so would it be better to have a profile that allowed the machines to download a weeks worth of WU's at a time ? then once a week upload results and download new WU's ?
that is possible isnt it ?

unfortunately, u dont get more than the max of 10 at the time (if u'r lucky), so the whole weekly contact thing went out my window a while back. Even if setting it to FAAH only, the longest once, it's done in less than 3 days.

Trick to get more is to suspend all the WU's and replicate......WCG sends u more. Dont know if there is a limit on how many it would send in a day without returning any.....think someone ran into the 120 wall a few weeks ago that knreed took down....but think its conditional.

Yes- this is a corporate firewall... and very strict ones. Not sure if they are Cisco appliances... cannot remember and I do not have access to see. They clamp things down so tight our own monitoring software has trouble talking to the agents through the firewall. They are extremely paranoid and do not like to leave ports open (in or out), so usually a server gets about 24 hours before re-authentication is required. Authentication is a manual process using a browser, which creates wonderful issues for my headless linux servers running BOINC. Plus, they bounce the firewalls which means you have to re-authenticate even if you did just an hour ago.

I have tried using wget running randomly on each host to keep the firewall open for the host but then the password is exposed and that is bad and it doesn't work very often anyway.

One or two hosts would not be a problem but I have 20+ behind this firewall and it is a big pain in the buttocks to stay on top of them for this silly little issue.