PSA - DIMES is something everyone can run, no impact on other DC'ing

bigted said:
well linux has the benefit of not having to buy/worry about licensing XP.

musky seems to be using centos, i'm sure there will be instructions to follow :)
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I actually have a 250 unit VLK for XP that collects dust, I got it after a company moved to windows 7... but by then, I had moved a year before... :(
 
They don't use much bandwidth since it is mostly just pings and trace routes. It really depends on what flavor of Linux you can get it running on. For simplicity, I would just do a bunch of XP VM's and give them minimal RAM. I think ~190MB will run it for this purpose ok. Maybe give them 256MB. You should also assign the first VM more ram for speeding up the process and then lower it after. I also don't know if you should install DIMES after cloning the VM or if it matters. YMMV
 
Gilthanis said:
They don't use much bandwidth since it is mostly just pings and trace routes. It really depends on what flavor of Linux you can get it running on. For simplicity, I would just do a bunch of XP VM's and give them minimal RAM. I think ~190MB will run it for this purpose ok. Maybe give them 256MB. You should also assign the first VM more ram for speeding up the process and then lower it after. I also don't know if you should install DIMES after cloning the VM or if it matters. YMMV
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That was my concern... Anyone know if these DIME installs have fingerprints or machine_IDs I need to worry about?
 
That is what I was referring to when mentioning not knowing if you need to setup DIMES after because they do register each machine so that you can track its production. So, I would recommend manually installing each DIMES client after cloning the VM. Unless someone else has already experimented and had positive results...
 
We moved up to 17th Place. Good job guys. And I see bigted has opened the flood gates. :)
 
He is way too lazy to fully install.

I have been cloning VMs set up right to the point where I am ready to install the agent. Clone, start, change network name, restart, and set up agent. I assume bigted is doing something similar.
 
musky said:
He is way too lazy to fully install.

I have been cloning VMs set up right to the point where I am ready to install the agent. Clone, start, change network name, restart, and set up agent. I assume bigted is doing something similar.
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precisely, installed win7, installed java, dled 0.5.5.4 to desktop.

clone, changed vm name reboot install/configure client.

have around 20 vms total now, just cloning in the spare time and such.
 
hmmm...I will stick with XP then. I have been only assigning 256MB to it and could possibly get it to less, but don't want to make the VM too sluggish for when I need to shut them down. :)
 
welp, win7 vm seems fine with 384, i probably wouldn't go any lower, memory usage on startup was as high as 370mb, now just sitting at the desktop with DIMES running it's at 280mb usage. i did change theme to be the basic theme and did not install the VBox guest additions.
 
Gilthanis said:
hmmm...I will stick with XP then. I have been only assigning 256MB to it and could possibly get it to less, but don't want to make the VM too sluggish for when I need to shut them down. :)
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i've found the big time limiting factor with having tons of VBox vms on one machine is the hard drive speed. my work laptop doesn't like having more than 2 vms open even if they are minimized and idle.
 
256mb no bueno on win7 vm, recommend 384 if anyone is going that route

1.25gb ram for 3 machines ain't bad :)
 
Yeah...I put my VM's on a separate hard drive from the OS. Usually one that was pulled from a dead system. However, right now they are usually tossed on a laptop drive that had bad sectors. I went that route to limit heat and power consumption. My dual core laptop runs 4 VM's but is very sluggish. However, I don't use that laptop for anything else. My i7 runs up to 5 at times, but I have it pegged with BOINC work. My Q8200 has a SSD but I don't put the VM's on it. It runs 4 just fine and is running them on a laptop hard drive as well. When I get around to building my home file server, I may tinker with putting VM's on multiple drives and see how well they perform.
 
We should overtake Team Short-Media today for 16th place. 15th place should come quickly, but from there we have a waiting period. Good job guys.
 
The team just got 100,000,000 points yesterday, congrats guys!
 
We took 16th place. Now to start up my VM's again...I got one computer that is beginning to BSOD.
 
I think it might be one of the projects that it was attached to, but since it has a known motherboard issue to begin with, I wont know for sure until I suspend that project and do some more testing.
 
It appears that we have awoken a few teams over at DIMES. Unless of course it ends up being them having stats issues again.
 
I'm crossing my fingers! Hopefully we can awaken more people at 33.
 
I can see that. Maybe I need to fire up a few dual cores to make into just VM boxes for DIMES... :)
 
That stats site for this is truly horrible - I really can't tell what is going on other than bigted adding a couple dozen VM's this weekend. I'm actually out of network/internet capacity I believe - I had to shut down a few vm's so I could use the internet...
 
Lol, and the commandos thank you for sacrificing your internet for the greater good.
 
musky said:
That stats site for this is truly horrible.
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i've noticed it will basically revert an update and have old stats, but will eventually update to proper stats. what's really weird is when it reports everyone that has no points for the day as having 10% of the day's points.
 
bigted said:
i've noticed it will basically revert an update and have old stats, but will eventually update to proper stats. what's really weird is when it reports everyone that has no points for the day as having 10% of the day's points.
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Tha 0 points thing is normal for DC stats, at the midnight update it shows everybody as 0 till the next update, during that time period it list the Todays Breakdown (Top 10) alphabetically. DC stats does that on all of the projects it reports on including F@H ;)
 
Looks like Grandpa has been pretty busy as well...
 
Unfortunately, around half my vm's are out of service due to a failed ssd this morning. I don't know when I'll get around to fixing it, if I do at all.
 
final tally for my DIMES system:

ESXi 5.5
16gb ram
250gb hdd
3820 OCd to 4.75ghz

69 WinXP vms, 192mb ram each with 3gb hdd thin allocation.

had to mod my DSL modem, put a 120mm fan blowing on it to handle all the heat the blinking LED puts out :D
 
Those are some good numbers to know. Is that a standard HDD or is it SSD?
 
Gilthanis said:
Those are some good numbers to know. Is that a standard HDD or is it SSD?
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standard spinny hdd, western digital i believe. 45.96 gb free as reported by vSphere Client

also using 15288mb out of 16326. some might see that as not enough free ram, but i like to live on the edge.
 
Stick a thumb drive or memory card in it for Ready Boost.... ;) Then again, I don't know much about the ESXi setups...
 
Thanks for the numbers, that's good to know.
Interesting that DIMES, when farmed like that, does stress the net connection, certainly more than I expected from what I know of it.
 
Gilthanis said:
Stick a thumb drive or memory card in it for Ready Boost.... ;) Then again, I don't know much about the ESXi setups...
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ESXi is the OS installed to the bare metal. you then manage it from another PC with the vsphere software.
 
CaptainUnlikely said:
Thanks for the numbers, that's good to know.
Interesting that DIMES, when farmed like that, does stress the net connection, certainly more than I expected from what I know of it.
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musky noticed his net slow down, i didn't notice any slowdown.

i am connected to my PC at home on RDP and i'm seeing solid 15-20 KB/s upload. a good (half?) portion of that probably due to my RDP connection. i can get a more accurate number when i get home and there are no other PCs communicating with the net.
 
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