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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Running BOINC on computers that don't have an internet connection |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 6
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Navy1965
Cruncher USA Joined: Jun 1, 2007 Post Count: 8 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I have several computers that will not have internet connection. I would like to have one computer running BOINC and controlling the wu's for the other computers. Is this possible? tks
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
That can not be done with a 'will not have'. BOINC clients only run on a per-host basis.
Got one computer wrap-ethernet wired to another with WIFI using the Windows bridge function [works for Linux too]. First using internet sharing but that prevented something else to work. The router only sees the WIFI device... the ether-netted host shielded twice. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
There's another, laborious method, human error prone, using one internetted host and multiple BOINC installs on there. This "Sneaker-Netting" method uses e.g. a memory stick to back and forth the results and new work from the non-internet hosts [porting the BOINC data-dir to/from]. Key is, the results -must- be uploaded by the same BOINC ID computer that fetched the tasks.
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noderaser
Senior Cruncher United States Joined: Jun 6, 2006 Post Count: 297 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I haven't tried it, but it may be possible to do something similar to the "sneaker net" method using one of the Live USB distributions of Linux that are tailor-made for BOINC computing, such as DotschUX or DCLinux. However, I'm not sure how successful that would be since I know that swapping computers with different families of processors can cause tasks to fail because of differing instruction sets and hardware.
----------------------------------------If you could get it to work, you'd definitely want to pick projects with very long tasks, such as CPDN or others. But, I think the easiest way would be to get an internet connection to the computers, regardless of how slow--unless you're paying for bandwidth, in which case I can understand not wanting to connect them. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
For various reasons one would want to avoid having to boot for each install, it might not even be possible. You can though install the full BOINC to memory sticks and stop and start them from there. On the offline machines could run them too from the sticks or is keep to copying over the data dirs and run as regular, albeit offline installs, suspending the network function of BOINC when crunching offline. The starting and stopping of the multiple clients is the sensitive part.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
this also discuss pretty much the same and it was 2.5 years ago.
It interests me that even after 2.5 years, some people, well my guess is more than a few people are still wondering if such feature/technique ever exists. Some might call it Super Host, Mini Grid, etc. It is also that because the log said "feeder not running" this morning so I check the forum for latest threads and I see this thread, so I decide to stop by  I can surely say that it does exist and it is pretty NOT complicated (I won't say easy). Years ago, I really used the the text editor to split the original state into several states, each with its own workunit/result elements, then I distribute them to each of my machines, then I merged them back to original state. As for now, I have made one decent app that helps me move tasks between machines, monitor tasks on each machine. Sure there are still some activities that needs to be done manually, like starting and stopping clients as Rob said, but it can be done from the app. Plus you only do that once every two days, so yeah I'm ok with that. I'm now crunching MCM with the app, and so far I never got any "Invalid" on my "Result Status" page, so I will continue crunching this way. I don't know if it will work for other projects on WCG, haven't tried it yet, guess I'll find it out later, now it's been MCM only. Cheers. |
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