17th of April

Farm news
The weather has been cooler for most of this week so I have had the Intel GPU machines running climate models (still going they're up to 113 hours so far) and some Asteroids work. Asteroids have finally fixed their missing files issue so work is now flowing again.

CPDN announced that they will only target 1 particular platform (Windows, Linux or Mac) for each type of climate model in future to save on development and improve their reliability. I would think that it may be easier to issue the work units as VirtualBox VM images so they don't need to get involved in which operating system to target.


Intel driver update
Intel released driver 10.18.10.4176 for the HD4000 so I was trying it with Einstein. It actually seems to work. The last few releases from Intel haven't worked. I didn't do many work units but managed to get the BRP4 work units done and then some Parkes PMPS XT (aka BRP6) work units. The bad news is its quite a bit slower than the (recommended) 10.18.10.3621 driver. I didn't try it with Seti and have since gone back to the 3621 driver as its faster.


BOINC testing
We got an early look at the preference changes in 7.5.0. They seemed to work fine but I have suggested some cosmetic changes. Others have also asked for additional settings such as a "in use" and a "not in use" set of preferences. No word yet on them coming or not.


Windows updates
Got a few fixes again for patch Tuesday as its known. There was the usual run around and update the farm. Also a few for the Raspberry Pi's (Debian Jessie).

While that has been going on I have been trying to get the windows time software (w32time) to behave and keep the PC's clocks more accurate. Microsoft chose to do their own version of the ntp client that works somewhat differently from the standard ntp software. Anyway after fiddling with a few things and using google a lot I have them working as they should be.