Active clients

[billford]

Just curious...

On an individual's stats page (eg mine) it shows the number of active clients over the last 50 and 7 days, interesting as it gives an idea how much hardware is being thrown at the project.

But if I have 2 (or more) identical machines behind a router using NAT (so they all have the same WAN-side IP), with clients using identical usernames and passkeys, how does it work it out?

One possible answer of course is that it can't, but I don't have two identical machines to test this hypothesis!

[P5-133XL]

Each v7 client has a unique number associated with the install. Beyond that, each slot is counted as an active client to make it consistent with v6 where the GPU, SMP, and uniprocessor clients were separate.

[billford]

That answers my question very satisfactorily, thank you

[Napoleon]

The client creates a unique ID based on the HW/SW setup when it is run for the first time on a particular setup. Therefore, using disk cloning to create identical folding setups can actually mess things up and isn't recommended. Also, if you really run multiple clients (multiple FAH Data directories in client v7) on a single setup, you should set them to suitably different machine-id values (among other things), see https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... nformation. IIRC, the machine-id defaults to value 0 and is part of the unique client/slot ID.

There's hardly ever any need to tamper with the default machine-id setting in client v7, since you can set up multiple slots (CPU & GPU) within a single client, but it used to be "business as usual" when folding with separate v6 CPU & GPU clients on a single setup.

[billford]

Thanks for that, but I'm happy to let the client sort itself out at installation- it's got a better idea what it's doing than I have!


edit- I've never had the need to use cloning, but I have used a backup on occasion to perform a similar operation. As far as possible I avoid doing this with applications, I re-install them as too many create a signature based on the (sometimes individual) hardware config and it has caused me problems in the past when I just used "restore" to a different machine.

[7im]

...

One possible answer of course is that it can't, but I don't have two identical machines to test this hypothesis!

Why would you assume one of the longest running and most powerful distributed computing projects hadn't already sorted this out many years ago?

[bruce]

The client creates a unique ID based on the HW/SW setup when it is run for the first time on a particular setup. Therefore, using disk cloning to create identical folding setups can actually mess things up and isn't recommended. Also, if you really run multiple clients (multiple FAH Data directories in client v7) on a single setup, you should set them to suitably different machine-id values (among other things), see https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... nformation. IIRC, the machine-id defaults to value 0 and is part of the unique client/slot ID.

There's hardly ever any need to tamper with the default machine-id setting in client v7, since you can set up multiple slots (CPU & GPU) within a single client, but it used to be "business as usual" when folding with separate v6 CPU & GPU clients on a single setup.

This was true for V6 where the number for the individual installation is shared through the Windows Registry but this is "fixed" in V7. In Windows V7 or in non-WIndows installations, there is no need to worry about this since each separate installation is independent of each other one. In fact, multiple installations on the same computer is rare (and is discouraged) since multiple slots serve the same function -- hence there's no need for us to talk about it.

[billford]

Why would you assume one of the longest running and most powerful distributed computing projects hadn't already sorted this out many years ago?

I didn't assume- I asked.