1) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Junk in my Home Directory (Message 37100) Posted 16 Oct 2004 by M A Cochran Post: Luke: Boinc is geting better, but it's not quite 'bionic' yet. Just kidding. In general, applications will spew their output into the directory from where the application was executed. For example, if you were to be in Terminal and drag the Boinc application into the Terminal window from its location in the Finder window and hit , Boinc would launch and its output would be deposited into whatever directory you happened to be in within Terminal. If you did this immediately after launching Terminal (or at least after not having changed directories in Terminal), Terminal would be pointing to your $home directory. So, if you generally fit the above situation, remember to change directories ('cd') to the location of the Boinc application before launching it. This can be done easily by typing 'cd ' (without the apostrophes) and dragging the icon of the folder containing the Boinc application into the Terminal window (you could also type the path, of course, such as /Users/myname/Library/Boinc). Then, you could drag the Boinc application icon into Terminal to launch it (or, again, type its name, such as ./boinc_4.13_powerpc-apple-darwin). Now, Boinc output would be placed in the Boinc folder. You can observe where you are at in Terminal at any time with the 'pwd' command. Your $home directory can be abbreviated with a tilde(~), such as ~/Library/Boinc. Finally, I recommend moving your Boinc folder into the /Applications folder, unless you don't want other users of your machine to be able to run Boinc or view its output. You can still apply these restrictions within the /Applications folder, but that's another Unix topic outside the scope of this reply. Cheers, Mark Cochran

2) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Boinc for Mac OS 9.2 (Message 28669) Posted 21 Sep 2004 by M A Cochran Post: > There is no BOINC for 9.2. It requires OS 10.3.x or later. All of the > projects are now moving to 4.x. > > If you can afford it, get 512 mb for your G4. BOINC will work with 256, but > with 512 you can still do a lot of other things while BOINC runs in the > background. > > > [url=http://team.macnn.com] > The best Macintosh team ever. > I am very successfully running Boinc 4.05 with the setiathome 3.20 worker using OSX 10.2.8. Although setiathome 3.20 for 10.2.8 is no longer posted at your Team MacNN site, it works fine with Boinc 4.05. Maybe you should repost it? MA Cochran

3) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Boinc for Mac OS 9.2 (Message 26334) Posted 14 Sep 2004 by M A Cochran Post: > There is no BOINC for 9.2. It requires OS 10.3.x or later. All of the > projects are now moving to 4.x. > > If you can afford it, get 512 mb for your G4. BOINC will work with 256, but > with 512 you can still do a lot of other things while BOINC runs in the > background. > > > [url=http://team.macnn.com] > The best Macintosh team ever. > I am very successfully running Boinc 4.05 with the setiathome 3.20 worker using OSX 10.2.8. Although setiathome 3.20 for 10.2.8 is no longer posted at your Team MacNN site, it works fine with Boinc 4.05. Maybe you should repost it? MA Cochran

4) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Running in the Background with a Root Crontab (Message 20811) Posted 1 Sep 2004 by M A Cochran Post: > I was wondering about > > MAILTO=" " > > ...does that suppress unnecessary email messages? > > davygravy: The null assignment to MAILTO is there just in case some process wants to mail output rather than just displaying it (screen or into a file with redirection (>,>>)). Usually this might occur with a system-generated message, such as a crash or an abnormal process exit. I did not have much accumulated in my system mail log over the past 2+ years, but why have anything at all? Thanks for your comments. Mark

5) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Running in the Background with a Root Crontab (Message 20138) Posted 31 Aug 2004 by M A Cochran Post: I just thought I'd share how I keep SETI@Home running whenever the machine is on via a crontab owned by the root user. 1. If you haven't done so already, log in as a user with administrator permissions and "enable root user" via NetInfo Manager (in /Applications/Utilities). After launching NetInfo Manager, if the 'lock' icon is closed at the bottom of the window, click on it and type your administrator password. When unlocked, the options in the 'Security' menu will be available. If "Enable Root User" is shown, select it. If "Disable Root User" is shown, and you don't know what the Root password is, select "Change Root Password" (and record it somewhere). Relock the window and quit NetInfo Manager. Armed with root capability, you're now master of all domains on your machine, but be careful how you exploit this power, as things could go very awry in a hurry. 2. Launch Terminal and type su root {CR} and enter the root password. Make your Terminal window bigger if necessary so you can work without lines wrapping. 3. Type crontab -e {CR} This should result in the vi editor opening in the Terminal window. Don't be intimidated! Here are the vi commands you may need to enter your script: arrow keys navigate around the file. i inserts text at the cursor position. a appends text after the character right of the cursor. o opens a new line below the cursor line. O opens a new line above the cursor line. {esc} cancels a i/a/o/O mode. x deletes one character right of the cursor. dd deletes the cursor line. :w{CR} saves the file. :q{CR} exits the editor. 4. Type in your cron script. Here is what I have for mine: MAILTO = "" # # boinc 4.05 5,25,45 * * * * cd /Applications/SETI/boinc/; cp boinc.log.txt boinc.log.bak; grep 'Finished upload' boinc.log.txt > completed.log.txt; ./boinc_4.05 >> boinc.log.txt # # seti classic 15,35,55 * * * * cd /Applications/SETI/setiathome/; ./setiathome_3.03 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null Comment lines start with a pound sign (#). The numbers before the four asterisks represent at what minutes of every hour you want the script to run. Don't use spaces. The text after the asterisks is the commands to be executed, just like you might type them in Terminal. Separate commands with a semicolon. All commands should be on a single line with no line breaks. Because it's a Mac, copy/cut/paste works in the vi editor; make sure you're in a text insertion mode (i/a/o/O) to paste into vi and {esc} afterwards. 5. Save your script and exit the editor by typing :wq {CR} The O/S will install the script in the cron for the root user. ************************************************************* Now that we've gone through the vi editor thing, here's a shortcut: you can replace a crontab with the contents of a text file by typing crontab myfile {CR} Make sure that myfile is saved in "unix mode" (vs. Mac mode) with respect to line feeds/carriage returns. You can do this easily in BBEdit. Also note that this method totally replaces the existing crontab with the contents of myfile. ************************************************************* 6. To verify that the script got installed OK, type crontab -l {CR} {that's an el, like in lollypop} 7. Type exit {CR} to log out of the root user, and then quit Terminal if you want. =================== NOTES ON MY CRONTAB =================== -- While the kinks with Boinc are being worked out, I am running both Boinc and SETI Classic, as you can see from the script. This causes no problems (other than increasing the clock time needed to process a workunit if both are running). -- I accumulate Boinc output to the file "boinc.log.txt" and back it up each time the crontab executes. So that the Boinc command line doesn't fail the first time it executes, create an empty text file named "boinc.log.txt" and put it in the Boinc folder before creating the crontab. -- I also keep track of the workunits I've completed and sent back to SETI by using grep to examine "boinc.log.txt" for lines with the string 'Finished upload' and recording them in the file "completed.log.txt". -- You can have the crontab execute as often or as infrequently as you wish by modifying the beginning of the command lines. There's really not much penalty for doing it fairly often, since Boinc manages communications with SETI. I avoided 0 and 30 to miss the likely bombardment of SETI at the top and bottom of the hours by other crontabs out there when we restart our machines and have to wait for the crontab to kick off. -- You can edit your root crontab anytime you want to make changes. You can also have crontabs for any/all users by just logging in normally as user X and building a personal crontab for some purpose, but these crontabs will only be active when that user is logged in. Root is always logged in. Your comments are welcome. Hope this helps, Mark

6) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Boinc 4.05 - OS 10.2.8 (Message 19381) Posted 29 Aug 2004 by M A Cochran Post: Probably not true. I substituted the name of the boinc file (version 4.05) for the old 3.20 one in my crontab, killed the running boinc 3.20 process, and waited for the cron to kick off. To my surprise, here's what the boinc log produced: 2004-08-29 16:45:00 [---] Starting BOINC client version 4.05 for powerpc-apple-darwin 2004-08-29 16:45:00 [SETI@home] Project prefs: using your defaults 2004-08-29 16:45:00 [SETI@home] Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [---] State file has different major version (3.20); resetting projects 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [SETI@home] Resetting project 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [SETI@home] Host ID is 61760 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [---] General prefs: from SETI@home (last modified 2004-07-24 23:16:39) 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [---] General prefs: using your defaults 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [---] Insufficient work; requesting more 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [SETI@home] Requesting 17138 seconds of work 2004-08-29 16:45:01 [SETI@home] Sending request to scheduler: http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi 2004-08-29 16:45:05 [SETI@home] Scheduler RPC to http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi succeeded 2004-08-29 16:45:05 [SETI@home] Project prefs: using your defaults 2004-08-29 16:45:05 [SETI@home] Started download of 25ap04aa.23553.15618.997154.98 2004-08-29 16:45:14 [SETI@home] Finished download of 25ap04aa.23553.15618.997154.98 2004-08-29 16:45:14 [SETI@home] Throughput 41615 bytes/sec 2004-08-29 16:45:14 [SETI@home] Starting result 25ap04aa.23553.15618.997154.98_4 using setiathome version 3.10 Wow! It seems to be working! Notice that it is using the existing setiworker file (ver 3.10, from Mikkyo) to process the data. We'll see what happens when the workunit finishes. Cheers, Mark

 
©2024 University of California
 
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.