How do you manage boinc installs across many machines?

[Endgame124]

I’m at 12 hosts running boinc now, have 3 more on the way, and am considering an additional 6 (8 hosts are raspberry pis).

I just realized today that asteroids@home ran out of work, and I had 4 idle pis. This means I really need a single place to look at all my hosts and track what is being processed. What does everyone else use, as I can’t be the only one with this issue.

 

[emoga]

I use BoincTasks. It works on both windows and linux(with wine), but I only use it on my main windows install to check what the other hosts are doing.

Here's an example of what I currently see.

Spoiler: image

The left side (where the mouse is at) is where you select the individual host or you can always choose to see them all.

 

[StefanR5R]

@Endgame124, I have a similar number of computers, but usually don't use all at once. On the other hand, my computers sometimes run several clients in parallel, due to the size of the computers.

Here are the tools which I use to control them:

• pencil and paper
• boincmgr
• boinccmd
• scripts around boinccmd
• ssh, scp, sed...
• boinctasks

Two remarks about boinctasks:

• My main desktop is a Linux computer. Boinctasks can run on it by means of Wine. But the UI is very sluggish then. I therefore (a) much prefer to run boinctasks on a Windows laptop, (b) use boinctasks less often now than I did at some point in the past.

• If you have a large number of boinc clients to add to boinctasks, then shut down boinctasks, bulk-edit "C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\eFMer\BoincTasks\computers.xml", and restart boinctasks.

 

[Howdy]

In my case .......pure luck?

 

[Markfw]

I use BOINCTasks also. I have a few more hosts. I could not live without it ! This runs on my main box (win 10) but most of the clients are linux. 2 other win 10 boxes.

 

[StefanR5R]

I really need a single place to look at all my hosts and track what is being processed.

One script which I use very often is doing this:

It periodically probes a given list of host:project tuples. For these, it logs the number of downloading/downloaded/uploading/uploaded tasks. Optionally, it

• triggers a project update if there are fewer tasks in progress than a configured limit,
• triggers a project update if there are more tasks ready to report than a configured limit,
• suspends network transfers if a given number of tasks in progress are present and downloads have finished.

I use this script both for filling bunkers at the start of competitions, as well as a continuous monitor during as well as outside of competitions.

Occasionally, I use special monitoring scripts which deal with specific quirks of some projects.