Friday evening, I discovered that BOINC had lost track of S@H on my host 7057115 following a restart. It was suddenly telling me that "This computer is not attached to any projects". The short version is that I eventually ended up having to add the S@H project back to BOINC, but in the process wound up with 146 Abandoned tasks. The crisis has passed, for now, but I'd like to understand whether there's some other approach I could take to avoid the Abandoned tasks situation if this sort of thing happens again. (I suspect the root cause is an incomplete system shutdown leading to startup anomalies, so unless I can track down that gremlin, BOINC / S@H will continue to be at risk.)

The first thing I did when I saw the "not attached" message was to confirm that the S@H project directory was still present and populated. It was, and as far as I could tell still had all required files present. The Event Log, though, had numerous error messages, starting with "Couldn't parse account file account_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", "Couldn't parse statistics_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", and "Project SETI@home is in state file but no account file found". I won't try to post everything here unless somebody thinks it necessary, but basically there are a lot of "... outside project in state file" messages for every WU and task (the ones that ultimately got abandoned).

I initially tried just shutting down the BOINC Manager and client, but still got the same "not attached" message, although this time the Event Log only showed the "Couldn't parse ..." messages without the myriad of additional error messages. At this point I finally just decided to go ahead and add S@H back to BOINC, hoping that it would recognize the existing project directory and tasks, but of course it didn't. It immediately tried to download two new tasks and all the associated application files. However, those downloads were failing with a series of "Can't create HTTP response output file ..." messages, one for each task and app file.

So then I just threw up my hands and rebooted the machine. When BOINC came back up this time, the new downloads proceeded without any problems and I eventually got all the application files back (well, the MB ones, anyway) and a whole queue full of new tasks, but of course by now the original 146 tasks had been abandoned. I guess BOINC just overwrote the entire S@H project directory, since I also lost my app_config.xml and mbcuda.cfg files, which I had to recreate.

As I say, the crisis has passed and BOINC seems to be running smoothly again, but I'd like to know if there's a way to reconnect BOINC to the project without such complete carnage, should it every lose its memory like this again. Any suggestions?

i think those lost tasks get resend if you reattach it in a reasonable ammount of time , i think it was a fluke

i think i have seen another post somewhere here that mentioned the same thing

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

Last Monday the 24th Feb the HDD in this machine 4241618 failed.

I replaced it on Tuesday and re-installed the OS, as I had to start with Vista then "upgrade" to Win 7 it took till Wednesday afternoon before it was ready. I re-installed Boinc and connected, and I have lost no tasks and had no errors.

So it would seem as long as the machine is the same there should not be a problem.

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I re-installed Boinc and connected, and I have lost no tasks and had no errors.

When you reinstalled BOINC, did you have to reattach S@H or did it find your projects and project directories automatically?

I re-installed Boinc and connected, and I have lost no tasks and had no errors.

When you reinstalled BOINC, did you have to reattach S@H or did it find your projects and project directories automatically?

He would have had to reattach because he had lost the following file:

starting with "Couldn't parse account file account_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", "Couldn't parse statistics_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", and "Project SETI@home is in state file but no account file found".

Had he restored them from another host he may not have had to do that, whether he would have lost his Wu's is another matter.

Claggy

I re-installed Boinc and connected, and I have lost no tasks and had no errors.

When you reinstalled BOINC, did you have to reattach S@H or did it find your projects and project directories automatically?

He would have had to reattach because he had lost the following file:

starting with "Couldn't parse account file account_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", "Couldn't parse statistics_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", and "Project SETI@home is in state file but no account file found".

Had he restored them from another host he may not have had to do that, whether he would have lost his Wu's is another matter.

Claggy

Well, I guess the loss of that account file is the reason that I had to reattach, but I was wondering whether Bernie had to do the same thing when he reinstalled BOINC.

What could have caused that account file to disappear, anyway? (I'm guessing that it was a shutdown problem, but I'm not really sure.)

I re-installed Boinc and connected, and I have lost no tasks and had no errors.

When you reinstalled BOINC, did you have to reattach S@H or did it find your projects and project directories automatically?

He would have had to reattach because he had lost the following file:

starting with "Couldn't parse account file account_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", "Couldn't parse statistics_setiathome.berkeley.edu.xml", and "Project SETI@home is in state file but no account file found".

Had he restored them from another host he may not have had to do that, whether he would have lost his Wu's is another matter.

Claggy

Well, I guess the loss of that account file is the reason that I had to reattach, but I was wondering whether Bernie had to do the same thing when he reinstalled BOINC.

What could have caused that account file to disappear, anyway? (I'm guessing that it was a shutdown problem, but I'm not really sure.)

I just installed Boinc and reattached, I didn't copy any files form any other machines, just started from new. The machine reattached as it's old ID as I had kept everything the same, PC name, ip address and OS.

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well i just had a hickup with one of my machines that came online yesterday night when it shredded the boinc folder i purged the boinc install and reinstalled it and now all my wu's are marked as abandoned

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

well i just had a hickup with one of my machines that came online yesterday night when it shredded the boinc folder i purged the boinc install and reinstalled it and now all my wu's are marked as abandoned

Which Boinc directory did it shred? There are two, on Windows they are Boinc program files directory, and the Boinc Data directory,

Claggy

well i just had a hickup with one of my machines that came online yesterday night when it shredded the boinc folder i purged the boinc install and reinstalled it and now all my wu's are marked as abandoned

Which Boinc directory did it shred? There are two, on Windows they are Boinc program files directory, and the Boinc Data directory,

Claggy

it was on my linux box intel i3 and /var/lib/boinc-client/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/

the files where not readable anymore and just showed $#%JG%$(^@^ or #_________$##$@

dunno what happened

that was about 2 hours or so after the client went online for the first time so i assume it was a glitch

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap