It would be great, if you could edit & save, at least the general preferences, in the Boinc client.
client:
Settings->Preferences
and then tabs for General / Seti@home /Folding@home / ...

The web-interface is not accessable when the website is down (hope this gets better the next days!) and the changes have no effect until the next communication between the client and the server.

btw: some local manual- / FAQ-documents would be great also.

I assume that you mean in addition to the Web Interface. The Web interface is much more convenient for those with multiple computers. But I agree that having both would be very nice.

> I assume that you mean in addition to the Web Interface. The Web interface is
> much more convenient for those with multiple computers. But I agree that
> having both would be very nice.

This has become especially apparent with the outages of late. It's fun to try to adjust resource shares if you can only access one project. In this case, Predictor was up, but S@H and beta were down, requiring some funky prefs settings at Predictor to compensate.

It would be extremely nice to be able to make local adjustments in a situation like this, and have the data migrate to the respective projects when (if?) they come back up.

It would be great. I mentioned something about it a couple of days ago or yesterday (I forget) in the "Proxy security and other problems" post. I think that all of the options should be kept as centralized as possible via tabs or a side menu (kind of like the settings in AIM, but simpler) in the preferences/configuration window rather than having to choose a different menu option for each project.

There is something to having a centralized settings for those with "farms" or just a bunch of computers. I think every client *should* have the option of changing locally. Changing settings online is an ok idea.

_I_ think that a good way to handle that kind of scenario would basically be able to have profiles outside of the current home, work, and school profiles, which you could name pretty much whatever you want (enabling you to have a lot of different profiles). I think that you should still select whether a profile refers to work, school, or home computers for statistical reasons though. The settings for each profile could be theen be changed and stored locally, but mirrored online for your account. The online settings would not even have to be accessible on the web, just stored there like AIM buddy lists and certain settings. Then, any other clients you had on other computers you would simply tell to use a certain profile (which could even be done as part of the installation process) and it would automatically retrieve those settings from online. From then on, if you wanted to change a setting for all of the computers, you would just change one setting locally, and internet conditionis willing, that one client would change the server settings, and it would propogate to the rest of the "farm" and update its local copy of the settings whenever it communicated with the server. Also, anytime you had to reinstall for some reason you could restore your settings from online easily. As part of the profile selection, you could also tell it not to use a profile and have the settings apply locally only.

An additional nicety of this would to be able to export settings to some sort of file (preferably with some kind of encryption if there are any sensitive settings included such as passwords) so that clients could be set up even if the server to retrieve settings faild to respond for whatever reason. Alternatively, one computer could be set up to provide settings to all other computers by setting up all of the other clients to take their settings directly from that client. Then, as long as the internal network worked, all settings on all computers could be changed at any time almost immediately.

The reason I like the idea of multiple profiles is because I have a work computer and several home computers. The home computers vary in processing power, the most powerful of which being my main computer, controlling the others via remote desktop. I generally prefer for my main computer to run SETI as its processor intensive task and thus I want to set it up so that it can process workunites as continuously as possible. My other "slave" computers I generally use for process intensive tasks other than SETI such as 3D rendering and audio/video compression. They don't do that all of the time so when they aren't doing number crunching my personal projects I want them to run SETI, but since they have other things they do, their settings need to be different. Maybe doing settings like that would require a little bit of work, but I really don't think it would be extraordinarily difficult. I have known several "amateur" programmers that could crank that type of thing (and have) in a day or 2 (since the basic structures are already in place). And I don't think it is an unreasonable request because I would imagine there are a pretty good number of people have multiple computers at one or all of the three of the current profiles that they want set up differently because of how the computers are used.

> I assume that you mean in addition to the Web Interface. The Web interface is
> much more convenient for those with multiple computers. But I agree that
> having both would be very nice.

I agree, there should be both. I do like the web interface, though, but more help items would be apprecaited.

> I assume that you mean in addition to the Web Interface. The Web interface is
> much more convenient for those with multiple computers. But I agree that
> having both would be very nice.
>
> <a> href="http://www.boinc.dk/index.php?page=user_statistics&userid=9915">
>
>count me as one who wants local control of my seti preferences...although i understand that this will have to wait until more important issues are taken care of with the new seti system...i do believe, in the end, the new seti will do a better job of doing what it's supposed to do, search for extraterrestrial intellegence...and if even if i had to do it with no screensaver...i'd still think that it would be a project worth participating in.

---

PROUD TO BE TFFE!

The general preferences can be adjusted locally, by editing the global_prefs.xml file. If you increment the timestamp the changes will propagate to other computers (when servers are up). If you do not change the timestamp the settings will only affect that computer and will stay until a later version is created somewhere. Exit the client while editing this file.

The project specific preferences must be edited on the web site.

I expect later clients or 3rd party monitors to use this to make local changes easier.

John Keck
BOINCing since 2002/12/08

> The project specific preferences must be edited on the web site.
>
> I expect later clients or 3rd party monitors to use this to make local changes
> easier.

The only concern I have about a 3rd party program is if it actually contacts the website to make the changes. At that point it will need your account login to make the appropriate changes on the server. Who is to say the author wouldn't steal your account information? (This is not a slight on the many reputatable 3rd party authors, but similar things have happened in the past and if I can think of it so can the morally-challenged individuals out there.)

One thing nobody noted is that an added benefit is reduced load on the servers. Right now, if we want to see the effect of changes (such as with the graphics), we have to update on the website, goto the client, update that, see how it turns out, and we want to tweak it more, repeat the process. This is a lot of time wasted both on the server and on our own.

~David