Help on Dimes

[Woodie]

Hey...all you new Dimes guys...STOP IT!!!

You're killing my stats! I'm barely in the daily top-10 anymore! Now I'm going to have to find some new crunchers, just to keep up w/ all of you.























J/K
Glad to see everyone jumping aboard!

 

[petrusbroder]

Woodie, how does running Dimes - affect your traffic to and from the net? :Q

 

[mrwizer]

Hey peter, any luck with the Linux version yet?

Maybe I will try to give it a shot on a linux box of mine...

 

[mrwizer]

Originally posted by: Woodie
Hey...all you new Dimes guys...STOP IT!!!

You're killing my stats! I'm barely in the daily top-10 anymore! Now I'm going to have to find some new crunchers, just to keep up w/ all of you.

J/K
Glad to see everyone jumping aboard!

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: mrwizer
Hey peter, any luck with the Linux version yet?

Maybe I will try to give it a shot on a linux box of mine...

No luck at all - I know too little about this stuff. At least I have Java running well, so thats not the big problem.
Here is one set of problems...
Problems here too...
looking through the forums shows mostly that all have failed ... even those who know much more.

 

[mrwizer]

Well then maybe I will not waste my time if the linux gurus cannot get it running.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

The longer I run DIMES the more problems I encounter. I get random crashes with DIMES, my one PC scores way lower than it should, DIMES enabled NetBios via TCP/IP on 2 of my PCs without any notification and worst of all, I really do feel a strong impact on the loadtimes of websites, chats, forums and so on.

In a addition to that, the official forum doesn't seem to be visited by an official DIMES representative too often or not at all, as my own and Peter's thread haven't received any answer yet.

It's a shame, that such a perfect secondary - because almost no CPU power needed - DC project doesn't seem to be well maintained.

By now I'm pretty sure that I'll pull the plug on it after the 50,000 MM

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: BlackMountainCow
The longer I run DIMES the more problems I encounter. I get random crashes with DIMES, my one PC scores way lower than it should, DIMES enabled NetBios via TCP/IP on 2 of my PCs without any notification and worst of all, I really do feel a strong impact on the loadtimes of websites, chats, forums and so on.

In a addition to that, the official forum doesn't seem to be visited by an official DIMES representative too often or not at all, as my own and Peter's thread haven't received any answer yet.

It's a shame, that such a perfect secondary - because almost no CPU power needed - DC project doesn't seem to be well maintained.

By now I'm pretty sure that I'll pull the plug on it after the 50,000 MM

I posted this at the Dimes forum:

On my home network I have Netbios over TCP/IP activated on most, but not all, computers, because of a older print-server. I have checked if
1. On computers with netbios over TCP/PI activated, the installation opens any port (up to port 4550),
2. On computers without netbios over TCP/IP activated if the installation enables netbios over TCP/IP and if any port is opened,
3. If Zonealarm Pro, Zonealarm (free) and Outpost Pro would hide those ports which were opended (if any).

The results are:
1. On computers with netbios over TCP/IP active, no ports were opened exept those alreadey open. All three firewalls protected these ports and claimed that the ports were in "stealth mode" - i.e. not visible from a computer outside.
2. On computers without netbios over TCP/IP active, on two of three computers netbios over TCP/IP remained disabled and no ports were visible from outside. On the third computer netbios over TCP/IP was found to be enabled after installation, but I have no hard evidence that this was done by the installation, because this was our games computer with some drivers and network protocolls I do not know well. However, no port was visible from the outside, all ports were reported as being in stealth-mode.

As far as I can see, from this informal test on just a few machines, there was no risk of a security failure, if a current and updated software firewall was used.

There is - it seems to me - very little risk if a firewall protects the computers in a network. But I still do not like the behavior of the Dimes-agent in this matter.

Also it hogs bandwidth. The longer it runs the more it seems to take. As I said at the installation guide @ TAS:

If you run several agents through your broadband connection you may accumulate quite a few megabytes of data flow, and if you have a limit on the amount downloaded or uploaded you have to be somewhat careful.
In my system Dimes (2 agents) sends 33 MBytes per day upstream, and receives 20.8 MBytes per day downstream. That makes 1.614 GBytes per month. No problem for me (I have a 24 Gbytes per month limit), but you have to think about this.

If I know my family well we will hit the ceiling this month, since we normally use 18 - 20 GBytes per month (I myself use for my work about 10 GBytes/month since I also work with interpretation of PET- CT- and MR-scans, and those files are huge!)

So I will not run this too much, probably I will increase the time between measurments so it measures once each 90 seconds instead of once every 30 seconds, as it is by default. If the computer starts crashing, or to behave erratically I'll remove every trace of the agent.

Oh, , Christian, of course the forum is not visited by officials during the week end. Both of us posted on saturday, October 1, and I think that the guys keep office hours ... and not like us amateurs (=those who love it) any hours...

