CPU <-> GPU rebranding

[Athalian]

Cpu suddenly got work and now the exe file appeared. So it works now odd enough :/ ill send the thing anyways

[Marius]

Cpu suddenly got work and now the exe file appeared. So it works now odd enough :/ ill send the thing anyways

Thanks, no change needed anymore The original clientstate is correct (no corruption) but it just didn't contain any information about the 603 cpu application.

Must say, this is the first time i've seen a client_state without a cpu application!

[msattler]

Downloaded the 1.9 rebranding tool, and for the most part, it works great.
I have one problem though, which prevents me from running it in automatic mode.

I have run it a number of times manually, and sometimes after the rebranding is finished, it does not correctly restart Boinc.  I get a message saying that Boinc is not connected to a client, "you have entered an incorrect password, please try again"......

Manually exiting Boinc and restarting it sets things right again.

Other times it works correctly.  I have not run it enough times yet to notice if the bad restart only occurs when work has actually been rebranded vs when it has not found any VLAR to rebrand.

Anybody else notice this problem?

I should mention that this is on an i7 XP x64 rig, and Boinc is NOT running as a service.

[Marius]

I have run it a number of times manually, and sometimes after the rebranding is finished, it does not correctly restart Boinc.  I get a message saying that Boinc is not connected to a client, "you have entered an incorrect password, please try again"......

This occasionally happends, but unfortunately its not something i can prevent. From where i stand it looks like a bug in the boincmgr because of credential problems but i'm not absolutely sure about it.

My vista/64 test installation ran without problems, but that doesn't help you much. In the background i use 'boinccmd.exe --quit' to stop boinc, boincmgr detects this and "grayes" out the project. After the reschedule i simply use 'boinc.exe -detach' to restart it, but this credential problem in boincmgr is a blocking factor. You could try these commands manually, its boincmgr whats causing the trouble for sure.

No idea if it can/could be fixed on my side. Any ideas out there?

[Jason G]

On XP I still use the 'old style' automatic mode.  That is with an entry in Windows scheduled tasks, pointing to a batch (.cmd)  file that has boinc control in it to control the service:

REM Reschedule.cmd, for automated rebranding
net stop boinc
reschedule.exe /Autorun 75
net start boinc

By linking to a shortcut to that you can set it to run minimised also, so that command window only appears briefly on the taskbar, otherwise invisible.  No problems stop/starting boinc that way here, probably since the reschedule process has enough meat in it without additional delays.

That, of course is for service installation, which won't be suitable with Vista+ with the GPU app, so changing the 'net stop & start' line to use boinccmd should work.  If some delay is needed you can use 'ping someaddress.com > nul' to make a delay before restarting.

[jasonkeil]

does anybody know how to rescheduler 1.9 to work with s@h beta test? i'm having problems with vlars and would like to move them to the cpu.
here is the thread that states my problem and Joe suggestion. any suggestions would be helpful and appreciated.

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta/forum_thread.php?id=1581

[msattler]

Well........
I just had a scare with the rebranding tool.......

Got some new cuda work overnight, and ran the tool to move some VLAR over to the CPU.  Tool ran, moved the work, and got the password error when restarting Boinc.

Manually shut Boinc down and restarted it, and when it came back up, the 'attach to project' window came up!!!  No projects, no tasks!
Shut it down again and restarted it again, and, praise to the Gods of Seti....my tasks were back.  The only ill effect was the loss of a bunch of crunch time on 4 AP wu's it had been crunching on....they exited with computation errors.

I think from now on I will shut down Boinc manually before running the rebranding tool and restart it manuall once it is done, unless the tool can be modified to start and stop Boinc in a safer manner.

Not to diss the tool, mind you.....I am glad it is available for those like me who practice 'no WU left behind'....LOL.

I am just going to be more cautious when using it until a fix is found or a successful non-vlarkill app comes along and I can update my drivers to run it.

[Raistmer]

Non-service BOINC installation bugged by default.
Cause there is no correct method to end BOINC and be sure it's client_state.xml is written already.
You could implement some watchdogs or pinging or simple put pause in bat-file, but "boincmgr --quit" is not enough.
Actually I prefer just to kill boinc.exe process by wkill tool.
This method doesn't give guaranty  that all science app are finished, htey can remain actie ~30 seconds after boinc.exe process kill, but at least I can be sure no more client_state.xml writes will be follow.
Regarding rebranding tool AFAIK it will not reschedule already started tasks so it doesn't need science apps exit, it only needs boinc.exe exit to keep client_state.xml safe.

