21 February 2013

21st of February

Well last week was a bit cooler and I managed to have all the Intel-GPU machines running for about 3 days straight. This week is back to being hot so they are off again.

The Pi's have been running regardless of the weather. In fact the two new ones turned up on Monday this week. I got one of them going on the Monday and the other on Tuesday. At present 3 of the Pi's are running Albert@home and the other 2 are running Asteroids@home tasks.

From the screen shot you can see where I have added one of the Pi's to BoincTasks. I haven't updated the others yet
 



Setting up BoincTasks talking to a Raspberry Pi
BoincTasks is designed to monitor a number of machines. Unfortunately its a Windows app and so getting it talking to the Raspberry Pi's is not the simplest of things to do. I assume that you've managed to get BOINC running on the Pi and BoincTasks (BT) is also running on your Windows PC.

  1. On the Pi you'll need to put the IP address and host name of the BT machine into /etc/hosts
  2. On the Pi you'll need to put a password into /var/lib/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg
  3. On the Pi you'll need to put the host name of the BT machine into /var/lib/boinc-client/remote_hosts.cfg
  4. Restart the Pi to pick up the above changes
  5. In BT (on your PC) you need to add the Pi. Click on the Computers tab and then on the Menu Bar Computers -> Add Computer. You need to use the IP address (not the host name) of the Pi and the password from point 2.

Points to note:
  • If you installed the boinc-manager on the Pi it will no longer be able to connect to the boinc-client. This is because it doesn't know the password. You can execute it manually and supply the password from a command prompt if you still want to use it, but you now have BT working so why would you need it?
  • The Pi is invisible to the windows PC's on the network. The router will usually be able to see all of them but the windows machines only show other windows machines. The Pi's don't seem to have visibility of anything else on the network.
  • Due to the 2nd point the Pi needs to have the IP address and host name of the BT machine in the hosts file. This is not good practice as IP addresses can and do frequently change.

I will see if the guys in the Raspberry Pi forums know how to work around these networking issues.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great stuff.

Thought I'd post to let you know I've made SubsetSum available by request over on my Raspberry Pi BOINC page in case you're interested.

SubsetSum sample run with successful completion: http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/subset_sum/result.php?resultid=1345268