[tab: About BOINC]
As an uber Geek I have a TONNE of computers lying around, and currently have 5 always on, one of which being a webserver. The always on is the key in this scenario. My main PC and my Webserver are always on because they are doing something, the others because its handy. But during the times that they’re idle I don’t want the power and potential usefulness of them to go to waste; enter BOINC.
BOINC is an open source project from berkley that allows computers from all over the world to take a piece of a complex calulation, perform whatever calulation/processing that is necesary, and return their result to a BOINC server. Geeks may already be aware of the SETI project, which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There are, however, a lot more projects that you can contribute to including projects relating to medicine, understanding disease and many other scientific endevours.
[tab: About Charity Engine]
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Charity Engine is an organisation that uses the BOINC software to raise money for charities, by charging for the data processing and then using “its” network of boinc-clients (us) to do the work. At the end of a given processing cycle, Charity engine announces Prize Winners based on a kind of lottery system. So not only are you donating to Charities, you’re entering yourself into a lottery for a chance to win.
[tab: Linux Setup – Command Line]
Im going to cover how to set up the boinc client using terminal only here, as setting it up in windows is fairly straight forward, and setting it up in ubuntu with a GUI has been covered quite a bit, however I couldnt find a lot of info on how to do it on a machine, such as my headless webserver.
Installation of BOINC on ubuntu server is pretty straight forward.
sudo apt-get install boinc-client
Once installed, we need to add a password to the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file in the etc/boinc-client directory
sudo nano /etc/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg
just type the password on a single line, and save and exit.
Now to add your computer to the boinc manager “Charity Engine” we need to use the boinccmd tool in the directory boinc-client is installed. We will be using –join_acct_mgr to do this. Prior to this step you will to go and create an account (in our instance, with charityengine) with your boinc manager of choice.
Before we use –join_acct_mgr we also need to add our manager to the remote_hosts.cfg file.
sudo nano /etc/boinc-client/remote_hosts.cfg
add (in our case) www.charityengine.com to its own line. This allows boinc to communicate with that server/manager.
The first time I tried to add a project manager url to BOINC I received this error “poll status: unexpected XML tag or syntax” because I had not edited the hosts file, which meant BOINC could not communicate with the server.
Now to actually add the manager to boinc so that it can start getting to work. The syntax for –join_acct_mgr is
–join_acct_mgr URL name password
The “name” variable I have found, is almost always an email address (the one you used to make your account with).
sudo boinccmd –join_acct_mgr www.charityengine.com email@address.com password
to see what it’s currently up to
boinccmd --get_state
And there we go folks, your pc’s are no longer sittin around with a thumb up their whatsits. 🙂
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