Error while downloading behind UMTS/3G network

[thanar]

Stumped upon this issue recently:

A BOINC host connected through UMTS/3G WiFi? router is receiving modified JPEG images, due to provider settings. Normally, checking the "skip image file verification" in BOINC Manager has no effect, because the compressed images end up smaller than 5000 bytes which revokes the bad proxy detection code in BOINC manager.

As a result, the host is unable to complete the download of the affected jpeg files, not being able to compute, although it receives work and reports back normally.

See this BOINC message board thread for more information.

[davea]

Client: fix bug involving small image files and UMTS proxies

Context: 1) Some clients are behing proxies that compress image files 2) We added a preference dont_verify_images that disables

size/MD5 verification of image files, if they're nonempty.

3) If a download finishes, the file is incomplete, and we

read less than 5 KB, we assume that what we read was a proxy error message, and we truncate it from the file.

Bug: if a project has a small image file, and a UMTS proxy compresses it to < 5 KB, 3) will truncate it to zero, and 2) will flag it as an error, and the job will fail.

Fix: don't do 3) if it's an image file and dont_verify_images is set.

[thanar]

davea, what does "fixed" means? will the fix be included in a future BOINC build?

[davea]

The fix will be in our next development/testing release, probably in a few days. If you want it earlier, send me an email and I'll try to arrange it.

[thanar]

No need to hurry and add extra work to you developers; I will grab it when it becomes available and test it out asap and let you know.

[davea]

They're here: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php