Down for next few days

[possum37]

Some of the PCs I've been using I have had to re-locate in another section of the building, so I can't guarantee that F@H will be running on them; or rather, that other users won't close out of it while it's running. Hopefully they'll be back soon.

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My knob tastes funny.

[Diesel]

A suggestion: IF you already have permission to run F@H on those systems, why not use Electron Microscope to run F@H in Stealth Mode.
EM will start the instance of F@H, and Stealth Mode runs EM with no system tray icon, so other than checking the Task Manager, no one will notice it's there.

Just an idea...


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[possum37]

You know, I tried that, and somehow I just couldn't get it to work right, as far as I could tell. Might it be something to do with the fact that they're running NT? I've always found NT to be less than user-friendly, at least as far as I and my lab's needs are concerned...

Dan -- can you point me to some decent installation instructions for EM? Or maybe some online documentation?

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My knob tastes funny.

[Diesel]

As far as installation, it's pretty simple.
Just download the latest version in .zip format, and unzip the archive into your F@H folder.

From there, just run EM.exe, and set the options accordingly.

As for online documentation, I don't think there is any that is better than the included Help file. It has just about all of the info you could need in there.

The way I have it set up is to start F@H when I start EM. I then set it to Stealth Mode, which hides it from plain sight. You can still find it in task manager and kill it that way if you know to look there.
To show EM once you've put it into Stealth Mode, create a file called "show.me" in the F@H folder, and it will magically appear again. You can then take it out of Stealth Mode, change options, or close it outright.

I would say that, if you have any questions regarding EM, ask me. If you can't get ahold of me, see if you can hunt down the author, Lperry, over at [H]ardOCP Forums. He's been very helpful with all of my inquiries to date, including bug reports and feature requests.


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[nootch]

A tad off topic, but I didn't really think this needed its own thread... I noticed that my F@H client has been acting screwy (pausing between frames for no apparent reason) lately. I normally leave this machine on 24/7, and I haven't been rebooting on a daily basis ever since I installed Win2k. I shut down both EM and F@H, reboot the computer (though I doubt that really had much to do with it), and it looks like I'm up and folding again. Didn't want anyone checking the stats to think that I gave up! http://www.aliensoup.com/ubb/smilies/tongue.gif

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"May those who love us love us. And those who don't love us-- may God turn their hearts. And if He cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so that we may know them by their limping." -- Keeping the Faith

[Diesel]

nootch&gt; Now that you're using Win2k, you can check to see if F@H is actually using all of the spare cycles, or if something else is stealing CPU time. Just fire up Task Manager.


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[nootch]

Dan: That's actually what I did to see if it was EM that wasn't responding properly or F@H just pausing. I now just make sure to check my percentages a couple times a day to make sure it isn't stopped (though I haven't noticed any problems since I restarted F@H).

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"May those who love us love us. And those who don't love us-- may God turn their hearts. And if He cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so that we may know them by their limping." -- Keeping the Faith

[cmrayer]

A few things I have found about EM, make sure all instances of F@H are stopped before you run it if you want to choose the start F@H with EM option. Also it keeps hanging on NT servers (the F@H process(es) continue fine but the EM process hangs if you try to open it out of the system tray???

[Diesel]

Charles&gt; I haven't noticed the behavior you mentioned when starting EM with an instance running.
This is under Win2k. In fact, I've done several EM upgrades without shutting down any instances of F@H.

It used to happen that way, where you'd get 2 instances of F@H running, which would cause a big problem, but not in any of the recent versions of EM.

Make sure you're running the latest version. You can download v.2.7.9 from http://homepages.waymark.net/~lperry/weather/download/em.zip


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[BRiT]

So what sort of nifty things does EM do?

--|BRiT|

[cmrayer]

I have 2.7.9 and it does this if you specifiy launch F@H with EM on 2000 Pro, Server and NT4 Wk.... At least it did with me. On another note my Athlon keeps messing up work units, only getting the frames from the last session (I shut this one down at night) so I have lost 20 units so far. I am using the shut F@H with EM option and F@H says the files are all okay when it starts, carries on from where it left off but project.bed has only entries for the last session. so 98 out of 100 gets you no units and 8.5hours of wasted processor time. I think I'll have to forget about this PC as the others are okay and are on all the time.

[Diesel]

BRiT&gt; Among other things, EM lets you hide the console window in favor of a system tray icon, or nothing at all.
It also will tell you the estimated time for the entire work unit, estimated time per frame, track your completed work units by protein, allow you to track up to 4 instances either on one system or across a network, check your total work units at Stanford, and a few other neat things.

It's definitely recommended that you use it, as it makes life MUCH easier.


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[cmrayer]

Every time I shut down the Athlon it loses its data, it is running W2k sp2. I am using EM 2.7.9 with 1.3.4 console. EM is set to close on shutdown and EM shuts F@H on close. Should I perhaps close F@H manually although this seems to obviate the use of EM... Anyone else got this sort of problem?

Help appreciated

Charles

[BRiT]

Just grabbed EM to try it out. It's nice. Although I have noticed some odd behavior. I had F@H already running. In EM options, I selected start F@H upon startup, checked task manager when done configuring the options, and noticed 2 F@H processes running. I exited EM and both F@H processes. I restarted EM, and now everything seems to be going well.

EM is a nice program indeed.

--|BRiT|

[cmrayer]

Except you will probably lose that unit with less that 100 frames found when you end it...

[BRiT]

Well I think I killed that 2nd F@H process quick enough. The unit was sent off already, only had 16 frames to go. Although I wonder if it'll count. The text of the unit finishing up shows (which really has me wondering) :
Reading upto 100 8byte entires from "project.bed": Read 84 successfully.

I've seen this before or something similar when restarting F@H after shutting down via CTRL-C. If that's the case, then F@H really can not be shutdown when its in the middle of a rum, which sucks! http://www.aliensoup.com/ubb/smilies/frown.gif

--|BRiT|

[cmrayer]

This is what I keep getting on my Athlon which I restart during runs:

Finished Work Unit: Sending results
- Reading upto 100 8-byte entries from "project.bed": Read 65 successfully
- Reading upto 2 8-byte entries from "project.evd": Read 2 successfully
- 65 Energy Values produced, ideally expected 100

I don't know if the run has counted or not as other machines keep contributing all on their own (nice of them). It might be worth setting up a different user to work it out (in the Alien Soup team of course...)

[BRiT]

My 2nd machine didn't finish a unit until after the noon update, and 3rd machine finished a unit around 6am. So I do beleive I received credit for that work unit, since I had mark of 5 during that update block. But the message produced does indeed make me wonder.

--|BRiT|

[Diesel]

Originally posted by cmrayer:
This is what I keep getting on my Athlon which I restart during runs:

Finished Work Unit: Sending results
- Reading upto 100 8-byte entries from "project.bed": Read 65 successfully
- Reading upto 2 8-byte entries from "project.evd": Read 2 successfully
- 65 Energy Values produced, ideally expected 100

I don't know if the run has counted or not as other machines keep contributing all on their own (nice of them). It might be worth setting up a different user to work it out (in the Alien Soup team of course...)

This will happen on occasion and is nothing to worry about. You will get credit for those work units.

FWIW, Crtl-C is the preferred way to shut down an instance of F@H. I've done this numerous times on many systems, and only early on did it result in any data corruption. However, the client has built-in features to remedy this, so you shouldn't worry about it.


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