31st of May

Farm news
The farm had a mixed week with running out of Climate Prediction work and then doing Asteroids and Seti work. This weekend saw the return of the Climate work units so I ran down the cache on the Intel-GPU machines so they can run without any contention.

I have even put one of the 6 core/12 thread machines on the job. Its running 6 at a time. They haven't run CPDN work before so it will be interesting to see how they go. I am sure they will work, just not how long they will take.


BOINC testing
We got 7.6.2 late last week and I have it installed on a couple of machines. I have made a few suggestions about how the new Options windows should appear. I don't expect anything will happen but hopefully they will improve before it becomes a release version.


File Server
The file server is back and running. At the moment we've only hooked up a single hard disk. I have ordered an Intel RAID controller so there is no point running the others until its installed..We're not too sure if the controller comes with cables or not and its at least a week away. If no cables then they have to be ordered and another week's delay.

The shop put a PWM fan in the top of the case. It continually revs-up and then slows down. I've told them they will have to change it to a normal one. Its noisy and very annoying.


Proxy server
I run one of these to try and reduce the downloads. Since switching back to using the old file server I noticed it doesn't seem to be saving much of anything so have spent some time this weekend going through the logs and adjusting settings.

The trigger for this was the CPDN downloads bring down an 80Mb file per machine as well as a number of 20Mb and 26Mb files, all of which get duplicated on the other machines. Windows Update does the same.

I am also looking at replacing it with something more energy efficient as well as having more CPU power. It will become a dedicated proxy server.