SETI Classic R.I.P.

17th May 1999 to 15th December 2005

Survived by Seti@home Boinc, and other boinc projects.

Sadly missed.

Condolences to all who crunched for it.

"Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon."

Speeches and food over in Rocky's cafe later today.



Edit because I've lost track of time and thought it was the 16th today. Note to self: go and find a grown up to talk to today..

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Reality Internet Personality

Now we get lots of ex-classic people saying, 'where'd it go, they never told us'

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Life on earth is the global equivalent of not storing things in the fridge.

Edit because I've lost track of time and thought it was the 16th today. Note to self: go and find a grown up to talk to today..

Not too early, the notice was just posted on the SETI Classic Home Page. May SETI:TNG do as well!

MJ

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Now we get lots of ex-classic people saying, 'where'd it go, they never told us'

...and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

-Mr. anon

[EDIT]P.S. My wife switched us over in July 2004 when she READ this on the Classic front page way back when...

June 22, 2004
A new version of SETI@home based on BOINC, is now available. We'll be
transitioning to this new version (details are here). For now, you can use the
new version or stick with SETI@home Classic.

...and those who said they were never told are full of it because that was just one of many messages.[/EDIT]

Now we get lots of ex-classic people saying, 'where'd it go, they never told us'

I'm a Classic refugee. I kinda thought the idea was to install and forget this thing, which would quietly serve the world with scientific computation, while the owner went on doing other work and consuming coffee. So the hostility to Classic late-switchers puzzles me a bit.

Perhaps to balance things (and in keeping with the Cafe SETI swapping stories theme), here is a summary of my history.

Joined 1999, Total 43437 results returned, 23.64 years of CPU time. Started running a SetiSPY/SetiDriver combo years ago, which cut the labor to near zero, and gave good visibility. I ran SETI usually on four or five computers, and founded a small team, perhaps inducing a few more tens of thousands of results to be processed by the few folks I tempted into the game. They have all quietly drifted off over the years, some driven away by Microsoft Outlook's inability to work properly if a non-disk using ap was running on the same machine, even when set to "step on me" priority. Others were scared off by corporate IT adverse advice, or the suspicion that not much science was being done with immense computing resource consumed.

I recall seeing/hearing about BOINC in early 2005. On a quick check, I thought it then a little raw, and likely to need more attention if installed then than I chose to give, so I kept on running, and thought no more.

Fast forward to early December. As by good luck I'd left the settings so that the download command line windows popped into view on one of my machines, I finally noticed the text notice fly by which said December 15 termination. If I got an e-mail notice since early 2005, I don't recall it. Possibly I accidentally deleted in my daily spam-purge which gets about 95% of the messages in that account. And, no, I had not been going to the news page, or checking my score, not once this year.

On December 6 I removed the old SETI launchers from startup, without bothering to check my stats (had to restart yesterday to get them for notes like this one). I setup on BOINC, choosing to do both Einstein and SETI. Of course, within hours I was in the midst of the recent unpleasantness. Once the outage passed, I installed crunch3r's optimized SETI science ap on my two best machines, and mean to have a try at the other two unless someone posts a clear adverse finding regarding W98SE compatibility (last I knew, the comment was that it was untested, but might work). I'm impressed at the speedup, but depressed that so many megawatt-hours have been spent running code with that much fat left in it.

So I'm here, and mean to get back to benign neglect mode soon. I respect the vast well of knowledge and appreciable help offered by the folks who have made a major life interest of Seti@home, but can't quite fathom some dimissive attitudes toward the quiet users who just toddle along crunching. For this thing to work, it needs to be easy to set up, non-damaging to the primary use of the machines, and engage the interest of the cycle-suppliers at some level (whether it is dreams of little green men, nobility of science, downloadable certificates, or bragging rights at this cafe).

Fire at will, though I do pre-emptively acknowledge that shifting when I did added to the problems in the recent outage.

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Archae86, there is one program for BOINC, which is somewhat similar to SetiSpy/SetiDriver: BoincView. The main purpose of SetiDriver was cahching work units, which is inbuilt in BOINC. But check out BoincView if you haven't already. It's great!

But check out BoincView if you haven't already. It's great!

As it happens, I installed BoincView this morning. I failed to get the GUI RPC interface to work, so just made shares instead. All four machines are behind a router, so I'm not too worried about the security bit. Thanks for the tip, I just barely got there before.

Is there an easy way to get the Angle Range for each result in the BOINC SETI world? I could have calibrated my speedup with the crunch3r code much more quickly had I had that. This was made easy by the result saving tables in either SetiSpy or SetiDriver, and I've not stumbled onto the new best method yet.

Thanks.

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Is there an easy way to get the Angle Range for each result in the BOINC SETI world?

Angle Range? Hmmm... not sure what you mean by that. Is it the point of origin for the signal in the sky?

You can look at each result in details by going first to your account page, then click on View (Results) and in the list of completed WU's then click on the far left link (there are two of them on the left side of each work unit. Click on the leftmost of these.)

