did you manage to get it sorted?

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I have tried to locally access the three networked PCs, but they won't work. Not sure if the port issue is relevant there? They are within the local network, so I don't need to mess with ports within the router ... so I am not sure what's going on there.

And I have tried to access the network externally, and this has the same issues in that the BOINC manager says it has no client to connect to.

Not sure what's wrong here ... but will keep messing about.

ok, if you can't access them from within the LAN then something basic is wrong

did you read thru my boincview guide? was there anything that was unclear?
are the hosts that you want to control remotely saying in the messages tab that remote control is enabled
have you specified the IP/hostname of the remote PC (that is running boincview) in the remote_hosts.cfg file?
exactly what error messages are you getting, and where? (this is where a network plan/disgram/description would help a lot)

after making any changes to the clients to be controlled (in the 2 cfg files) have you exited, then restarted the clients (so boinc.exe exits, then is restarted)

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I will try again.

On the host to be controlled (not the controlling computer) create the following files:

remote_hosts.cfg

with contents that look like:
foo
bar
10.90.46.100
4.5.6.7

the above file will allow this host to be controlled by a host named foo, or bar, as well as whatever hosts are at 10.90.46.100 or 4.5.6.7. The names are translated to IP addresses ONLY ONCE at startup. If the host does not exist in the local WINS or DNS directory, it will not be able to control this computer.

gui_rpc_auth.cfg

with contents that look like:

passwordgoeshere

The above file requires you to type passwordgoeshere into the password entry box of the select computer dialog in BM, or the remote host configuration dialog of BV. (You have apparently set this up).

On the controlling host, BOINCMgr.exe must be allowed to call out on ports 1043 and 31416.

On the controlled host, ports 31416 and 1043 must be allowed in to boinc.exe.

In the current production builds, there is no provision for BOINC to use a custom port (BOINC View can set one up for the controller side, but it must be mapped someplace to tghe correct port for the controlled host).

The first step is to get BOINC Manager to work on the LAN.

Step 1 - create the files as above.
Step 2 - make certain that any personal firewalls (Zone Alarm or similar) are properly configured for these applications and ports. Note that some personal firewalls do not turn off gracefully, and may still be enforcing some of the network restrictions when they have been turned off (this includes ZA).

Which version of BOINC are you using? Are you using any personal firewalls (Note that if you are using Windows XP, you may have a personal firewall of which you are unaware).

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BOINC WIKI

Not sure where that leaves us!

I have managed to get the PCs and clients/managers to run with the selected password, which is alphanumeric in origin. So that's done.

I have tried to locally access the three networked PCs, but they won't work. Not sure if the port issue is relevant there? They are within the local network, so I don't need to mess with ports within the router ... so I am not sure what's going on there.

And I have tried to access the network externally, and this has the same issues in that the BOINC manager says it has no client to connect to.

Not sure what's wrong here ... but will keep messing about.

Cheers,

Steve.

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Just to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

The latest versions of BOINC have dropped port 1043 and now default to 31416 again. It seems M$ was using 1043 (even though it was not registered to them, and is in the registration required range) and it was killing BOINC on some systems (or BOINC was killing some M$ apps on other systems).

So, the default is going back to 1043. There is also discussion (not certain of the implementation state) of allowing a configurable port.

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BOINC WIKI

Do I have to change the password in the existing file whilst the manager is connected to the client? I was closing BOINC manager and then changing the password - would not expect that to work, after thinking about it!

Am now trying to change the password, then see if I can close and restart the manager to check it can connect to the client.

disconnect any managers, remote, local or otherwise
stop the client (so that boinc.exe isn't running, not just suspended)
edit the password file and re-save it
start the client again (so that boinc.exe is running agian)
reconnect

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Did you remember to put a carriage return after the password? It is needed.

no it's not, and that's not just theroy, it's not mentioned anywhere official that it's needed and all my hosts don't have a carrage return in the password file and they work just fine

a carrage return is only needed if you want a blank password (because the file can't be empty), so it's suggested to have a carrage return only

My mistook. :-)

I'm using blank passwords as all of my systems are on a LAN behind a NAT router.

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Any other ideas?

It states "The password you have provided is incorrect".

i think the password is case-sensitive, so remember any capitalisation you used

also try with a simpler password (like: 123) to start with, so you can find out where the problem is

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Did you remember to put a carriage return after the password? It is needed.

no it's not, and that's not just theroy, it's not mentioned anywhere official that it's needed and all my hosts don't have a carrage return in the password file and they work just fine

a carrage return is only needed if you want a blank password (because the file can't be empty), so it's suggested to have a carrage return only

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I am having a problem with one of the remote machines ... when I change the gui_rpc_auth file, it will no onger allow the manager to connect to the localhost as the password is wrong. I have re-started several times and changed the password a few too. Where else is the password stored for the manager to check?

that's the only place the password is stored
as stated, you have to restart the client for it to take effect

one thing that comes to mind... i'm not sure how well boinc handles character encodings, so make sure you're only using standard letters/numbers (without accents etc.)
make sure the file is encoded using ISO 8859-1 (notepad calls it ANSI even thou it's not)

make sure the password is on the first line of the file, and that there are no spaces, carrage returns, or anything else after the password, so the file contains only the password (check the number of bytes in the properties of the file, when using "ANSI" encoding it should be the same as the number of characters)

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Do I have to change the password in the existing file whilst the manager is connected to the client? I was closing BOINC manager and then changing the password - would not expect that to work, after thinking about it!