@msattler
In your case it seems client_state_prev.xml was used to restore your BOINC. You are lucky indeed

[Marius]

I just had a scare with the rebranding tool.......

Don't worry about it to much, for what i know boincmgr just misfired on restart and got credential errors (like you had before i guess). Boincmgr screen will be shown completely blanc without any tasks and projects, i've seen this before and i'm not really worried about it. Restarting boincmgr will solve it all. However those computation errors are weird, they should not have happened as i don't touch any of the the running workunits. Mayby Raistmer is right about reused .._prev.xml, but i'm not sure about that (and difficult to detect, mayby there was a collision with boinc.exe?)

Still this is a sign things can go wrong on 64 bit system (=systems not run with standard boinc service). If you happen to know a safe method on stopping/restarting boinc please do (better safe then sorry). I would appreciate any hint or report with workarounds, i'll happily adopt it in the tool if i can, but for now i dont have any workarounds (other then killing boinc the hard way with "pskill boinc.exe" (don't try this for fun!)).

[Josef W. Segur]

Marius, would you describe more fully what the 1.9 release note relating to SETI Beta means? Is it just avoiding messing with Beta work, or actually meant to allow rebranding of work at Beta? If the latter, it appears not to be working from Jason Keil's experience.
                                                                                Joe

[Marius]

Marius, would you describe more fully what the 1.9 release note relating to SETI Beta means? Is it just avoiding messing with Beta work, or actually meant to allow rebranding of work at Beta? If the latter, it appears not to be working from Jason Keil's experience.
                                                                                Joe

Sure, previous versions would simply mess up the client_state.xml as it was unable to distinguish units from seti beta and seti main. If you read a few pages back in this thread you problably can find the conversation about it.

1.9 is ONLY able to rebrands for seti main.

If i have time i would like to introduce seti-beta rebranding in a 2.0 version (its exactly the same, only app_name is different).

Greetings,
Marius

[Josef W. Segur]

OK, I was too optimistic when I read the note, wishful thinking I guess   I did remember the exchanges about the difficulty, I think I even commented therein.

In case it might encourage you to do the 2.0 version, I'll note that the file being split for Beta has a good mix, midrange and VHAR for the first part then VLAR for the end. I'm not sure how much of each, haven't investigated that closely. But there have been at least 6 channels split and the work that brought up the question was from the later part of the first of those. The others will of course have the same pattern, all feeds travel together. At the rate Beta participants get through work, there may be a week or two of non-VLAR work before the next problems. All in all, there's about 3 months of work already split (I think the mb_splitter there is using the same "Results ready to send" queue control values as Main).
                                                                             Joe

[MarkJ]

Well........
I just had a scare with the rebranding tool.......

Got some new cuda work overnight, and ran the tool to move some VLAR over to the CPU.  Tool ran, moved the work, and got the password error when restarting Boinc.

Manually shut Boinc down and restarted it, and when it came back up, the 'attach to project' window came up!!!  No projects, no tasks!
Shut it down again and restarted it again, and, praise to the Gods of Seti....my tasks were back.  The only ill effect was the loss of a bunch of crunch time on 4 AP wu's it had been crunching on....they exited with computation errors.

The core-client seems to start up, just the manager is unable to connect to it. I usually just click Advanced -> Select Computer and hit the Okay button (or enter) and it will reconnect.

[k6xt]

I just had a scare with the rebranding tool.......Got some new cuda work overnight, and ran the tool to move some VLAR over to the CPU.  Tool ran, moved the work, and got the password error when restarting Boinc.

This happened to me as well when I ran the tool in manual mode. Running via a cmd batch file using the commands posted in this thread there was no error i.e. autorun 75.

Edit: [Snip] Sorry forget I asked!

In accordance with instructions I herewith post my thanks to Raistmer, Marius et al for a marvelous tool. No more killed VLAR's!

thanks
Art

[Fredericx51]

Hi ,   I never had a problem ,  stopping BOINC, even when using the sleep mode ,availeble when right-clicking on the tasbar - icon.
Never had to use net stop boinc, so time to install this tool,  too 
You've done a great job  Raistmer!