Folding Forum

@ChristianVirtual has this iOS App on AppStore which is supposed to allow remote monitoring of my FAH machines on my home LAN via my iPhone, just like I am able to do with HFM.NET from one PC. Since HFM works flawlessly, and the setup on the FAHMM looks very similar (hostname+port+password), I expected for it to be a breeze to set up, but neither the "Discover Clients" option discovered anything nor my entering my clients individually into the app resulted in me being able to remotely monitor my machines while the clients & iPhone are on the same home LAN. Again, things work on all clients and HFM can monitor them all remotely from one PC, but trying to do the same from my iPhone using FAHMM isn't happening. Given the app has not been updated for about 2 years on AppStore and given the many "it doesn't work" comments in addition to very few "works easily" comments, I stand confused... Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Tuna

Indeed, I did get it working just fine.

You need to restart the computers hosting the clients you have added, after adding whitelist IP or password and IP.

You can use for example 192.168.1.0/24 to open access for all IP ranges inside your LAN, so the field would look like:

127.0.0.1 192.168.1.0/24

and then restart each client machine and make sure the "is active" toggle is flipped in the settings of the iOS app for each client.

I have a thread with screenshots up ill try to find it.

The creator of the app is here on the forums, the name of the thread is like "Folding for ipad" or something

EDIT:

Heres my thread linking to the original thread as well

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=33475

treckin wrote:...after adding whitelist IP or password and IP.

This helped! Thanks. Since the Settings item in the iOS app said "Hostname/IP" (in addition to Clientname/Port/Password), I had entered the hostnames, not IPs, expecting FAHMM to discover the IPs via some sort of an internal "ping -4 HOSTNAME". Entering the current IP addresses of my hosts worked. The problem is, my home LAN is behind a Netgear Orbi router that manages the IP addresses via DHCP. And, assigning reserved IP addresses for devices on the network is a pain for Orbi (empirically speaking, it involves adding the IP to a table on the router, shutting down the device, rebooting the Orbi, which then results in 15 minutes of network settling down across the router and switches and satellites, then rebooting the device itself, for each host, and I have 6 such hosts).

So, if Christian is watching this thread, fixing that might be a good thing. I wonder if people running into "this app is not working at all" issue on the AppStore are simply running into the same issue.

Tuna

Once I got all hosts on FAHMM, using hardcoded IP addresses instead of their LAN hostnames, two things that jumped out as "problems," in case Christian is looking:

1) Tapping the camera icon for an active slot results in immediate app shutdown.

2) "Donor Statistics not yet update" has been there for a while. I am guessing this is due to the Bad Gateway we get frequently against the overloaded FAH servers. If so, no problem. If not, there might be a bug lurking in there.

Tuna

Re: network config

Yes you can set static IPs for all your devices, however modern DHCP routers shouldnt be changing your assigned IP addresses willy nilly, and modifying your DHCP configuration so that you can monitor F@H clients seems like overkill.

I recommend whitelisting the 192.168.1.0/24 domain as I indicated, as this will allow access to/from all clients to/from all F@H Control instances within the subnet, with or without a password.

That way, you do not necessarily need to manage IP address assignments on a device-by-device basis.

Obviously, your LAN may use 192.168.1.1 or .50.1 or .10.1 etc depending on your network setup

I've got it working well on both my iPhone and iPad. And I also whitelisted my internal domain. Interestingly, the protein viewer works in this app, unlike the known bug in the Windows FAH client viewer that leaves it stuck in demo mode. The only issue I've had is an annoying one, not a critical operational bug. I have two computers currently folding and configured in FAHMM. When I first open the app, it will bring up the first configured computer fine, but for some reason the second computer always seems to be deactivated in FAHMM, even though the computer is folding at the time. I have to keep going back into setup to activate the second computer. Even so, it often takes me several times trying to activate the second computer before the setting "takes" and then both machines are correctly displayed. Other than that, it's a pretty handy app for remote client monitoring.

Tuna_Ertemalp wrote:Once I got all hosts on FAHMM, using hardcoded IP addresses instead of their LAN hostnames, two things that jumped out as "problems," in case Christian is looking:

1) Tapping the camera icon for an active slot results in immediate app shutdown.

2) "Donor Statistics not yet update" has been there for a while. I am guessing this is due to the Bad Gateway we get frequently against the overloaded FAH servers. If so, no problem. If not, there might be a bug lurking in there.

Tuna

3) The Circle Diagram is AWESOME!... Except: with 14 slots I have, the inner circles get such a pale white-ish tone of yellow that they are practically invisible both on my latest iPhone and old old iPad. On iPhone, I have to bring the screen brightness down to a minimum to see those circles. Plus, the text in the circles seems rendered in the background color which becomes invisible as the circles get lighter. It'd be wonderful if the user could select a starting and ending color for the gradient change, maybe even the text color.

Tuna

treckin wrote: I recommend whitelisting the 192.168.1.0/24 domain as I indicated, as this will allow access to/from all clients to/from all F@H Control instances within the subnet, with or without a password.

Of course! That's the way every single host of mine is set up like in the desktop FAHcontrol app. On each and every host. No problem there. This way any HFM.NET on any client and any FAHMM on any iOS device can watch/control any client.