Am now trying to change the password, then see if I can close and restart the manager to check it can connect to the client.

Cheers,

Steve.

I think that you have to stop and restart the Boinc client, so that it reads the new password.

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[quote]Am now trying to change the password, then see if I can close and restart the manager to check it can connect to the client.
quote]

Failed again ...

Help would be much appreciated! I did not have this problem on the other computer so have no idea what I have done differently.

Cheers!

Steve.

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Do I have to change the password in the existing file whilst the manager is connected to the client? I was closing BOINC manager and then changing the password - would not expect that to work, after thinking about it!

Am now trying to change the password, then see if I can close and restart the manager to check it can connect to the client.

Cheers,

Steve.

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Did you remember to put a carriage return after the password? It is needed.

Still didn't work - and, no, I hadn't remembered!

Any other ideas?

It states "The password you have provided is incorrect".

Cheers,

Steve.

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I am having a problem with one of the remote machines ... when I change the gui_rpc_auth file, it will no onger allow the manager to connect to the localhost as the password is wrong. I have re-started several times and changed the password a few too. Where else is the password stored for the manager to check?

Thanks,

Steve.

Did you remember to put a carriage return after the password? It is needed.

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I am having a problem with one of the remote machines ... when I change the gui_rpc_auth file, it will no onger allow the manager to connect to the localhost as the password is wrong. I have re-started several times and changed the password a few too. Where else is the password stored for the manager to check?

Thanks,

Steve.

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The one problem I ran into (thanks to MS) is that when you create a cfg file for remote control, notepad automatically makes it remote_hosts.cfg.txt (which won't work).

I just told Windoze to save it as type "all files" so the .txt extender gets dropped, and the selected filename extension of .cfg seemed to work OK. I think it worked as it does not appear as a text icon, and has saved as a configuration file.

Hope that'll do the trick!

well whichever way works, as long as it's got the correct name, including extension, then boinc will recognise it, and should allow remote access

oh by the way, i don't know if you've read the guide yet, but just incase... the file that turns on remote access is remote_hosts.cfg, but obviously make sure you use the correct format for the contents (telling it which IPs/hostnames are allowed to connect)
but that's all in the guide, there just seemed to be some confusion before about which file did what

gui_rpc_auth.cfg only affects the password, and is required for all v5 clients
it alone won't enable remote access, because it's intended to password protect the client from any IP trying to access it, including the local computer it's running on, to stop other users from changing things, but obviously the effect applies to remote hosts that are wanting to connect as well

Just got to drive miles to the remote ones and do it all again there!

that's another reason to actually set up a VPN, because it'll allow you to do more than just connect to the BOINC clients, depending on how restrictive it is, and how it's setup, it can allow full access, as if you were directly connected to the remote LAN
the main advantage is when you want to do something new, you don't have to go to the remote site and configure the router to allow access for the new thing

but you can achieve full access (sort of), to at least configure remote hosts without using a VPN

one thing i've done is configure my routers to forward terminal connections to a randomly chosen external port to a dedicated PC so i can log on to that PC remotely when i'm out and about with something like MS terminal services client (or as XP calls it, remote desktop), then i can log on to any other PC/server from that internal PC using another internal terminal session, or just using internal network shares for dealing with files, and can configure anything i need that way, it's been extrememly handy at times, because i host my website from home, and i've wanted to change something when i was out, was all nice and easy thou :)

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Thanks for that - I think I can get my head round it.

you're welcome, if you need any help just ask, i remember what it was like when i was started learning lol

My setup has three PCs behind a router. The router is using DHCP to assign internal IP addresses. These are the clients I want to access remotely. The remote (controlling) PC is a laptop, also running Boinc and connected to the net over a wireless connection through a further router.

about static IPs and DHCP, either tell the DHCP server (which i assume is your NAT box (router)) to assign "reservations" to those hosts, but depending on the complexity of the server it might not be able to do that

if you have to assign them manually on each of the PCs themselves, then use IPs which are not in the range of addresses that the DHCP server has been allocated, the reason is that if the DHCP server had a pool of addresses from say 192.168.1.10 -> 102.168.1.200, and you manually assign static IPs to internal hosts in the range, it can cause problems if/when the DHCP server assigned that same address to a DHCP client
so it's safest to use IPs that are outside the range
depending on your subnet mask (which is probably 255.255.255.0) you can use other subnets for other things
so all of your static IPs could be in the 192.168.10.x range for example
but you'd need to change the subnet mask on all devices which have static IPs and change the setting on the DHCP server so it tells DHCP clients to use 255.255.0.0 instead (to allow the use of the full 192.168.x.x range)
if it's a big network, and you need more addresses, you can use the 10.x.x.x range (which is reserved for private use as well)
if you want to learn more about subnetting, it's all covered in the TCP/IP guide i mentioned before