 

[CheesePoofs]

How do you measure how many mb DIMES is using upstream and downstream?

 

[petrusbroder]

I just got an answer on the question if the Dimes-agent activates the netbios-over TCP/IP:

The thread with the answer is here.

PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 4:36 pm Post subject: Reply with quote
NetBIOS is a well known security issue in windows based systems.
However , DIMES agents does not in any way tamper with your NetBIOS settings - It may cause an increased NetBIOS activity only in certain netwroks that use dns over NetBIOS.
For those who are concerned , I recommecnd that you read this web page and follow the instructions on the bottom of the page :

http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_security.asp

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
How do you measure how many mb DIMES is using upstream and downstream?

I have a communications computer (running a Linux version). The comp givs me the stats for each machine on the network. I just reset the counter for the comps with dimes, left the comps in peace (no internet access and such) for three hours, subtracted the "normal traffic" to and from the communications computer (that is measured in kbytes/hour) and multiplied the results with 8 to get a 24 hour number...

May not be the most exact number but it seems right to me ... considering other posts on the Dimes forum.

 

[Assimilator1]

Originally posted by: mrwizer

Originally posted by: Woodie
Hey...all you new Dimes guys...STOP IT!!!

You're killing my stats! I'm barely in the daily top-10 anymore! Now I'm going to have to find some new crunchers, just to keep up w/ all of you.

J/K
Glad to see everyone jumping aboard!

BMC
What connection have you got?


Btw does anyone else have the problem of the DIMES GUI opening very slowly?
(other than that it runs fine)

 

[BlackMountainCow]

@Assimilator

I got DSL, 200k downstream, 128 upstream. Why?

And yes, my GUI opens very slowly as well.

 

[CheesePoofs]

My GUI seems to open quite quickly. Is this only for the first time you open it after a reboot or does it happen all the time?

 

[Woodie]

Woodie, how does running Dimes - affect your traffic to and from the net?

I'm not sure. I know it certainly is taking up some bandwidth, but I don't measure it. With a 4+MB d/l speed on Comcast, I haven't noticed any significant impact. But...I rarely play online games (CS:S or UT2K4), and haven't noticed a difference there.

 

[Assimilator1]

Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
My GUI seems to open quite quickly. Is this only for the first time you open it after a reboot or does it happen all the time?

It seems just afer a reboot ,though I've also noticed the GUI lock up for a few seconds occasionally even after its been open a bit

BMC
I just wondered what connection you had ,though I could understand Dimes affecting a dialup connection I'm surprised it effects yours.Makes you wonder if its peak b/width useage is only 1KB/s......
Mines 2M down ,200k up so I don't notice ,though I did suspect it was causing ping problems playing Freelancer online lastnight ,but it could of just been ISP problems too.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

According to my firewall, my peak usage for 4 PC running dimes is arounf 15 KB/s ...

 

[Assimilator1]

4 PCs? oh I see ,I've only got 1 running it.
Hmm ,that makes 3.25KB/s for each PC running Dimes ,is that Dime b/width useage only?

Btw 15KB/s will be your entire upload speed! ,no wonder its causing you problems ,you either need to kill off at least 1 client or increase the time between measurements on all of them.
Would seem a shame to stop it dead when I doubt you'd notice any ill effects on your net useage by say 1 PC.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I didn't stop it dead, just killed it on my X2 where it 'caused random crashes. Still got it on three machines!

 

[CheesePoofs]

I just figured out how to make my firewall log the internet activity of a specific program, so hopefully if I did this right I'll be able to get a reading on how much bandwidth DIMES is using for me. Can someone confirm that "javaw" is the program taht I should be monitoring?

 

[petrusbroder]

Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
I just figured out how to make my firewall log the internet activity of a specific program, so hopefully if I did this right I'll be able to get a reading on how much bandwidth DIMES is using for me. Can someone confirm that "javaw" is the program taht I should be monitoring?

Yes, thats the one. Good luck and post some results when you get them!

 

[CheesePoofs]

Well, I havent gotten any results on that (and I actually dont' think my firewall logs how much bandwidth a program uses, only how many times it accesses the internet), but I just watched "Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition binary" use 34kbps upstream bandwidth. I think this must be what DIMES is using to access the internet, because I haven't seen javaw access it yet, and that 34kbps upstream usage happened right before a bunch of points appeared on the DIMES graph. Is it just me, or is that a LOT of upstream bandwidth to be used?

EDIT: I just started logging "Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition binary" 's internet usage, and it is definately DIMES, it access the internet a lot about every 30 seconds and then about once a second in between that. Unfortunately, my firewall doesn't log how much bandwidth it uses.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

But you can always limit the usage of bandwith in the settings, can't you?

 

[petrusbroder]

Well, in a way you can: by taking more time between measurements and by limiting the maximun transfer rate. But that decreases also your score ...

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Oh so true ...