Just for testing purposes I have set up a virtual machine with Windows 98 SE and successfully installed BOINC 5.8.16. No errors during setup.
When trying to connect to SETI (setiathome.berkeley.edu) I always get the error message "Internet access okay, project servers may be down" - the connection to boincstats/bam is working fine.
Windows itself is also fine, no errors or BSOD
It is also possible to open several internet sites so the DNS works fine.

Trying Version 6 of BOINC does not fix the problem, is there another version that works on Win98?

That is a server message, not one generated by your computer.
A few things that may or may not be relevant:
Does that Windows 98 VM connect to the internet?
Did you install the 32bit version which should work (the 64-bit version will not work)
You need to move forward to a v7.x.x version of BOINC - there have been many changes that will affect connection to the servers.

Good luck with your trial, I hope it works.

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

I've just had a look at the BOINC system requirements page, and you may be onto a looser as the oldest version of Windows "guaranteed" to work is 2000 :-(
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/System_requirements
But it is still worth trying with a newer version of BOINC than 6.x.x as there my be server-side things getting in your way.

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

Okay, I will try a newer Version.
The old versions are 32Bit - directly got'em from the BOINC site with "working on 98"
Edit: as already posted: Yes, internet works fine...

Keep you updated

You should be able to find newer 32-bit versions. Indeed the current 32-bit version may work OK

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

Dusted off my old Toshiba 2060CDS laptop, found an old version of Opera to get out on the net. It's working, although it's slow as expected. Anyway figured I'd just put it to use for seti work and nothing else. So I downloaded boinc 5.8.16 from the boinc site and it installed easy. Tried to attach a project and get "The project is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later" Figure that either means what it says, or more likely the program is too old. Any help would be appreciated.

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That's digging back a long way.
Try the newer version, but make sure you stick to the 32-bit versions. There have been quite a few changes since v5.x some of which might prevent that computer joining SETI.
Please report back what you find as doing so will help others.

Recently there have been quite a few server problems which may affect people trying to connect new computers. (Its a good few years since I referred to a Windows 98 computer as "new")

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

The particular problem for these older machines is likely to be that SETI now requires HTTPS (secure) connections to its servers.

HTTPS relies on a system of security certificates, and BOINC supplies its own private set of certificates - not relying on the shared operating system set, which will probably have been updated automatically when you went online to download files or post here.

You will find a file called 'ca-bundle.crt' in your BOINC program directory. If you can replace this with a newer version, perhaps a copy from another, newer, computer already crunching for BOINC, it may improve the connection.

I will try both of the above suggestions tonight and post what happens.

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Here are the results:
Tried replacing the certificate on the 5.8.16 version in the BOINC directory of the W98 with a certificate from a W10 currently working on seti.
That didn't work. When I installed the certificate the error says Invalid Public Key Security Object File. This is an Invalid Security Certificate File.

Tried installing 6.6.38 from the BOINC site that produced a different message
DAEMON Start Failed BOINC Manager is not able to start a BOINC client. Please launch the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services applet and start the BOINC service.
I'd do that but W98 doesn't have an Administrative Tools that I can find on this laptop. If anyone knows how to find this please let me know.

Then I tried installing the latest version of BOINC from their site and this error appeared immediately.
BOINC_7.14.2_WINDOWS_INTELX86.exe file expects a newer version of Windows. Upgrade your Windows version.

It's not looking good.

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I feel that the version 5.8.16 might still work but I'm missing something.
Here is what a connection try looks like. Maybe someone might see something that is missing here?

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Thanks for trying and getting back to us.
So near and yet so far.....
I don't think the servers were down last night, so it's a case of finding where the path to the server is held and trying a bit of a manual edit.
One thing that might work is to directly enter the project URL rather than selecting from the list. So, when you go to attach the project in BOINC do you get a window showing the list of projects with a one line bx below called "project URL:", if you do then enter the project URL ("https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/") - this should over ride the default SETI URL and get you to the secure side of the fence.


(Richard may have some more hints and ideas - let's hope between us we are able to get your compute connected)

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

You could also try pasting

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

into a browser, to see what you get.

