I dont how some of you guys manage some of those rigs you have. It is a full time effort. I have three days away from home and one machine crashes with two classic clients on, my VM Ware notfred fails to get new work and the fans in my antec 300 starts to wail it keeps her indoors awake. aahhhh.
It is hard work but it's worth it. I spend half my day fiddling with my rigs (but whilst I'm being paid for my time at work)
In a former life as a folder I had a farm of 10 3800+s running under SuSe10 in the early days of the SMP client and not a day went by without I had to "fix" a machine. However I haven't had to do a thing for the 12 GPU clients or 3 Windoze SMP clients I run since I restarted a few months ago. But then I don't use any of the more exotic VM stuff.
i must admit that i chuckled when i read saspro's post,but it sounds like we all have perverted minds here,maybe its a side affect of all these years of folding. regarding full time job,absolutely is,i try to check all my rigs at the weekend but it usually doesnt work out that way. cheers spunky
At the beginning I used to get all sorts of problems and if you look back theres lot of threads I made saying im getting to the point where I was going to give up but I stuck with it and a bit of trial and error and a few 9800GT RMA's later I got a good XP build for all my rigs, 90% of my reliability issues came from Vista! These days I get the odd client stop and a simple restart sorts it which isnt too bad considering most of my hardware is overclocked although I make sure it runs cool and I dont have anything going above 70 degrees in any of my rigs. I think the VMware NotFreds on my Dual cores give me the most issues at the moment! Since the new v2.10 core came out I got 2 CPUs that just don't want to play properly even though i've made a new VM for them Ah well not the end of the worth though I suppose! Fold on I say!
Sorry Sas, couldn't resist On the serious side, yep, I have to agree that rigs can take some looking after, though periods of stability are only normally interrupt by a few things; 1. component failure (had PSU's, Mobo, RAM and Modem go so far!), 2. hanging clients (more on the Linux side, but not so much as they used to be - though as Coolamasta says, they're easy to remedy), and 3. the one that nearly always catches me out, is a client change (I always seem to be away when that happens!). The other reason why things go wrong is through 'fiddling' (perhaps 'tweaking' might yield fewer titters!) to eke out a higher PPD. I've encountered this with GPU Folding under Linux recently (though now it's controlled) and the one that sounds like it will cause me a few sighs is having setting up VMware ...... but where's the fun in not trying
