Another One Bites The Dust...... #$%$^#$&&$

[Fire$torm]

The HDD in my Dell Inspiron 2200 took a nose dive today. Not a good week for my Mini micro farm..... I think I'm gonna cry now. :((

[Maxwell]

Ugh... I hate that. Good luck getting up and running again!

[DrPop]

Dude...must be some crazy vibes goin' on in the Midwest these days, eh? ;)

WAIT a sec! Is that an older notebook style? Like EIDE? I may have a HDD for you ... PM me please!

[joker]

How ironic. We were just talking about DELL HHDs over in the Im Pissed thread.

Does it use standard HHDs?

[Maxwell]

Not nearly so bad, but today I learned that you shouldn't kick the power button on your UPS with your foot...

[joker]

Why did I have this strange vision of you before you kicked it saying (in your best Dolph Lundgren voice) I must break you. =))

[Fire$torm]

Not nearly so bad, but today I learned that you shouldn't kick the power button on your UPS with your foot...

LOL Maxwell. That reminds me.... quick story here.

Jack Daniel the founder of the whiskey company by the same name tries to open his safe one day. When he repeatedly fails to open it Mr. Daniel gets angry and kicks the safe whereby he breaks his foot. Mr. Daniel dies some days later due to complications stemming from the broken foot.

@joker & DrPop: Yeppers, its a standard 2.5" 5400 RPM ide drive. But I might have a solution. I am going to attempt a USB install of Dotsch_UX and run the lappy diskless. Hopefully I can get it to access a partition on my server to store BOINC data and updates.

[Mumps]

LOL Maxwell. That reminds me.... quick story here.

Jack Daniel the founder of the whiskey company by the same name tries to open his safe one day. When he repeatedly fails to open it Mr. Daniel gets angry and kicks the safe whereby he breaks his foot. Mr. Daniel dies some days later due to complications stemming from the broken foot.

@joker & DrPop: Yeppers, its a standard 2.5" 5400 RPM ide drive. But I might have a solution. I am going to attempt a USB install of Dotsch_UX and run the lappy diskless. Hopefully I can get it to access a partition on my server to store BOINC data and updates.
Dotsch does have instructions for doing a PXE boot with persistence up on his website. I also ran for quite a while on USB Keys that I moved between machines. So if you set it up for the USB Key boot, it will save your BOINC data to the USB key.
(That was a fun way to get work for systems that didn't have network access. :))

[Fire$torm]

Dotsch does have instructions for doing a PXE boot with persistence up on his website. I also ran for quite a while on USB Keys that I moved between machines. So if you set it up for the USB Key boot, it will save your BOINC data to the USB key.
(That was a fun way to get work for systems that didn't have network access. :))

Question: Would it be hard to reconfigure Dotsch to save BOINC project data to a shared network partition?

I know I would need to edit fstab.conf but what is the BOINC file(s) that need to be changed?

[Mumps]

Question: Would it be hard to reconfigure Dotsch to save BOINC project data to a shared network partition?

I know I would need to edit fstab.conf but what is the BOINC file(s) that need to be changed?

I've personally never set up a diskless server, so I haven't delved into it that deeply. I'd guess you've got it right with mounting an NFS location from your server on each client. You could easily drop your entire BOINC install folder on that mapped folder and it would be transparent to BOINC. So...

Dotsch installs the BOINC software to /u/home/boinc/BOINC (IIRC)
So if you have a folder on your PXE boot server, say things like
BOINC/host1
BOINC/host2
etc
and have that parent BOINC folder exported, then the fstab could be set to mount
server:/BOINC/hostname to the folder /u/home/boinc/BOINC

That could even be done after the fact. Once you have the client all set up. shut down boinc, rename the BOINC folder out of the way, create a new empty folder to use as the mountpoint, mount it, and copy the set aside BOINC folder to the master server. You can then restart boinc and it should happily run all the executables from the PXE server rather than its' "local drive."

This presumes the start sequence of the system ensures the filesystems mount before boinc is launched, but that's almost guaranteed to be the case. And, now that you have me thinking about it, I may actually test out that "master host server" theory. Just not using a PXE boot host and Dotsch. I've had plenty of reason to want to have a central place with all my boinc logs to be able to compare performance. Historically I just used scp to grab them from each host when I was thinking about it...

And linux experts out there that want to step up to corroborate or decry my theory, please do so.