Who wants to be a guinea pig?
Hello, fellow folders!
For those of you who are used to working with NotFred, I came up with a series of changes that allows NotFred to run -bigadv work units. I'm putting this up as an alternative to the virtual appliances mentioned here. Like a regular NotFred, this is very lightweight - it can be run from a USB drive, a CD, or even a TFTP network boot - but unlike regular NotFred, this can run -bigadv units. Here are the changes I made from regular NotFred:
* Updated the client install to 6.24beta.
* Added in the drop-in client binary necessary to run -bigadv units.
* Added additional configuration options to the web interface:
o Additional parameters (to pass to the client)
o Hostname (the name of the VM on the network)
* Using the remote reboot script now backs up the WU data files before shutting down.
I'm looking for a few people willing to help me test this VM. You can find the *.vmx and *.vmdk files here:
http://www.blueshiftlabs.net/remote/downloads/folding/latest.zip
Give it a shot - try to break it. If you manage to get it to break, post about it here.
A few things to keep in mind:
* If you have any spaces in the "additional parameters" box (for example, if you pass -bigadv -verbosity 9), you will need to surround it with "quotes".
* To run bigadv work units, put -bigadv in the additional parameters box. Also, make sure that the checkbox for advmethods units is turned OFF.
* The VM is configured to use 5GB of memory. If you have more memory to dedicate to folding, feel free to increase this number; likewise, if you don't plan on running -bigadv work units (for whatever reason), you can turn that value back down.
* You will need VMWare Player 3 to run this. DO NOT use VMWare Workstation - it chokes on anything above 4 processors. I haven't tried it in Server, but I imagine the results may be similar.
* As always when running -bigadv, keep an eye on your temperatures.
I'll keep this thread updated as I make updates to the VM. Let me know about any issues you encounter - be as specific as you can.
Thanks for taking part in my beta! Happy folding!
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