I think what you are saying to do is to assign static IPs to the three PCs, and forward traffic from randomly selected ports to each of the internal IPs in turn, on port 1043. So, for example, I tell the router to forward any traffic coming in on port 60,123 to port 1043 on one PC, 60,124 goes to 1043 on another PC etc ... that about right? Easily enough achieved too, I think.

that's the gist of it
for internal forwarding, if your router allows you to forward to hostnames or dns names then i'd suggest doing that (so it doesn't matter if the IP changes), but if not (most domestic "routers" insist on using IPs, as using names is more complicated and thus is only in more expensive devices) then static internal IPs will be needed for the hosts behind the remote router, which is fine as long as it's set up properly :)

as for ports, you could use 60,123, but as you've published that here, don't use it.
the more random the port number, the less likely someone will be able to guess (but they could always use a port scanner, although most routers these days will block an IP that does a port scan (accessing lots of ports in a short space of time))

i only stress this because i'm not too sure of how robust the security of the boinc client is, and as you're opening ports... well it's putting a hole in the firewall basically, and could potentially open the other network up to attack
better safe than sorry
best to make sure you choose a good password for all the remote clients, so that even if someone guesses the port number, and conects, boinc will still deney them access if they don't know the password
boincview can save passwords, so it doesn't need to be easy to remember

Is the other port (31416, I think) not required at all? Or could a similar thing be done to that too for each corresponding port? I assume that its easy enough to get BoincView to send these requests from different ports too?

yes, you can tell boincview which port to use (it was designed for situations like this, using different ports to access multiple remote clients)
i suggest you get it running on a local PC first (which ever is going to be your "monitoring" PC, and get things set up so it's able to access another PC in your local LAN, so you know how it works etc.
then set up your remote clients and tweak the remote router
and finally configure boincview to access the remote clients

about the public IP of the remote router thou, either you'll need some way of finding out what it is if it's a dynamic (DHCP assigned) address, unless you use a dynamic DNS service
or you'll need to have a static public IP

where i live a static IP costs extra with any of the ISPs here, so dynamic DNS will be cheaper (some companies offer it as a free service, but they charge for any extras)

as for the other port (whatever it is, i can't remember), it's only used as a backup, incase boinc can't bind to the primary 1043 port.
so boinc will only use one of the 2, and it'll try to use 1043 first, so that's the "standard" one, and the first one to try/setup with/use etc.
if something is claiming the primary (1043) port (it shouldn't be, but i've heard of problems with M$ outlook, obviously M$ doesn't take note of assigned port numbers! how typical) then it's best to sort that application out, rather than having to deal with multiple ports

I'll have a detailed read over the weekend and see what I can set up!

let me know how you get on :)

i'd suggest that you get it working internally first, so you know the clients are allowing remote access (from another PC that is)
then work on allowing access thru the NAT box from the internet, so that if you run into trouble you're not trying to deal with 2 things at once, and you'll know where the problem is

there might be another, better way thou
see if the routers at each end support a VPN tunnel
if they do, set one up and then you have a secure connection between the 2 networks, which removes a lot of question marks
port forwarding will work, but a VPN is preferable, and more secure, because the data from the clients will be transmitted in plain text, and any node along the path will be able to capture and read that data (such as an email hash, which can enable someone to get your email address)
the reason being that if you set even a modest refresh interval of say 60 seconds, every 60 seconds the client data is going to be transmitted, for anyone along the connection path to retrieve, it's just a bit too easy, but if you're only connecting every so often, to check how the remote clients are doing, then it'll be fine, and if you're new to VPNs, then it might not be worth the effort, it's your call

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The one problem I ran into (thanks to MS) is that when you create a cfg file for remote control, notepad automatically makes it remote_hosts.cfg.txt (which won't work).

I just told Windoze to save it as type "all files" so the .txt extender gets dropped, and the selected filename extension of .cfg seemed to work OK. I think it worked as it does not appear as a text icon, and has saved as a configuration file.

Hope that'll do the trick!

Just got to drive miles to the remote ones and do it all again there!

Steve.

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Lee,

Thanks for that - I think I can get my head round it.

I'll paraphrase my understanding to make sure I'm along the right lines and then go into the detail over the weeken to see if I can get it to work.

My setup has three PCs behind a router. The router is using DHCP to assign internal IP addresses. These are the clients I want to access remotely. The remote (controlling) PC is a laptop, also running Boinc and connected to the net over a wireless connection through a further router.

I think what you are saying to do is to assign static IPs to the three PCs, and forward traffic from randomly selected ports to each of the internal IPs in turn, on port 1043. So, for example, I tell the router to forward any traffic coming in on port 60,123 to port 1043 on one PC, 60,124 goes to 1043 on another PC etc ... that about right? Easily enough achieved too, I think.

Is the other port (31416, I think) not required at all? Or could a similar thing be done to that too for each corresponding port? I assume that its easy enough to get BoincView to send these requests from different ports too?

I'll have a detailed read over the weekend and see what I can set up!

Thanks very much for your help on this - much appreciated.

Steve.

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