Edit: It seems other ISP's can also cause the same problem so not just limited to AOL
Yesterday Rom and I spent several hours investigating (using Remote Desktop) a user who was getting server errors
Project encountered internal error: shared memory from SETI@home.
We suspect the problem is caused by AOL, and a workaround is described here:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/aol.php
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In case anyone's interested, here's what we found:
- The scheduler request to setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu was being magically sent to setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu instead;
Since setiweb doesn't have a feeder (hence no shared memory) that's why the error message was sent.
- I tried to attach to the alpha test project (isaac.ssl.berkeley.edu/alpha).
The call to get_project_config.php was being sent to setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu also!
(and since there's no /alpha there, it failed with a "URL is not that of a BOINC project" error.
Furthermore, references to setiboinc or isaac from a web browser
were NOT being changed.
So it looked like something was trapping network connections from
BOINC, and transforming them.
On a hunch, I reinstalled BOINC in C:\Program Files\BOINC2.
Voila! It worked!
Then I renamed C:\Program Files\BOINC to BOINC2 and installing there.
That didn't work. I have no idea why. I deleted BOINC2, did the install again to BOINC2, and it worked.
Initially we thought Norton Personal Firewall was to blame. But disabled it (used MS firewall instead) and same problem. So our current theory is that the AOL software (which traps all network calls, and knows what program they're from) is doing something "special" for BOINC.
I sent an email to AOL support about this, but no reply so far (and I'm not holding my breath).