On my daily driver (Windows 7, Chrome), that redirects to

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

and then shows me a file, starting

<project_config>
<name>SETI@home</name>
<master_url>http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</master_url>
<web_rpc_url_base>https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</web_rpc_url_base>
<local_revision>20843</local_revision>
<web_stopped>0</web_stopped>
<min_passwd_length>6</min_passwd_length>
<sched_stopped>0</sched_stopped>
...

Thanks for trying and getting back to us.
So near and yet so far.....
I don't think the servers were down last night, so it's a case of finding where the path to the server is held and trying a bit of a manual edit.
One thing that might work is to directly enter the project URL rather than selecting from the list. So, when you go to attach the project in BOINC do you get a window showing the list of projects with a one line bx below called "project URL:", if you do then enter the project URL ("https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/") - this should over ride the default SETI URL and get you to the secure side of the fence.


(Richard may have some more hints and ideas - let's hope between us we are able to get your compute connected)

To attach a project with the 5.8.16 version you need to manually enter the url. I did try both the http and https and received the same servers are busy message. This makes be believe that my computer is knocking at the door of the server but its response is I’m busy, LOL

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You could also try pasting

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

into a browser, to see what you get.

On my daily driver (Windows 7, Chrome), that redirects to

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

and then shows me a file, starting

<project_config>
<name>SETI@home</name>
<master_url>http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</master_url>
<web_rpc_url_base>https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</web_rpc_url_base>
<local_revision>20843</local_revision>
<web_stopped>0</web_stopped>
<min_passwd_length>6</min_passwd_length>
<sched_stopped>0</sched_stopped>
...

I’ll definitely try that on Saturday. When I manually entered the url to get a project on BOINC I entered both http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and received the same message.
I will try it in a browser and see what the results are.

Will get back to both of you with any results.

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Tried installing 6.6.38 from the BOINC site that produced a different message
DAEMON Start Failed BOINC Manager is not able to start a BOINC client. Please launch the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services applet and start the BOINC service.
I'd do that but W98 doesn't have an Administrative Tools that I can find on this laptop. If anyone knows how to find this please let me know.

That's because Windows 98 doesn't have service installations (the Daemon the BOINC installer complains about). Instead, in the third screen of the installer click Advanced and UNCHECK Service Installation.

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Tried installing 6.6.38 from the BOINC site that produced a different message
DAEMON Start Failed BOINC Manager is not able to start a BOINC client. Please launch the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services applet and start the BOINC service.
I'd do that but W98 doesn't have an Administrative Tools that I can find on this laptop. If anyone knows how to find this please let me know.

That's because Windows 98 doesn't have service installations (the Daemon the BOINC installer complains about). Instead, in the third screen of the installer click Advanced and UNCHECK Service Installation.

Nice, I'll try that too tomorrow.
Will post the results
Thank you

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Tried installing 6.6.38 from the BOINC site that produced a different message
DAEMON Start Failed BOINC Manager is not able to start a BOINC client. Please launch the Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services applet and start the BOINC service.
I'd do that but W98 doesn't have an Administrative Tools that I can find on this laptop. If anyone knows how to find this please let me know.

That's because Windows 98 doesn't have service installations (the Daemon the BOINC installer complains about). Instead, in the third screen of the installer click Advanced and UNCHECK Service Installation.

I tried installing version 6.6.38 again. On the 3rd screen when I click Advanced there isn't an option the check Service Installation. The only options are to change the Program or Data directories and the screen saver. It also doesn't appear to make as much progress as the 5.8.16 version did.

[/img]
[/img] [img][/img]

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You could also try pasting

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

into a browser, to see what you get.

On my daily driver (Windows 7, Chrome), that redirects to

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/get_project_config.php

and then shows me a file, starting

<project_config>
<name>SETI@home</name>
<master_url>http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</master_url>
<web_rpc_url_base>https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/</web_rpc_url_base>
<local_revision>20843</local_revision>
<web_stopped>0</web_stopped>
<min_passwd_length>6</min_passwd_length>
<sched_stopped>0</sched_stopped>
...

I entered this in the browser and this appeared.
[img] [/img]

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Hope someone will come up with the missing link in this. I'm still hanging in there and wiling to work it through and post results.
Must be missing something big in the 6.6.38 because the computer isn't connecting at all and doesn't get back any messages like the 5.8.16 version.

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