3rd week of May

Another fairly quiet week on the farm.

Maul - he's back
Picked up Maul from the shop again. Its his 3rd trip. Got it home and lugged it up into the loft (climbing the ladder is always interesting with a big PC). As you can see from the previous pictures the case is a CoolerMaster HAF 932. Its not exactly light.

The shop replaced the motherboard for a new one. First bootup and it complained about the BIOS settings being invalid. So go and reset everything back the same as the other 4. This gets it booted and running. Previous Windows 7 still on there (fortunately not activated, only 2 days left).

Upgraded BOINC to 6.10.56 and got work and left it to run. A few hours later I noticed it had rebooted. Okay time to wipe it and reinstall. Formated the partitions, and reinstalled Win 7. Reinstall BOINC, copy backup of BOINC directory back onto it and its off and running again. So far its survived a full day crunching. Unfortunately Seti's upload server has gone off-line so can't upload completed work and it refuses to ask for new work (because it can't upload). The backup project on this machine (Einstein) is getting plenty of attention though.


BOINC testing
Well the testing continues. No new version as they are trying to get this one out as the "release" version. As mentioned last week pretty stable, haven't had any cause to complain.


Proxy Server
All the number crunchers communicate to the outside world through a proxy server. I last updated it about 18 months ago. I took the opportunity this weekend to update it to the latest production release. It was only 5 versions behind. Web access seems to be a little faster now too.