20th of August

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Seven running Asteroids work.

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti work

Raspberry Pis
All running Einstein BRP work


Other news
One of the Intel GPU machines is off as its front case fan has died a rather noisey death. Its an older version of the Fractal Designs ARC Midi case. I have asked the computer shop to get me some replacement fans. I expect the other machines that are in the older cases will also fail in due course so having some spares is a good idea..

I also had an older 8 port Netgear switch where some of the ports stopped working. I replaced it with a newer one during the week. While I was at it I got a spare, just in case another switch stops working.


Software updates
I did install the 4.11 kernel onto the core i3 machine and it fixed the disappearing desktop issue with Debian Stretch on iGPUs. I had to do it via ssh seeing as I couldn't get a desktop after installing Stretch. Unfortunately if you use the 4.11 kernel there are issues with some apps that use vsyscall as its disabled by default. It can be enabled via a command-line argument on kernel start-up.

I have installed BOINC 7.8.1 on one of the Nvidia GPU machines in order to test it. The manager has a few issues and my drystone benchmark figure has doubled. The issues with the manager while annoying seem to have occurred some time after 7.2.42 and have been there for quite a while. The manager issues don't have any impact on BOINCtasks which is how I normally manage the farm. I don't expect they will be fixed before an official 7.8 BOINC is released.

The Raspberry Pi foundation have updated Raspbian to the Stretch release. Raspbian for those that don't know is Debian but with some customisation for the Pi. They recommend you reinstall it rather than upgrading, but you can upgrade an existing Pi if you wish.