I thought I might increase my RAC if switched to Lunatics optimized apps. This did not go well and I am back to stock apps.

First when I downloaded lunatics_win64_v0.43a_setup.exe Symantec scanned the download and immediately deleted it. It was removed for having a bad reputation. That is lots of Symantec users had reported issues with the file.
The developers may want to submit the app to Symantec for whitelisting at

https://submit.symantec.com/whitelist/

Second. Figuring this is problem with small not widely used app, I ignored the warnings and restored the download and ran it. Installation went smoothly. Only changed one suggested setting use Cuda50 rather than Cuda32, as the stock apps had been using cuda50. Brought up Bonic and noticed that all waiting tasks now had run times of hours not minutes. Noticed in task manager the GPU apps had the notation for 32 bit apps. Watched things run for a short while and it appeared the predicted runs times were real. Instead of GPU tasks running in 7 minutes they were 4 hours.

This was just too much that was not right. Time to uninstall and regroup.

Attempted to run the Lunatics uninstaller and of course Symantec promptly deleted the file. So I reset the Seti Project in Bonic and immediately shutdown before it could reload. Then uninstalled Bonic, cleaned out all the files to get rid of Lunatics files. Then reinstalled Bonic. It recognized the old machine profile immediately and started downloading the old tasks.

You would at least benefit from the 64 bit CPU apps on your Systems running the Lunatics apps.
GPU apps are nearly the same so its hard to believe you are getting that much slow down in run times.
But i`m no cuda expert.

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With each crime and every kindness we birth our future.

Firstly, welcome to the boards.

A question - which download source did you use?
There are three genuine sources for the Lunatics applications, first is KWSN/Lunatics, second is Crunchers Anonymous, and third, Mikes World.
(I see Mike has chipped in while I've been typing)

Performance? like Mike I'm very surprised at the run times you are quoting - I've been running their offerings over a number of years, and have found their current offering to be slightly faster than the stock option.
Name looking like a 32bit - yes, so do mine (on the GPUs), but I'm not having any performance issues.

I'm just thinking, maybe the rejection by Symantic upset your GPUs into thinking they should run at some reduced clock speed?

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The Symantec antivirus may be scanning your boinc and seti directories and the executable in memory and its file writes/reads etc.

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To overcome Heisenbergs:
"You can't always get what you want / but if you try sometimes you just might find / you get what you need." -- Rolling Stones

Brought up Bonic and noticed that all waiting tasks now had run times of hours not minutes. Noticed in task manager the GPU apps had the notation for 32 bit apps. Watched things run for a short while and it appeared the predicted runs times were real. Instead of GPU tasks running in 7 minutes they were 4 hours.

This was just too much that was not right. Time to uninstall and regroup.

Attempted to run the Lunatics uninstaller and of course Symantec promptly deleted the file. So I reset the Seti Project in Bonic and immediately shutdown before it could reload. Then uninstalled Bonic, cleaned out all the files to get rid of Lunatics files. Then reinstalled Bonic. It recognized the old machine profile immediately and started downloading the old tasks.

The times are estimates, once you're completed 11 validation of the anonymous platform planclasses (that aren't outliers, ie full length tasks that don't exit early), then the estimates should be right,

The wild difference in times is because of a difference in how the project/Boinc supplies the app's <flops> values between Stock and Anonymous platform.

The GPU apps are 32bit apps, having apps that address 64bit address space slows them down, so the GPU apps are 32bit with a 64Bit Boinc compatible app_info,
Some of the CPU apps are 64Bit, they do get a speedup, again they have a 64bit Boinc compatible app_info.

Claggy

It was scanning the download. It was clearly referencing the downloaded executable.

A question - which download source did you use?
There are three genuine sources for the Lunatics applications, first is KWSN/Lunatics, second is Crunchers Anonymous, and third, Mikes World.
(I see Mike has chipped in while I've been typing)

I'm just thinking, maybe the rejection by Symantic upset your GPUs into thinking they should run at some reduced clock speed?

I downloaded from both Crunchers Anonymous and from Mikes World. Followed the links posted in pinned thread for Lunatics. Same result for both. Also did the download on two different machines, same results. Found a download from sometime ago, never acted to install. Scanned it, same result.

Can see no logical reason that the GPU's (MSI GTX 750 ti x 2) would even know about what my End Point protection is doing. Symantec took it's time with the "scan". It was clearly preparing an hash and sending to Symantec's database for information. Symantec has the file flagged as bad because it has been reported by users to be dangerous. This is the modern world of reputation based protection. One more attempt to keep up with the bad guys. I would sure the authors can submit to Symantec and they will tell them what is going on. McAfee (Intel Security) runs an identical service so they should be contacted also.

