folding without a hard drive?

D

DaSmurf

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 24, 2004
Messages
113
My friends system just had the hard drive die, and he says he's just gonna go on his laptop till the hardware over the horizon comes around.

So, I relieved him of his box, thinking I could fold on it without a hard drive. I thought I saw a linux bootcd swimming around somewhere that would let me do that, but I can't find it now.

Is there such a way to do this, or was I dreaming?

I looked at foldserver, but that requires a main box with a hard drive to run, and I need my windows box.

Seems to me that it should be doable, a bootcd that creates a ramdisk for the folding program. I have a 600 pointer right now, and its only taking 30mb on the disk...
 
Overclockix. I've got a copy if BT won't work for you; I could mail it to you.
 
Hehe, sweet. Thanks!

BT is cruising along at a decent 60kb/s

Too bad its from team 32 :p It'll be feeding 33 with 1.5Ghz in just a short while though :D
 
just make sure you edit the config file in the ISO so it is for team 33 and your username. by default (which it does every time the machine reboots) it is for Arkaine and team 32.

set that up right and you'll be fine.
 
ooh, thats evil.

So I edit the config before burning the cd, pop it in and turn it on. Folding is already set to run?
 
I believe so, yep. There was a thread a while ago that mentioned a good program to edit the iso with. Winiso, maybe? Something like that.
 
Mage, I edited 3.8 with some iso proggie like that, and when it booted up, it was FUBARed. Never actually got into linux, and everything was written in spanish for some odd reason. Do I have to "Reassemble" or something? I made sure the client.cfg file was the same amount of characters after editing... so that's just crazy.
 
No ideas - as long as it's the same size it shouldn't've messed anything up. I haven't tried OCix recently.

Is "shouldn't've" even a word? :rolleyes:
 
I saw something on the ocix forums about the spanish thing...
Seems the people that showed it at CeBit decided to have it output all errors in spanish, and that made it through to the release. :confused:

There was a post on how to fix it, but it only works on hdd installs, so I didnt bother with it.

On another note, the seed I was getting decent speed from decided to kick the bucket, so this looks like it will have to wait till tomorrow.
 
I'm all for bootable cd distros, but the size of this file vs what I need it to do seems a tad bit out of whack.

Its a full distro complete with x server and several window managers, even KDE!

It may be faster for me to learn how to manipulate ram drives and create my own gentoo cd before this beast finishes the torrent :D
 
you could give this guide for
windows a try

and let me know how it works!!
havnt done it yet but im gonna try it over the weekend.



 
I just made a gentoo livecd work for me. I still need to write a script and modify the iso so it works on reboots, but it will do for the time being as it is.

Steps:
Download gentoo livecd (60MB)
Boot
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/fah (the livecd makes a ramdisk for itself)
cd /mnt/gentoo/fah
wget (url to linux client)
chmod +x FAH502-Linux.exe
./FAH502-Linux.exe -config

And its off!

Now to figure out a way to monitor it with my windows box
 
DaSmurf said:
I just made a gentoo livecd work for me. I still need to write a script and modify the iso so it works on reboots, but it will do for the time being as it is.

Steps:
Download gentoo livecd (60MB)
Boot
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/fah (the livecd makes a ramdisk for itself)
cd /mnt/gentoo/fah
wget (url to linux client)
chmod +x FAH502-Linux.exe
./FAH502-Linux.exe -config

And its off!

Now to figure out a way to monitor it with my windows box
Click to expand...

Just use EM3. You could also create a screen and ssh to the box and attach to it, or just use samba and look at the log file. I might give this a run on my K6-2 500 I have sitting around doing nothing. I found at boot it's pulling 51watts, which shouldn't impact my energy bill much at all if it stays near that at full load.
 
I would love to be able to use EM3 to do it, but this cd does not appear to have samba installed on it (big surprise there)

It does however have the ssh daemon included, so I'll just have to give that a go.
 
This Topic Is Way Too On Topic.
OCAU. We Will Pwn U With Our r0x0z 1337 b0x3n

Mage.... you should make a uber 1337 version that is better then his...

Come on.. I know you can...
 
DaSmurf said:
I would love to be able to use EM3 to do it, but this cd does not appear to have samba installed on it (big surprise there)

It does however have the ssh daemon included, so I'll just have to give that a go.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just noticed that, since I just did the same thing you did with a copy of gentoo I had laying around. A version of gentoo with a custom minimal build would really be nice for this purpose. I may look into doing this, and booting either via cd or pxe. This box is pulling 61 watts(via my wattmeter) under load with the monitor off, so the power usage isn't too bad.

I may go with a PXE build, since I always run my mian box anyways, and it has the advantage of writing off to the disk in case of a crash, you don't loose a work unit.
 
Yea, this will definitely end up being a semi-permanent solution until I get a big enough garden to make fold-server worth it.

I'll probably work on minimizing the minimal livecd with samba support and an automated script to get it all working. Maybe down the road something that loads data from and saves it to a pen drive on a TERM command, that would be one sweet lightweight cd.

Ofc, this would all take time. And we all know just how easy that is to come by...

**DaSmurf runs off to the most recent 'D' thread :D

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top