How I got my PowerPC Macs crunching again

I don't remember when my Power PC based Macs quit receiving tasks to crunch. It was at least 2017, maybe earlier. I think it was something to do with SSL changes in more recent versions of BOINC and the lack of their availability on said platform that was the cause. None of the suggestions I could find online at the time (or since) provided a solution. Updating certificates didn't work.. Installing a newer version of OpenSSL didn't work... Given that the latest version of BOINC available for Leopard and G4s/G5s was 6.12.35 it was understandable. Nothing lasts forever.

Or does it?

In one of my more recent searches (today in fact) on a tangentially related subject, I ran across a proxy server called WebOne. The purpose of this proxy server is to allow old computers with old browsers to access the web by taking http requests and converting them to https. It works pretty well for that purpose but guess what else this works for? 

To get this working with BOINC:

1. Download and install WebOne (https://github.com/atauenis/webone/releases/tag/v0.17.3) on a machine on your network or otherwise have network access to. It is available for several platforms and for this experiment I used the Windows version.

2. Change the WebOne config to add einstein@home related URLs to the "ForceHttps" section. These include einsteinathome.org, einstein.phys.uwm.edu, and scheduler.einsteinathome.org

3. Add the address and port of your proxy to the HTTP proxy config in BOINC.

4. When attaching to einstein@home, use the http version of the URL (not https as it will be converted automatically).

That's it! While I hesitate to claim complete victory until a task has completed and validated, I do have two 1.07 GHz iBook G4s happily crunching away. The application name shows up as "Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo,GBT) 1.58 (ALTIVEC)"

FWIW, this also works for moowrapper (I didn't even have to add any URLs to the config). Not sure if there are any other projects that still have PPC apps.

I know I'm not going to break any speed records with machines like this but for some reason coaxing an old PPC Mac into to crunching some BOINC tasks again after at least seven years gave me a real sense of victory, lol. Yes, this was my idea of fun today :)