The times are estimates, once you're completed 11 validation of the anonymous platform planclasses (that aren't outliers, ie full length tasks that don't exit early), then the estimates should be right,

The wild difference in times is because of a difference in how the project/Boinc supplies the app's <flops> values between Stock and Anonymous platform.

The GPU apps are 32bit apps, having apps that address 64bit address space slows them down, so the GPU apps are 32bit with a 64Bit Boinc compatible app_info,
Some of the CPU apps are 64Bit, they do get a speedup, again they have a 64bit Boinc compatible app_info.

Claggy

Ok so this stuff that freaked me out maybe normal. Will download again and give it another try.

Thanks

Herb,

Have you thought about adding lunatics, boinc and seti to the no scan list of your anti-virus?

If it's scanning it as it downloads it, why not just prevent it from scanning it in the first place?

My 2 cents. I run lunatics on all my machines except the MACs.


Zalster

Only changed one suggested setting use Cuda50 rather than Cuda32, as the stock apps had been using cuda50.

CUDA50 is the one to use other wise you will get very poor crunching times & probably processing errors (depending on your driver version).
I'm running CUDA50 on my GTX 750Tis with no issues.
I also don't run programmes such as Norton as they are well know for bringing even the fastest systems to their knees.

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Grant
Darwin NT

A few days ago I (once again) set up my laptop for crunching and I got an alert from Avast also. It was about the lunatics uninstaller. I ignored it because I already had heard about false positives regarding the lunatics installer. I was just wondering why it is still not whitelisted at Avast.

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A few days ago I (once again) set up my laptop for crunching and I got an alert from Avast also. It was about the lunatics uninstaller. I ignored it because I already had heard about false positives regarding the lunatics installer. I was just wondering why it is still not whitelisted at Avast.

I think it was during one of the more recent Lunatics releases it was mentioned, by Richard?, that the installer could be submitted to the various AV makers to be whitelisted. That give gives them extra work to do. I expect it is much easier to just tell users that they may need to adjust their AV settings. Much like it is advised to do with BOINC in general.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

Something's afoot. I downloaded the file from Crunchers Anonymous and then uploaded and reran it through VirusTotal. Outcome: Detection ratio: 7 / 57.

Ikarus 	                Win32.SuspectCrc 
Jiangmin 	        Backdoor.Win32.Yoddos.an 
McAfee 	                Artemis!060E0553B4E7 
Norman 	                Suspicious_Gen5.AWBHN 
Qihoo-360 	        Win32/Trojan.75f
Symantec 	        WS.Reputation.1 
TrendMicro-HouseCall 	Suspicious_GEN.F47V1208 

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On the topic of the End Point protection. I spent my last 5 years before retirement running the end point protection for Fortune 500 company. The bad guys are smart. The bad guys are relentless. They are often a few steps ahead of the good guys. What was safe yesterday may not be safe tomorrow. And no site or source can guarantee they will never become a problem.

That said you want to run protection as high as you can. Draw your exceptions as narrow as possible to keep performance acceptable. Notice I did not say maximized. All downloads get scanned, no exceptions. If you make a real time scanning exception, do NOT make the same exception for scheduled scans.

As for the submission process for white listing, it is fairly simple. Go the vendors page. Follow instructions which are normally give your contact info and upload a clean copy of the file. Expect a response in 48 to 72 workday hours.

The post by Ageless is also troubling. All of the big three for large commercial protection are reporting. Both Symantec and McAfee with their reputation based systems. I will be watching my outbound firewall traffic for anything abnormal after I install.

Based on prior batch of comments and the leap of faith that download package is clean I have reinstalled Lunatics on one my machines ID 7448424. The run time, as predicted, are good and the predicted times become more believable.

It looks like the MB GPU work is slower than with stock while CPU is faster. In looking at the Average Processing Rate for CPU it is 11.40 Gflops for stock and 15.66 for Lunatics. However for GPU stock is 167.63 versus 123.85 for default Lunatics.

Are there some adjustments to the config files that should be making?

Thanks

It looks like the MB GPU work is slower than with stock while CPU is faster. In looking at the Average Processing Rate for CPU it is 11.40 Gflops for stock and 15.66 for Lunatics. However for GPU stock is 167.63 versus 123.85 for default Lunatics.

APR varies with the mix of available work, especially on GPUs, doing VLARs on the GPU will cause the APR to fall because pulse finding is inefficient especially on the Cuda apps,
doing VHARs will also cause the APR to fall because autocorrelation is also inefficient, and VHARs are dominated with autocorrelation processing,

So compare runtimes instead, and compare runtimes of Wu's of comparible Angle Ranges.

Claggy

All of the big three ...

:D You consider those "big three" as good Antiviruses??

The most false of all detections:
McAfee Artemis
Symantec WS.Reputation
TrendMicro Suspicious_GEN

99% of files 'marked' with such "detections" are good, why some people use those "big three" is beyond me.

