UK BOINC Team Forum

There is a bug in the latest boinc under windows, a task that has a stalled upload can prevent all other projects being updated on completion, the other projects upload ok but are then prevented from reporting completion and hence will not download new work. Also manual commands to update projects are ignored. Restarting the boinc-client temporarily clears the log jam but while the upload is stalled it will happen again. Resetting the project with the stalled upload works but will lose credits from the relevant project and might need one more restart cycle.

I suspect the timed cycle for attempting to re-upload the stalled task is halting the updates, although to prove that would take days of faffing around and you need a task that has a stalled upload (goofygrid was the one in my case but denis and ithena are projects that also commonly end up in that state but all of them, are intermittent projects).

It might be a unique set of circumstances, goofygrid was still responding but doing so incorrectly (no start flag), if a server is simply down then it might not occur as that may have proper timeout handling. For the moment I've disabled goofygrid on Windows but the problem is most probably not limited to goofygrid.

I've not reported this bug, I spent about 5 hours getting as far as I did, luckily having three computers exhibiting the problem saved (or wasted?) a lot of time, I don't want to spend more time on diagnostics and I don't understand enough about boinc or windows to understand any interrogation on github.

The problem does not occur on Linux where I am much more comfortable debugging.

Hi

I would have no idea where to start with Linux, tried a few times over the years but never got the hang of it - probably age related!

I'm so bad at it, that this version asks for 'Docker' to be installed - can't do it! So I'll wait for the next version of BOINC for an autoinstall. I've not come across any projects that call for Docker, so I'm not too bothered.

Doesn't help you but I got a minor rant out of the system!

Mike

I was a qualified Unix system administrator many years ago but that was mostly about the multi-user and network side of things, before that I spent many years playing with CP/M which got me used to command line usage and I also became an unwilling wizard at DOS batch files when PC's came out.

However I have tried Ubuntu a few times in the years since and totally gave up each time. Its only buying a Raspberry Pi' which basically uses Debian that I found myself more comfortable and not looked back, my main desktop computer is a Raspberry Pi5, all my other computers are controlled from there.

However I have got a little Trigkey N100 Windows mini-PC which is earmarked for being a secondary Windows computer when I get round to transferring everything from an ancient Core 2 Duo which was my previous Windows computer.

Linux is a slight learning curve, there always a bit of techy stuff needed, Windows is great when it works, when it goes wrong it is a total pain. Windows updates take forever, I can update all eight of my Linux computers in less than 5 minutes sequentially however a version update is much harder, its normally best to install from scratch.

I can install and fully update Linux on a Raspberry Pi4 or PI5 in around an hour including putting all my stuff back on, I allow half a day to do that with Windows and have often overrun.

Both have their benefits, both have their frustrations, I just find Linux more visible when trying to fix things.

I have intentionally ignored Docker/Podman to date, old dog, new tricks etc, didn't need it, really p*ssed off that Boinc is foisting it on me. In the long run it will make Boinc easier but at the expense of making the clients more complicated. But Podman is working well with the current sprint on Windows, I have absolutely no idea if the Linux machines are actually using Podman or not. I'm also a bit annoyed that the Boinc Podman install doesn't mention it installs Alpine Linux, I didn't get an option to change it to Debian and daren't play around with it while it appears to be working.

The Boinc instructions for installing Podman were incorrect in a few places, I had to engage brain and rely on google.