Machine ID's

[FEAR6655]

A forum search shed some light on this but I'm still out in the open. I'm planning on asking my school if it is at all possible to run F@H SMP on the L1 computer lab PC's (32x 1.8GHz Pentium Dual Cores). Since the client only allows up to 16 Machine IDs, and I'm already running 3 at my home, how do I accomodate the other 19 PC's?

Also any help on me thinking up a damn good reason for the school to do this would be greatly appreciated, I know I'm gonna need it!

[John Naylor]

Machine IDs only count internally within each machine. You can have up to 16 clients on one machine... you would need clients numbered 1 and 2 on each of those dual cores...

[314159]

Oops,

If FEAR plans on running the SMP client, then he would only need one client I.D. per dual core machine. Right?

If he was planning to run two uniprocessor clients per machine, then I.D.'s #1 and #2 (or any two different ones) would be necessary.

I would just use client I.D. 1 on each of the dual core boxes if I were you AND the SMP client was your choice..

Cheers,

John

[Tigerbiten]

Stanford records three things from each client.
User Name and team number, so Stanfords knows where the points go, plus the clientID, so Stanford knows where it sent the work-unit.
A clientsID is made up from two parts.
The UserID, which is downloaded from stanford, and the MachinedID, that you set.
As long as the combination of the two ID's is unique then you have no problems.

If your going to install all the clients by hand then each one will download an unique UserID from stanford, so you'll have no problems.
If your going to clone an drive image to install all the clients that way, then you must do it before the client downloads a UserID.
Otherwise you need to go around removing the UserID from 19 of the 20 images after it has been installed so that they can download a unique one.

Luck ............

[FEAR6655]

Sorry guys, I still don't fully understand. So you're saying each of the 32 machines don't need a unique machine ID? I plan on installing each client by hand. If what I gather from these posts, they can all have the same machine ID???

Also, school runs a fairly locked down domain login system (each student has their own domain login). To install the client I would need an Admin account for the PC's (this could be difficult to obtain), and if I install it as a service, it will run at startup, whether or not someone is logged in and without any visible sign of it?

If anyone with experience installing the client in a corporate environment has any advice on the necessary changes to the system (firewall exceptions etc), that would be very helpful, as I need to know everything about installation and running of this software before I have a chance of a go-ahead.

[Tigerbiten]

Sorry guys, I still don't fully understand. So you're saying each of the 32 machines don't need a unique machine ID? I plan on installing each client by hand. If what I gather from these posts, they can all have the same machine ID???.

A clientsID is made up of two parts.
The first part is UserID that is downloaded from Stanford. Each computer will download its own unique UserID.
The second part is the MachineID that you set.
Its the combination of the two that needs to be unique.

If you run multiple clients on a single computer then each client needs a different MachineID as they will all use the same UserID.
If you run single clients on multiple computers then each client can have the same MachineID as they all have different UserID's.

Luck ..........

[bruce]

Sorry guys, I still don't fully understand. So you're saying each of the 32 machines don't need a unique machine ID? I plan on installing each client by hand. If what I gather from these posts, they can all have the same machine ID???

Let me try it from a slightly different perspective.

Stanford will automatically assign a unique ID to every machine. (It's called a "UserID" not to be confused with a "UserName") SInce you'll be running one SMP client on each machine, they'll all have unique identifiers without any action on your part.

If you choose to run more than one client on a single machine, then you would need to make sure that those clients have different MachineIDs.

The SMP client is a single client that can use as many as four CPUs. Instead of running that client, you COULD choose to run two copies of the classic CPU (uniprocessor) client or perhaps a GPU client and a CPU client or whatever and then you would change the MachineID to make the second one unique.

[FEAR6655]

If you choose to run more than one client on a single machine, then you would need to make sure that those clients have different MachineIDs.

Because in that case the UserID is the same as its the same computer, gotcha.

So since I'm already using 1, 2 and 3, I could just set each PC to 4 when it asks for a machine ID, and Stanford will take care of the rest of the ID stuff? Sorry if I seem like an idiot.

[bruce]

MachineID is an identifier for the client software on a specific machine. This is one possiblity when running four clients on three machines:

Computer #1 has a UserID of 28E18A3C25D1B22B. It has one client with MachineID = 1
Computer #2 has a UserID of 17F68092A884D21C. It has one client with MachineID = 1
Computer #3 has a UserID of 775320ACD46B17F6, It has two client with MachineID = 1 and MachineID = 2

There's no reason to worry about the value of machineID UNLESS you have two or more clients on the SAME computer. You only need 16 values for MachineID if you have a computer so powerful that you can run 16 clients ON THE SAME COMPUTER. For Machine #3 there's nothing magic about MachineID 1 and 2 except that 1 is the default and using 2 for the other client helps keep things straight in my head.

[7im]

http://fahwiki.net/index.php?title=MachineID