BOINC

[Pokey]

I've been Googling around looking for info on BOINC, and it looks like there are teams beta testing, like BBR etc, some with fairly large teams, but I didn't see Team Anandtech represented. 😕 Is there a story there?

Hope I'm not plowing old ground, I've only been doing Seti about six months so I'm not up on all the history.

😀

 

[scoser]

We're about 145th or so in total credit, so you just have to go down the list aways.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I did some Astropulse Beta testing, but I stoped it pretty early, cause it was just a waste of CPU time IMHO.

 

[Unforgiven]

i refuse to have anything to do with software that is unstable and that the staff working on it doesnt care about security issues with the platform. im pissed off over the fact that everyone @ the SETI I program has basically given up on the millions of people who support them and dont even seem to care about the concerns of their users. i wont have anything to do with ANY project run on BOINC because i feel its a gaping security hole just waiting for a hack and there is no way i can run anythign like that on my business fleet so there is no point in wasting time on it :| sorry if i piss anyone off with this post but i really dont agree with the whole transition to BOINC on the SETI side of things and im angry!

 

[Spacehead]

Unforgiven, what security issues are you talking about???

 

[Unforgiven]

the fact that the software automatically updates itself. granted i havent been keeping an ear to the ground for months on BOINC, but i cannot install any software on my computer that will be automatically updating itself. some people are ok with that, i however am not. just my personal opinion.

 

[Pokey]

Originally posted by: scoser
We're about 145th or so in total credit, so you just have to go down the list aways.

Guess I am too used to seeing us near the top. I gave up after the first few screens..............😀

 

[Pokey]

Unforgiven

I can see where security could be an issue. Especially for corporate IT systems. I think most of us are so used to MS updates and McAfee, Norton ,etc. we don't think about it in that light. Hopefully they can address the security issue. It would seen to be to their benifit if for no other reason than to make more computers available for the program. I will certainly look at it in a different light now.

 

[ProviaFan]

Due to my particular interests in projects, I won't be using the BOINC client (at least not for a long time, hopefully, since if F@H were to switch over - and I doubt they will anytime soon - we would loose all our stats again, and we lost them once already in the v1 to v2 transition), but the F@H software uses an auto-updating core, is used on over 160,000 active systems, and we've not had any security vulnerabilities yet, AFAIK.

I say this not to state that this is something that should be taken lightly, but just to point out that this kind of thing is already done, and not just on a small scale, without problems (then again the Stanford guys are a bit more careful than MS seems to be, and they don't put out an update without careful testing). Of course, there will always be a paranoid few who run their "untrusted" software in a chroot sandbox, or an entirely separate VM, or don't run it at all, because of some issue, but I doubt this will be a problem for most people, assuming the BOINC guys do it as well as F@H has.

 

[Rattledagger]

Originally posted by: Unforgiven
the fact that the software automatically updates itself. granted i havent been keeping an ear to the ground for months on BOINC, but i cannot install any software on my computer that will be automatically updating itself. some people are ok with that, i however am not. just my personal opinion.

Uhm, BOINC core client has never auto-updated, so this is just like every other piece of software you can download & test out on one machine if it's stable or not.
As for applications like seti@home, use the "anonymous"-method that basically is to either compile the application yourself or download this from somewhere, directly from Berkeley should be possible (atleast if you knows there an auto-download is coming from). After getting the application-exe, make a small app_info.xml with the correct info, look here

Afterwards, you'll have a BOINC core client what is only upgraded then you download & install a new version & a project-application that is only upgraded then you yourself manually adds it & edits your app_info.xml

So if you're not today walking around with floppy/cd/whatever and distributes seti-wu & later collects the results, there isn't any security-risk in BOINC except the fact the machine must for short periods of time roughtly once a week be connected to the internet, and therefore susceptible to someone hacking? (or whatever it's called) your machine(s)...