If you want, you can cause your individual system to stop polling all BOINC Servers (including the Seti server) during the Tuesday Seti outage somewhat before it starts in your time zone and wait till after it is up to start polling it again.

One way is using the "local boinc manager" settings. Under the "options" tab look for the "computing preferences" and under that look for the "daily schedules" tab.

Here is the tricky part. The first column is for when the Network should "start up" again. The second column is for when the Network should stop.

I my case, the maintenance at Seti starts sometime around 8:00 am local time and for a short/standard maintenance it stops before 3pm. So I have 15:00 (military time) in the first column and 07:00 (military time) in the second column.

I have a couple of Seti-only processors/systems that I am using it on.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

What's the point of that? Simply just go to your settings and allow it download about a day's worth of work. When Seti is down, your computer will continues to crunch and they will upload once Seti is back up. Or am I missing something here?

The point is he runs multi-gpu, multi-core, fast hosts and a day's amount of work, as you suggest, of the standard 100 tasks per gpu and 100 tasks per cpu and the maximum the project will allow, would last about an hour.
The hosts run dry throughout the majority of the outage. To overcome this he runs a custom client allowing more tasks. To be kind to the servers, he does not want to hit the servers with the many thousand tasks to report or ask for replenishment until normal users have had their chance at the task feeding trough once the project comes back online. He is being considerate of others.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Honestly I don't mind running through tasks and not having anything to do.... gives the power bill a reprieve. LOL!

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All of this has happened before and will happen again -Battlestar Galactica

No problems with each person crunching seti in their own way. EVERY little bit helps!! I really like this info though as it highlights a cool feature that might be overlooked. It also isn't the easiest to set up, so the instructions are helpful. I personally try not to upload or download during the outage or recovery, as I think it is a small thing I can do to help the system. After the outage there is always a traffic jam, so I choose to wait (because I can), and let those who need to get WUs do so. Lately it also seems that there has been a download problem, which can cause "ghosts" to happen (See another great thread that is pinned in this section for how to recover ghosts).

We want more people to join the project, so any little thing that can be done to help the system handle more people seems like a good thing. If it isn't your cup of tea, no worries, handle it in your own way, but maybe this and other informational threads will teach some people about the options available in the program.

Curious which rescheduler you ended up with Unixchick. I wonder which one eventually became the most popular. Mr.Kevvy started it, then Jimbocous added his nice front-end, W3perl came out with his Perl script and finally Jeff Buck came out with his very nice GUI python app which is the one I use.

As you say, whatever way someone runs the project and is happy with is fine. We need all the processing power we can muster.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Curious which rescheduler you ended up with Unixchick. I wonder which one eventually became the most popular. Mr.Kevvy started it, then Jimbocous added his nice front-end, W3perl came out with his Perl script and finally Jeff Buck came out with his very nice GUI python app which is the one I use.

As you say, whatever way someone runs the project and is happy with is fine. We need all the processing power we can muster.

I don't need a rescheduler at the moment. my machine is so old and slow that the 100 tasks lasts me about a week. I will be getting a newer machine this year, so I will be looking at the options I have then, but for now my pokey machine doesn't need anything fancy.

It also seems that when there is a traffic jam that the slower machines seem to get served first, when I personally would prefer that those machine that have 0 cache at least get a partial cache before those who still have work.

OK, I was confused by your comment about the rescheduler not being the easiest to set up and the instructions were helpful. Thus my query.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

I think he is talking about a feature in standard BOINC. Under preferences there is a tab for daily schedules. It could have a better interface. It is more confusing than it should be, so I'm glad Tom wrote a short bit on how to use the feature. I use it to cut communication before and during the Tuesday outage.

If you can think of a better way of laying out the "daily schedules" tab, then you can always sketch out your proposal and submit it to the BOINC development team who will add it to the pile of suggestions they are already considering.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?