BOINC Manager remote access

Phil
Phil
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Topic 197632

Having trouble getting BM to remotely access other crunchers on my network.

Here's the setup.

All machines running Linux Mint 17 and BM 7.2.42.

I followed the instructions found here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Controlling_BOINC_remotely

Both gui_rpc_auth.cfg and remote_hosts.cfg already existed with the hosts file having all lines commented out, and the auth file being empty. I added the password to the auth file and added the host from which I wanted to access other crunchers to the hosts file.

On reboot (not required, but it still freshens things up) the remote host would not connect to the client, and the host I wished to access from could not connect to the remote host.

Any ideas to solve this would be appreciated.

The idea is to get this to work so I can use something like BoincTasks to monitor my hosts.

Thanks in advance.

Phil

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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BOINC Manager remote access

The instructions in the BOINC wiki work fine (at least they did last time I looked - quite a while ago) so I don't think that's the problem.

Can the hosts ping each other?

Does Mint come with an activated firewall? It probably does. Try disabling it and see if that allows things to work. If so, you'll need to work out how to configure it for your needs.

Cheers,
Gary.

Phil
Phil
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Hi Gary, Before I go start

Hi Gary,

Before I go start digging again. These are crunching only machines, no personal info or anything else is on these machines. So, is a firewall even necessary? I have a main router to serve the house as a whole, and these crunchers are behind a second router downstream that serves only the crunchers.

Also, I think I might have misunderstood something. The directions say DNS Host Names or IP address. I just used the name of the host by itself. Did I miss something? I don't have a problem assigning static IPs if that is better.

Thanks.

Phil

[Edit] Firewalls have been checked and are not the issue. Not installed on the Cinnamon machines and is already disabled on the KDE machine. I can also ping between machines both directions.

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
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RE: ... is a firewall even

Quote:
... is a firewall even necessary?


I regard myself as being insufficiently well educated to answer that question authoritatively :-). I take exactly the same attitude as you are proposing. I'm behind a NAT router and the boxes only do crunching - no personal information - so I disable the firewall. I keep promising myself that one of these days I'll make the effort to be better educated. :-).

Quote:
The directions say DNS Host Names or IP address. I just used the name of the host by itself. Did I miss something? I don't have a problem assigning static IPs if that is better.


If you want to use DNS host names then I think you may need some sort of DNS server running to do the forward and reverse translations/lookups. I think doing this would be overkill. I also like to have static IP addresses so I maintain a table of static addresses/machine name pairs in /etc/hosts on the server machine.

I reserve a range of static addresses on the router and let DHCP manage the balance so a new machine can get a dynamic address (outside the static range) prior to setup. On each LAN machine, I configure the appropriate static address and put the server address in the hosts file. I have no problem in communications using either IP address or simple hostnames.

Quote:
I can also ping between machines both directions.


Are you pinging IP addresses or hostnames? If both work then BOINC should work with hostnames, I would imagine.

Cheers,
Gary.

Phil
Phil
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I didn't try pinging host

I didn't try pinging host names, but I like your setup. I think I'll go with static IPs. Anything that uses resources, like dynamic IP's, however small, I plan on removing.

I also removed the KDE desktop I was trying out on my "admin" machine and went back to Cinnamon. It just works better.

After I get set up and running again I'll try the remote access one more time. I'll let you know how it goes.

Perhaps after we sort this out is there a way to update the BOINC instructions with more detail?

Thanks.

Phil

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

MarkJ
MarkJ
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For my Raspberry Pi's (which

For my Raspberry Pi's (which run Debian) I ended up setting some of the IP addresses as static and definining them in the /etc/hosts file. You may want to leave gui_rpc_auth blank so you don't have to worry about the password seeing as you have the host names in remote_hosts.

I use BOINCtasks on a windows box to control the farm, so the process is the same except I can see multiple machines at once.

Phil
Phil
Joined: 8 Jun 14
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Credit: 232,741,008
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I tried BOINC remote access

I tried BOINC remote access using IP addresses instead of hostnames and it works.

Not sure if it's something I have done or a normal result of using remote, but the BOINC manager on the remote machine now refuses to show any data even tho the machine is still crunching.

Phil

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Anonymous

I recently installed a new

I recently installed a new router and decided to use DHCP. With my old router I manually defined every client on the network and maintained /etc/hosts on all nodes - windows and linux.

After installing the new router as a DHCP server and changing all clients to use DHCP rather the "manual" they were all issued IP addresses as expected. On each of the machines I could type "hostname" to get its name. Now for the interesting part. If I had a host with the name "snoopy" and I "ping snoopy" that host would not respond to the ping. If I "ping snoopy.local" then the PC known as snoopy would respond with the IP assigned by DHCP. "pinging" with "snoopy.local" is not recommended. To effectively resolve IP addresses and hostnames using DHCP requires a setup with a DNS server and a DHCP server that will update the appropriate DNS records if your router does not support this (most don't). Because my router could not be configured to update a local DNS server I fell back to "manually" defining my IP addresses on the clients and allowing the router to issue IP addresses outside of this "fixed" environment.

I had tried to configure a local DNS and a local DHCP server but ran into other problems. I decided to fall back to what had worked with the possibility of setting up a DNS and DHCP server at a later date.

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