Newbie questions related faclient access and fahcontrol

[JL_678]

I just installed FAH last night on a headless Ubuntu LXC container, and I am underwhelmed with the client -- it seems very unstable with Chrome. While the client seems to be working, the config process was confusing and not that well documented which was frustrating. Here are some questions for the experts here:

1. You need to enable web access for the client via IP address. FAH is inside my LAN and so I would like to provide a wildcard to allow any local host to view it. Is there a way to do this? Maybe a subnet mask or something?

2. I use a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager) to access hosts with simple URLS like host.int.123.com as opposed to <ip address>:<portnumer>. I cannot seem to get NPM working as the FAH GUI just seems to spin forever. Has anyone got this working?

3. I saw that some people suggest that I should use fahcontrol. I tried to install that on my Ubuntu 22.04 system using the official eeb file, but it throws Python related dependency errors and fails (listed below). Does anyone else see this and have a workaround?

Thank you in advance!

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fahcontrol:
fahcontrol depends on python; however:
Package python is not installed.
fahcontrol depends on python-support (>= 0.90.0); however:
Package python-support is not installed.
fahcontrol depends on python-gnome2; however:
Package python-gnome2 is not installed.

[Knish]

Hello, i'm not exactly an expert here, but on my debian system I think this ( https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-control/pull/70 ) is what I used to get a working FAHControl going. There are some posts down that thread that describe what the commands for ubuntu are.
Sorry I can't help with your other questions

[JL_678]

Thank you. After reviewing this, it seems that fahcontrol relies on python2, and I cannot get it work as it ahs been deprecated from Ubuntu 22.04. Since this is a VM, it is easy to rebuild the system with Debian and so I will try that.

[Joe_H]

Hello, i'm not exactly an expert here, but on my debian system I think this ( https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-control/pull/70 ) is what I used to get a working FAHControl going. There are some posts down that thread that describe what the commands for ubuntu are.
Sorry I can't help with your other questions

That leads to this version of FAHControl updated to use Python 3 - https://github.com/cdberkstresser/fah-control. It was never released as part of the download from the F@h servers, but FAHControl is open source. They did need to change a module for Python 3.1 when a command was removed from the language that was there in 3.

As for the first question, the web control was really only meant for local control on the system the client was installed on. I do recall coming across mention of a tutorial being posted on Linus Tech Tips about how to set the network addresses in the client to allow additional access from other systems. There is a limited web server built into FAHClient to handle the web control access.

As for proxy settings I can't help there. The client was always only encoded to handle simple proxies.

Official development on the v7 client did end with the 7.6.21 release. They are working on getting out the v8 client in the near future.

[JL_678]

Goodness, I hope so. This version is a complete nightmare, and I still cannot get it to work.

I really appreciate the efforts here, but I feel like I am expending way too much time on something that should not be this difficult. Will v8 fix all this stuff?

[Joe_H]

Goodness, I hope so. This version is a complete nightmare, and I still cannot get it to work.

I really appreciate the efforts here, but I feel like I am expending way too much time on something that should not be this difficult. Will v8 fix all this stuff?

Will it fix it all? That I don't know. But it is being programmed to be compatible with current releases of the various OSs, and finally will complete the transition to open source that was started in 2018-9. COVID interrupted that as the single paid developer was tasked with getting the servers set up to handle the huge increase in participation during the first year of COVID. v7.6.21 was the older code from ~2017 patched up to fix some bugs and add the COVID and high priority preferences. On the Linux side its codebase and installer was released originally with compatibility to Linux distros current then such as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 18.04 LTS was actually released a short time after v7.5.1.

From what I gather, v7.5.1 was originally intended to be the last update to the v7 code. it was released partly to update code sections related to server connections, F@h was moving at the time from being based out of Dr. Pande's Stanford lab. He had taken a job in the private field and that lab was closing down as his grad students and post-docs completed their work. The developer was also given the task of moving some of the servers to cloud services, then converting the code to open source.

If it helps, I have come across mention of there being a Snap package of the F@h software. It may take care of various dependencies, I have not used it myself.

[JL_678]

Thank you for the suggestion! The challenge for me is that the bulk of my available computing resources are on headless Linux servers and so local GUIs do not work for me. The Snap that you mentioned is really focused on the local GUI use case.

My ideal solution is to have a local client and a web-based management interface. It appears that this use case is less common which is probably why I am having these issues. I know that the current implementation has a basic interface, but it is very limited.

v8 seems to be more aligned with this use case, and I would love test it out. However, it seems that it is not available to the public.

[Joe_H]

One other option, do you have a Mac or PC running macOS or Windows that you can use? You can install just the FAHControl portion of the F@h app and use that to remotely manage the headless systems. You just need to add the appropriate network settings and optional password to the config.xml file on the various systems involved.

[JL_678]

I like that idea of using a separate client on Mac/Windows. I will go explore that option which I wait for v8. Thank you, Joe_H!

[calxalot]

See also viewtopic.php?t=39003
Wherein the OP is using the open beta 8.1.11.

[ETA_2025]

1. You need to enable web access for the client via IP address. FAH is inside my LAN and so I would like to provide a wildcard to allow any local host to view it. Is there a way to do this? Maybe a subnet mask or something?

Network range format is 192.168.0.0-192.168.0.255 or 192.168.0.0/24.

2. I use a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager) to access hosts with simple URLS like host.int.123.com as opposed to <ip address>:<portnumer>. I cannot seem to get NPM working as the FAH GUI just seems to spin forever. Has anyone got this working?

Forget about web control. Just use Fah Control. It great for monitoring and managing (configure) remote clients.

3. Package python is not installed.
Package python-support is not installed.
Package python-gnome2 is not installed.

I'm guessing you need to install python. Duckduckgo (or goggle) search for information about installing python on Ubuntu.

I like that idea of using a separate client on Mac/Windows. I will go explore that option which I wait for v8. Thank you, Joe_H!

I'm running 10 headless Pi's via my PC. I used https://linustechtips.com/topic/1094810 ... -tutorial/ as a guide.

Also check out https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/i ... ux/?lng=en for information about setting up FAH on Linux, including installing FAH, and dealing with dependency issue with Python. Especially useful for file directory information. Note, the installation files are outdated. Current files are at https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/?lng=en.

Finally, check out Incorrect Slot Options in viewtopic.php?p=327416&f=24#p327416 for many uncommon configure options that might be useful in your situation.

There's also HFM-NET, which allows you to monitor you remote clients. But you can't configure them using this app. https://github.com/harlam357/hfm-net

I hope this helps solves your various issues.

[Roan]

Hey!

2. I use a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager) to access hosts with simple URLS like host.int.123.com as opposed to <ip address>:<portnumer>. I cannot seem to get NPM working as the FAH GUI just seems to spin forever. Has anyone got this working?

Did you ever get this working? My webpage is also continuously reloading
I'm also running the client on a remote linux server and am running a reverse proxy (caddy) to get access to the webpage.

[jloflin]

v8 seems to be more aligned with this use case, and I would love test it out. However, it seems that it is not available to the public.

https://foldingathome.org/beta/?lng=en