How do I get my machines to adopt the Separate Preferences? They are all using the Default (Primary) preferences. I have separate preferences for Work, Home, & School, and machines assigned to each, but they all ignore the Separate Prefs.

Thanks!

--Bill z.

I have issues with this as well. I would prefer that my laptop not write to the hard drive as often as the desktops since the laptop hard drive gets very hot if it is run constantly. I have made seperate settings but was unable to make them stick until I started mucking about in the XML files. If you change the location on the website and in the (I believe) client_state.xml file (I believe it is the "venue" tag) at the same time and then update your preferences it won't change back to the default location. However I am not convinced that the settings actually change. At work now so I can't check this out but maybe if you poke around in the XML file some more you can manually change the settings and have them stick. Please post back and let me know if this actually works :)



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Thanks, Toby! This makes sense. If we change the local preference settings on our machines, they should remain stable until updated from the server, which should not happen until we make a change on the server. I found all my preferences, Primary and Separate, faithfully reflected locally in: global_prefs.xml and in sched_request.xml. But that's as far as I know how to take it. These files open on my machine in Internet Explorer, which won't let me edit them. What appl. should I use to edit these xml files? I would just change the values in the global preferences area, since that's what BOINC seems to be obeying now. Also, is this fairly safe to do?

The bigger question is, why isn't BOINC honoring the Separate settings? We shouldn't have to hack things like this. I was hoping that there was just a switch somewhere on the website that I needed to turn on.

Thanks!

--Bill Z.

Never mind, Toby. Duh! View:Source opens it in Notepad. Piece of cake. I changed the global prefs in both files and the next request to the Scheduler reflected the changed values (days of work and seconds requested). Had to quite BOINC and restart it, of course, to apply the new values. Now we'll see what happens after Berkeley restarts the project...

Does any of this work for you? Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

--Bill Z.

Greetings all,

This feature used to work for me, but lately I've had the same issue. I'm not sure, but I think it began after detaching to flush bogus WuWu's and updating to BOINC 4.05. That forced me to merge a few of my machines including the one at issue and I believe that's when preferences stopped being honored.

I've wanted to give my faster machine a couple additional days of work since the project greatly underestimates the time to complete, so I created a seperate pref and assigned it to this host. However, whenever I restart BOINC it reports "General prefs: using seperate prefs for home" where "home" is NOT the one I chose to use on the BOINC web site.

Anyway, following this thread, I edited the Host_Venue entry in both Client_State.xml AND in Sched_Request.xml to say "school", then restarted BOINC. It now reports that it is using the preferred pref of "School".

Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that when it talks with the scheduler it keeps the choice.

Thanks for broaching the subject.

- GOmeyer

More info;

I should add that my previous failure to get prefs to work happened while the schedulers were still running. (obviously at this time with shedulers down my host would NOT follow settings changes made online)

Also, while all was running, whenever my host did contact the scheduler it would change my "location" setting for this Host online. So instead of the project settings modifying my host, it went the other way.

I only add this in case anyone from BOINC intends to T-Shoot the issue.

-GOmeyer

Interesting...

My client_state.xml file does not even contain a host_venue field. (Likewise for global_prefs.xml.) My sched_request.xml file has one, but it contains no value. That's why I changed the actual values in the global prefs areas of the files. It'll be interesting to see how these patches (hacks?) work out after the Project comes back up.

It would be even more interesting if the folks at BOINC would simply turn the Separate Prefs feature back on!!

--Bill Z.

Bill,

In my client_state.xml file host_venue is virutally the last entry.

And yes, it would indeed be nice if BOINC turned it back on. Guess they have more on their minds right now, but hopefully they'll place it into their "job jar" for later.

- GOmeyer