Make BOINC more efficient to deploy to mulitple hosts

[ranger911]

Dear BOINC Developers!

We are highly appreciating your efforts and confirm significant improve in BOINC client within last few months. It's time to boost now!

Please focus a little on corporate networks - I'm truly 250% sure, you'd benefit a lot more from common people like me, who are a little more keen in IT, than typical users you are generally targeting BOINC client. Why? Because as System Engineer or System Administrator, or, in my case, as IT Manager, I can setup and arrange much more computing resources on 30-50 PCs, than 200-300 typical home Internet users irregularly running your nice and tiny application.

None would tell a word against if 10% of PC power would be spent to "hidden" in the system BOINC service during office hours and none would tell anything if 90% of all avaiable office PCs would be running for BOINC overnight 18:00 - 08:00. This would give you MUCH MORE results with shorter time.

TO HELP ME DO SO, AND PROMOTE YOUR VISION AND IDEAS TO OTHER BUSY IT GURUS, WHO REALLY COULD HELP AND WHO DON"T NEED TO EXPLAIN WHY AND HOW - BOINC SHOULD BE EASY AND FAST TO DEPLOY IN CORPORATE NETWORKS IN TYPICAL WAY!!!

HOW TO DO IT BETTER - PLEASE THINK AND PROGRAM:

1) Typical IT personnel is able to deploy software through manual installation at PC, through Windows Server remote deployment or through network share. For my corporate network I need client software (typical install package with no settings, ideally running as service) + initial settings, to let it install, start and run for 1st time, then I need exportable settings in the file to copy to certain machine to join her to the BOINC GRID.

2) To be able to copy typical settings from one PC to a bunch of other PCs, please add to BOINC "export settings to the file" in menu to a folder we can choose to (save as). This doesn't exist now! I have manualy to find setting file at file system - this is inconvinient at all!!

3) Also, please think over and implement smooth and easy post-install for multiple PCs with BOINC client - it should get a list of projects we would like to participate with access logins and passwords (over network) AS FILE + it should get typical (pre-configured) operation settings AS FILE. Manual copy is not good if there are 50-70 machines, so a setting in CLIENT preferences like "local path to network share" or "weblink to those 2 files from intranet server" could be a solution for this request.

Initialization, when BOINC client itself calculates the computing power of the particular machine should happen just after installation automatically. Until settings are copied - no activity should happen. For corporate network setup, BOINC instalation at PC and "activation" - to run should be split. Until settings are copied to the installed BOINC copy - no activity should happen except PC performance check. This would allow to deploy BOINC with cloning tools like ACRONIS or NORTON GHOST.

SUMMARY: We need easy and fast deployment of the BOINC client core to dozens of machines in corporate network + we need one settings file with project info (incl. logins and passwords) for the list of projects we want to run on all those machines + we need a pre-configured (second) file with BOINC settings to copy from server to all those machine, exported from one machine or configured through wizard (separate application) to let it all work fine.

Can you please do it for us?? This would be really great to use the power of huge corp networks for something good!

Please feel free to contact me at any time. +7 (985) 920-01-67

Yours, Maxim

[romw]

Setup bugs are being punted to a future release. This work item should be completed with the new open source installer.