From the frontpage of the Seti Classic website:

News

November 15, 2005

On December 15, 2005, after 6 years of operation, this project will shut down. But SETI@home is not going away. We're alive and well and running on the BOINC distributed computing platform. It's easy to switch over - just follow the instructions on the new SETI@home web site. We hope to see everyone there!

At the time of shutdown, the stats for this project will be frozen but will continue to be available on the web.

Thanks to all original SETI@home participants for their tremendous dedication to the project. You made SETI@home into something of lasting significance.

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Reality Internet Personality

Angle Range? Hmmm... not sure what you mean by that.

It specifies how much the telescope point of view moved during the Work Unit. Controlling for computation variation associated with variation in this parameter accounts for the great majority of work-unit to work-unit computation resource variation (assuming one excludes results which don't reach 100% completion).

You can look at each result in details by going first to your account page.

Found that already, thanks, and no, AR is not there. As this is a question, I suppose I should pose it on the Questions forum.

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*snif*
so close to my 5th anniversary :(
oh well, out with the old, in with the new, back to work kids ;)

But check out BoincView if you haven't already. It's great!

As it happens, I installed BoincView this morning. I failed to get the GUI RPC interface to work, so just made shares instead. All four machines are behind a router, so I'm not too worried about the security bit. Thanks for the tip, I just barely got there before.

Is there an easy way to get the Angle Range for each result in the BOINC SETI world? I could have calibrated my speedup with the crunch3r code much more quickly had I had that. This was made easy by the result saving tables in either SetiSpy or SetiDriver, and I've not stumbled onto the new best method yet.

Thanks.

GUI RPC is easy. Simply create a file in the BOINC directory that's named remote_hosts.cfg

In that file, enter the IP address (or preferably the computer name) of whatever computer you will be running Boincview on. Restart the BOINC client after you're created the .cfg file, and you're set.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

It specifies how much the telescope point of view moved during the Work Unit. Controlling for computation variation associated with variation in this parameter accounts for the great majority of work-unit to work-unit computation resource variation (assuming one excludes results which don't reach 100% completion).

I've never heard of it then. LOL! Sorry. :o)

You may get a better reply over at NC, yes. But I haven't really seen this issue discussed ever. Not that I've read EVERY post on the board, but I tend to read most of them and I've been here since summer 2004.

GUI RPC is easy. Simply create a file in the BOINC directory that's named remote_hosts.cfg

In that file, enter the IP address (or preferably the computer name) of whatever computer you will be running Boincview on. Restart the BOINC client after you're created the .cfg file, and you're set.

Did that (the install directions are pretty good). Boincview did a hang up (I wound up killing it in Windows Task Manager). Just now I tried it again, changing the location setting from the share to the GUI RPC. Did not hang this time, but the nifty red X showed up immediately on the one location I'd changed. I left it that way for a minute or so, then it perked right back up when I switched back. Maybe I have a firewall setting or something getting in the way, but I'm not motivated to spend debug time on it unless I learn more dire peril from the one that is working for me.

Thanks.

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GUI RPC is easy. Simply create a file in the BOINC directory that's named remote_hosts.cfg

In that file, enter the IP address (or preferably the computer name) of whatever computer you will be running Boincview on. Restart the BOINC client after you're created the .cfg file, and you're set.

Did that (the install directions are pretty good). Boincview did a hang up (I wound up killing it in Windows Task Manager). Just now I tried it again, changing the location setting from the share to the GUI RPC. Did not hang this time, but the nifty red X showed up immediately on the one location I'd changed. I left it that way for a minute or so, then it perked right back up when I switched back. Maybe I have a firewall setting or something getting in the way, but I'm not motivated to spend debug time on it unless I learn more dire peril from the one that is working for me.

Thanks.

It does need a bit of tweaking from time to time. The thing that I found works best is to simply reboot all computers involved...and that usually fixes it.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Also since version 5. something there is a password stored in the Boinc directory in the file "gui_rpc_auth.cfg" which you have to enter in BoincView for it to work. This is why you get the red X.

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archae86 if you delete the password from the "gui_rpc_auth.cfg" file making sure you have at least one [enter] press and save the file
(this must be done with boinc.exe & boincmanager closed down)
restart boinc from your startup folder
boincview can now be set without a password

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The King is dead. Long live the King.

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Need help? Check out the excellent Unofficial BOINC-Wiki!
'We are the BOINC. Prepare to be assimilated.'

Also since version 5. something there is a password stored in the Boinc directory in the file "gui_rpc_auth.cfg" which you have to enter in BoincView for it to work. This is why you get the red X.

Thanks rsisto, and also Shane, I did find that myself yesterday (well, from another online help page), and it did allow regular Boinc Manager to see the other machine using GUI RPC (could not before, so I must have done at least one thing right, but Boincview still could not (still red x).

The share method is working for progress monitoring just fine, though the one or two commands I've issued did not work (like "update"). Are those only available if GUI RPC is used?

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The share method is working for progress monitoring just fine, though the one or two commands I've issued did not work (like "update"). Are those only available if GUI RPC is used?

Yes only if using RPC connection, with the share option you can only receive information about the cliente, with the RPC the comunication is both ways and you can send commands.

Here you have the BoincView Forums where you can get more info and help about BV.

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