NotFred Diskless Folding CD/USB - Download the new version!

verbal

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Cob's posts in theheyes recent thread reminded me about folding from a USB stick or bootable CD.

Basically you can boot from a CD or USB stick and automatically start folding in a VERY stripped down OS without a GUI and then monitor that client by typing its IP in the web browser of another machine on the same network.

See here: HardOCP guide to using NotFred's diskless folding CD/USB

Anyone who is thinking of trying this out (whether via a VM or straight from a USB stick or CD) should download (or re-download) the folding CD generator from here.

**Not long ago the url for getting work on Linux machines changed. So a new version of the diskless folding OS was put up yesterday. If you use the old version you can't get work so the folding never starts.**

I'd advise anyone who wants to fold from a USB stick to use the diskless folding CD to create their bootable USB stick rather than getting the USB software directly, but only because I had problems with it. Once you have a USB stick set up you can boot from that and you don't need a CDROM drive or HDD.
 
Hmm. Might give this a try in one of my rigs - it has a 400GB HDD in it and is only used for Folding. If it works good, I may do it to all of my dedicated Folding rigs - will save quite a bit of power not having to run HDDs and GFX cards.
 
I've got it running no problems at the moment. It's also easy to point FahMon to the right place to monitor it because the diskless folding OS can use samba to make the diskless folding PC(s) viewable in Network Neighbourhood.

I've got an E6320 (on loan) @ 3060mhz doing 2151ppd on project 2605 and drawing just 105 watts from the socket.

I'm getting an E4600 soon. It will be interesting to compare the ppd after I have clocked it.
 
The rig I'll be testing it on has been running for a while so I have decent benchmarks for it. I'll run this for a bit and see how it compares and if it's there and there about, I'll stick it on them all.

It may even be better. All of my rigs are running Vista but this stripped down Linux distro will use considerably less resources which may help.
 
If anyone can figure out how to make a couple of them write to a hard drive instead of a USB stick, I'll run it in my VMs and save some RAM and some sanity! ArchLinux keeps client-core-communications-erroring my WUs to death at 100%, which is annoying me quite a lot.
 
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The offical thread can be found here. I'm going to try this tonight, however I was under the impression that it would be better to run 4 SMP clients, the option to run an SMP client per 2/4 cores confuses my slightly, especially if you only setup VMWare to use 2 cores.
 
Mattus said:
If anyone can figure out how to make a couple of them write to a hard drive instead of a USB stick, I'll run it in my VMs and save some RAM and some sanity! ArchLinux keeps client-core-communications-erroring my WUs to death at 100%, which is annoying me quite a lot.
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You may be getting fahcore_a2 work. See my thread. :(
 
I've bunged this on two of my rigs. The E6600 is currently working on a P2605 which is giving approximately 145 ppd more over the P2653s it was doing on Vista (both WUs are worth 1760 points). The Q6600 (@3.5GHz) is currently running two P3062s (1732 points) which are giving approximately 140 ppd less per client than the P2653s it was doing on Vista. At the moment, I'm taking a slight ppd hit running these but I'm running two HDDs and 1 GFX card less (the E6600 rig has onboard GFX) so will be a bit less power. I hope the Q6600 gets some P2605s so I can see if there is any gain on those.

One issue. It works fine booting from the CD but refuses to boot from the USB sticks. I can boot with the external drive and then unplug it and all is well but if the rig reboots for any reason, I have to re-attach the external drive to boot - which is a pain in the butt since I only have one internal drive (on the gaming rig) and one external drive to do the rest.

I've found some cheapo internal CD-ROM drives on a competitor's site (sorry OcUK, you don't sell the cheap bits :p) for £2.53 a pop (inc vat) so I think I'll order a heap of those and burn plenty of boot CDs to plug into the rest of the rigs to keep them running.

Actually, I have another issue - It won't work with my wireless PCI cards (works fine with the wired network bits) so the two rigs in my bedroom can't work as things stand. Is there some sort of switch that will pick up the wireless signal and output it via cat5 to the onboard NICs? (Can you tell I'm a networking noob? :o).

All in all, I'm impressed. At the moment, because I've had to take one of the bedroom rigs through to the computer/entertainment room to get this going, I have 5 PCs in a room measuring approximately 12'x10'. The more I can run with no HDD or GFX, the less heat I will have to endure (it'll help with the leccy bill too). I'm happy to take a slight performance hit if it makes things more comfortable and saves me money (both through he leccy bill, and less components to buy for future additions to the mighty farm).
 
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I'm booting a Macbook Pro off the CD image with a USB hard disk plugged in which it sees but when it comes to writing a checkpoint, the screen says "hard drive image is corrupted, not backing up". Anyone know why?
 
MikeTimbers said:
I'm booting a Macbook Pro off the CD image with a USB hard disk plugged in which it sees but when it comes to writing a checkpoint, the screen says "hard drive image is corrupted, not backing up". Anyone know why?
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Mine does the same. As far as I can find out, it means that the client isn't being backed up and if you have to reboot, it won't start from where it left off - it'll just download and start a new WU.
 
Good to see people testing this out. I'm going to give it a go in VMWare when I get a VT enabled chip on Monday or Tuesday.


If you have any questions then post them in the official thread here. The developer seems to answer them the same day.
 
You can set the client not to try to backup on the folding CD generator page. The default is that it tries to backup every 15 mins. You can just set it to 0.

Stan, I have the USB working (booting) on it's own so you shouldn't need to buy those CDROM drives, just need to figure out why it's not working for you at the mo.
 
Verbal have you tried editing the .cfg in the .iso to see if it can run one SMP client per core?

I've had a look through it and it seems possible, tho I can't try it out for a few days.
 
If I get hold of a USB stick this weekend I'll try it, although the fact I keep getting these horrible WUs no matter what options I stick into the client makes me think I'm setting myself up for a headache. I shall try though.

If anyone is thinking of jotting down a guide rather than linking to that post let it be known and I'll see if SiriusB will kindly add it to the SMP Guide. If you can't be bothered formatting it in HTML no worries just post it I'll do it. :)
 
MikeTimbers said:
I'm booting a Macbook Pro off the CD image with a USB hard disk plugged in which it sees but when it comes to writing a checkpoint, the screen says "hard drive image is corrupted, not backing up". Anyone know why?
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acruxksa said:
Greeting NotFred,

I'm a bit hesitant to have my first post on the forum be a trouble shooting question, especially since you have already done so much to help folding@home, but here it is anyway. I was successfully using your usb key folding image for about a week when the latest update from stanford changed the url. No worries, I just checked back here regularly and you wasted no time getting the changes out. This is where the problem is now though, I'm receiving "Hard drive image is corrupted, not backing up" error on all four of my folding machines. It doesn't seem to affect folding since a all machines are humming along nicely and a couple have successfully completed and returned work, but I'm wondering if you could shed some insight into the situation.

Thanks for your hard work!!!
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notfred said:
Hmm, you should only see that error message if you are running under VMWare. It's because I was in the middle of getting the VMWare folding appliance out when Stanford changed the URL. I wouldn't worry about it for now.
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Saw that earlier but thanks anyway. useful for anyone else trying it.

this build certainly shows how inefficient some OSes are. The macbook is running leopard and was doing a 2653 with 17min frame times but is now doing them in 15 minutes.
 
I'm getting the following problem whilst trying to set this up on a VMWare Server. The USB drive I have is being detected correctly, and I've downloaded the iso a couple of times just in case it was something I did....

corrupt.png


Any ideas? :)
 
That's exactly what I'm getting. Are your cores in use when it gets to that point? I'm running VM too. I'm going to do some more reading after the football.
 
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