Both Symantec and McAfee with their reputation based systems ...

I never seen any real malware detected as "bad reputation" (on VirusTotal ), real malware will not show as just 'a guess'
"bad reputation" means just ... nothing

I will be watching my outbound firewall traffic for anything abnormal after I install.

You expect "outbound traffic" from SETI@home applications? :D

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

The trouble with virus-checking an installer is that there are two separate classes of executable code that the virus-checker has to take into account.

1) The code which runs directly (just once) to perform the installation task. We use NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System), because it's free and open source.

2) The application programs it's designed to install - 23 of them, at the last count. They can be extracted manually if desired - which means that any decent virus checker will scan them too.

With these 'generic', 'heuristic', or 'reputation' detections, it's probably the behaviour of the outer wrapper which triggers the report. Consider what an installer does: asks your permission to run as an administrator, and then distributes executable binaries to protected areas like Program Files (if you took the default BOINC installation location). By contrast, a virus does ... exactly the same (except it doesn't ask permission first). And a virus writer could use NSIS to deliver their payload too, for the same reasons that we do. It's very hard to tell us apart from a virus writer.

I did look into the possibility of whitelisting when this question was raised after the release of v0.43 last year. It turned out to require considerably more identity and security checks than opening a bank or PayPal business account, and I found I couldn't possibly qualify in any event (I don't run a personal website with my home address checkable through a WhoIs lookup on the domain name).

So, sorry folks, you'll just have to put up with the minor inconvenience of wrestling with the virus product of your choice. We supply, and I maintain, the Lunatics Installer free of charge as a voluntary hobby. I do my best to verify that the payload packages I include (but which are supplied by several other independent developers) are free from viruses, but we cannot offer any guarantees. Use it, if you wish, at your own risk, and use your own judgement about the honesty and reliability of the source - just as you would before opening any email from a stranger.

...
1) The code which runs directly (just once) to perform the installation task...
...
With these 'generic', 'heuristic', or 'reputation' detections, it's probably the behaviour of the outer wrapper which triggers the report.

It is funny to look into this "behaviour" ;)

A) "They" consider the 32-bit code 'less-bad'
Lunatics_Win32_v0.43a_setup.exe (4 / 57)
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/a28bae036aa64d9c59c14fc20d3c9a4ee1b6acfd996a8e0932ad98f690b8ad32/analysis/

Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe (7 / 57)
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/68df9f695e36c1803c92a40f09bf17e0ce5182aaa2ab34de702a3abb10fd2a57/analysis/


B) Some of "them" do not scan the internals (the included .exe .dll files) the same way when in NSIS installer and in .7z (despite almost the same compression method is used)
I extracted Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe (by 7-Zip) and re-compressed the resulting directory by 7-Zip (the .7z file is 17 MB - 'Solid')

Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.7z (9 / 52)
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/65a3e4c98b0656ec4cf0475e5e5e8ce6352a88c55a27557fd02b0188b7aaf166/analysis/

All the 6 "Gen:Variant.Fosniw" are caused by BitDefender engine/signatures (which are used by the listed 6 Antiviruses)


Info on compression:

---------------------------
Properties
---------------------------
Size: 0
Packed Size: 25 323 101
Folders: 6
Files: 129
----------------------------
Path: ...\Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe
Type: Nsis
Method: LZMA:23
Solid: -


---------------------------
Properties
---------------------------
Size: 163 244 711
Packed Size: 17 261 062
Folders: 7
Files: 129
----------------------------
Path: ...\Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.7z
Type: 7z
Method: LZMA BCJ
Solid: +
Blocks: 2


EDIT:

C) Another strange thing - how many different versions of Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe exist?

Link from the post by Ageless:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=76719&postid=1641439#1641439

... and the file I have do not have the same checksums:

SHA256: 1fc2d9144c3e2074a377f0a4e4c8ef9bfc03e4c68571958e9582f95841b17ff2
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/1fc2d9144c3e2074a377f0a4e4c8ef9bfc03e4c68571958e9582f95841b17ff2/analysis/

SHA256: 68df9f695e36c1803c92a40f09bf17e0ce5182aaa2ab34de702a3abb10fd2a57
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/68df9f695e36c1803c92a40f09bf17e0ce5182aaa2ab34de702a3abb10fd2a57/analysis/

 

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- ALF - "Find out what you don't do well ..... then don't do it!" :)
 

LOL, upping the ante.
Using 7-zip, I unpacked all files from the Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe archive.
I then put them all back into a 7-zip archive, and set SFX on (Self-extracting archive). Named this 15.9MB (16,326KB) version also Lunatics_Win64_v0.43a_setup.exe and uploaded that into Virustotal: Detection ratio: 3 / 57.

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