I was talking about the need to use the actual IP addresses of those clients instead of their hostnames while entering my 6 clients into the FAHMM iOS app even though that field under "Setup / Basic Settings / Edit / +" is named "Hostname/IP".

Tuna

Yeah I didn’t have any luck using device discovery (which the website for the app says will use Bonjour or rDNS to identify F@H clients inside the LAN.

I have not had it running long enough to see what happened when DHCP leases expire for clients on my network, I guess I’ll find out lol.

Thanks for your interesst in that app. Haven’t touched it for a while. First: the discovery was a kind of experiment and proof of concept but never made it into consideration of the official FAH stack. No direct scientific benefit. UX is not a high enough priority. I might should remove or hide that to avoid confusion. if one is really geeky it could be setup manually but defeat somehow the purpose.

static IPs for the folding hosts works best.

Was myself inactive for the last two years F@H and recently reinstalled a CPU system, but didn’t got any work. Even after a day idle. Basically I can’t test right now. No GPU Right now at hand. Will try again soon.

Tuna_Ertemalp wrote:<snip>

3) The Circle Diagram is AWESOME!... Except: with 14 slots I have, the inner circles get such a pale white-ish tone of yellow that they are practically invisible both on my latest iPhone and old old iPad. On iPhone, I have to bring the screen brightness down to a minimum to see those circles. Plus, the text in the circles seems rendered in the background color which becomes invisible as the circles get lighter. It'd be wonderful if the user could select a starting and ending color for the gradient change, maybe even the text color.

Tuna

Thanks

The intention was to only focus on the outer rings ; those are the one finishing next. The inner rings are faded away as they are there and running but results will take a while. Like looking in a tube.

ChristianVirtual wrote:Thanks for your interesst in that app. Haven’t touched it for a while. First: the discovery was a kind of experiment and proof of concept but never made it into consideration of the official FAH stack. No direct scientific benefit. UX is not a high enough priority. I might should remove or hide that to avoid confusion. if one is really geeky it could be setup manually but defeat somehow the purpose.

static IPs for the folding hosts works best.

Was myself inactive for the last two years F@H and recently reinstalled a CPU system, but didn’t got any work. Even after a day idle. Basically I can’t test right now. No GPU Right now at hand. Will try again soon.

Thanks for your work on this. Its a nice app for monitoring and your work is appreciated. If you ever get a chance to do an update, know that it will be well received, at least by me!

ChristianVirtual wrote:<snip>The intention was to only focus on the outer rings ; those are the one finishing next. The inner rings are faded away as they are there and running but results will take a while. Like looking in a tube.

Understand... I hope you would still be open to adding some color picker option, if you had the time and inclination. Given that I have 14 slots, and I might bring a few other machines online that are currently collecting dust if I can find a circuit or two in the garage that are not already used, adding another 5-10 slots, I am using the circle diagram more or less as a "utilization diagram", i.e. how many N of my X slots are in use. Heck, another option that would be nice to have is to choose between displaying all slots always even if they are idle vs. displaying only the slots that are doing some work (like it seems to be today); having a constant number of rings in visible colors would make my eyes to develop the muscle memory to grasp the overall utilization easier. #firstWorldProblems LOL

Thank again!
Tuna

ChristianVirtual wrote:Thanks for your interesst in that app. Haven’t touched it for a while. First: the discovery was a kind of experiment and proof of concept but never made it into consideration of the official FAH stack. No direct scientific benefit. UX is not a high enough priority. I might should remove or hide that to avoid confusion. if one is really geeky it could be setup manually but defeat somehow the purpose.

static IPs for the folding hosts works best.

Was myself inactive for the last two years F@H and recently reinstalled a CPU system, but didn’t got any work. Even after a day idle. Basically I can’t test right now. No GPU Right now at hand. Will try again soon.

I must say, for a 2 year old app that hasn't been touched since and wasn't intended for the masses, through iterations of iDevices and iOSes, it has held up incredibly well! Kudos!

That said: HOSTNAME-->IP would be awesome. Maybe a help page in-app or on web describing all the different parts of the individual slot info panes under Workunits tab would be very nice. Fixing some of the crashes, always when clicking the camera icon, or sometimes when switching to the app while it has been in the background, or sometimes scrolling to the bottom of the Workunits page, would be useful, too.

And, I am still seeing "Donor statistics not yet updated" even though the "Bad Gateway" on FAH website seems to have been resolved. And, I didn't see any place under Preferences to enter my FAH User details, except for the Donor Credits switch, which I turned ON.

And removing the discovery would probably be for the best.

Sorry that this app all of a sudden became something more than you ever intended it to be, with the virus + surge of users on FAH + increased use of speedier iPhone/iPad among the rest of us over the last two years... LOL! Good luck! Enjoy the newfound fame & glory...

Tuna

treckin wrote:I have not had it running long enough to see what happened when DHCP leases expire for clients on my network, I guess I’ll find out lol.

Oh, all that'll happen is that the host will become inactive, as if you have turned it off, or it crashed and stayed off, until you update the IP and set it back to ACTIVE. A few of my hosts ended up staying off after some update or power glitch or network hiccup, and that is what happened. FAHMM seems to immediately put the host into INACTIVE mode once it fails to find it. Of course, it'd be nice if it retried pinging the host to see if it became alive afterwards, instead of marking it inactive until the user re-activated it.

Tuna