I have 2 problems, but came looking specifically about a runaway loop. I am running on a dual core amd64 machine. Way back when, it was Debian/unstable, not too long ago changed to Gentoo. Lately, SETI jobs take from 2-8 hours of CPU time, the currently active process is over 90 hours. Which is still quite a bit less than the climate prediction jobs I get. But is it possible that this has run past some loop exit condition accidentally, and now it will never end? How long should I let it run?

Second. Every since the switch to Gentoo (caused by a disk crash, so I never had access to the original BOINC stuff in /var), trying to start the BoincMgr via the GUI menu results in a manager which can't talk to the clients or the BOINC projects running tasks. What I have been doing, is to start a shell, and use the command line to start the manager:

boincmgr -p `cat /var/lib/boinc/gui_rpc_auth.cfg` &

which works.

I need to shut down this machine for an OS upgrade, and some hardware issues, so I thought I would look into this again.

Thanks.

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Lately, SETI jobs take from 2-8 hours of CPU time, the currently active process is over 90 hours. Which is still quite a bit less than the climate prediction jobs I get. But is it possible that this has run past some loop exit condition accidentally, and now it will never end? How long should I let it run?

There are two main sorts of tasks available at Seti, one is the Multibeam tasks, which run anywhere from mere seconds to those 8 hours you mention, and the second is Astropulse, which runs from mere seconds to multi-tens-of-hours on a CPU.

You had one of the latter. An Astropulse v7.
They're a broadband way of looking for ET, whereas Multibeam is narrow band.
More on the differences between the two, at the AP FAQ and How Seti@Home works.

Second.

You added BOINC from Berkeley or from repository? The latter I think, seeing how it's "7.2.0", unless you built it yourself?
Did you follow http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Installing_BOINC_on_Gentoo on that? (Do read the Optional setup hints)

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The name on that long running SETI job looks the same as the others queued up. But, I won't worry about it for a while yet.

Yes, BOINC came from a repository. No doubt, I have the wrong password stored in that login box that pops up with new jobs. I added the user that normally views boincmgr to the boinc group, so that the "cat" gets the password in that cfg file.

Thanks.

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FYI - that long running job died at 140+ hours with a computation error.

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