use of BOINCDIR variable does not work here by itself

[verduin]

What follows is rather lengthy and may only apply to Fedora-10-preview. Thanks in advance to anyone who chooses to wade thru it. This material perhaps only effects an extremely small user community.

The rev. boinc-5 has a long successful history here on Fedora 8. While preparing to upgrade the OS, boinc ran for months with working dir /db/BOINC. On this host, /db is a mount point for mysql, http, and other server data. After upgrading F8 to F10 and boinc-5 to boinc-6.2.15-1.20080818svn.fc10 the normal adjustment of BOINCDIR=/db/BOINC in /etc/sysconfig/boinc failed to assign the working dir. In addition frequent failures of boinc_cmd showing "Authorization failure: -155" and boincmanager made boinc quite unuseable.

As part of the troubleshooting, the SETI project was installed successfully while the working dir was set to /var/lib/boinc, but no work unit was queued for processing. Partially completed work for SETI and climate remained untouched under /db/BOINC.

To work around the script failure, the /etc/init.d/boinc-client script was revised to point to /db/BOINC without need for the sysconfig script -- this failed as well. As a "last ditch" effort, /var/lib/boinc was made into a symbolic link to /db/BOINC and this provided some limited success.

There is some indication that the problem is not with boinc software. The installer creates a "boinc" user with /var/lib/boinc as working dir -- this is what I saw here. After I assigned a pwd to boinc, tty login went normally. During troubleshooting the boinc user was helpful in monitoring the contents of the home directory. At the time of installing the symbolic link there was a major problem.

The procedure of installing the link was: log-off boinc user use another console as user root to do the following sequence: cd /var/lib ls -l | more mv boinc boinc.tmp ln -s /db/BOINC boinc ls -l | more ls boinc service boinc-client start After the previous sequence boinc-client failed to process the backlog from /db/BOINC queue.

Furthermore, when user boinc logged in again, the listing of home dir contents was identical to the former /var/lib/boinc contents and this is clearly wrong. After the sequence of commands: cd .. ls [This displayed bogus contents for /var/lib] cd .. ls [This displayed suitable contents for /var] cd lib/boinc ls [This displayed contents of the /db/BOINC directory as expected] The above series indicates [to me] a basic error in directory management.

The system today runs with selinux =disabled and iptables STOPPED, these settings will change soon. Boinc-client is processing the backlog from prior to the upgrade. Boinc_cmd usually works, but GUI boincmanager usually fails. Thus boinc is half healthy. My attempts to replicate and isolate errors are not entirely successful. However there seems to be an undocumented(?) dependency that requires "/bd/BOINC" assignment in /etc/passwd>boinc[working directory]. If in fact there is a requirement to assign the boinc user home directory identical to the boinc-client working directory, then perhaps this is overly restrictive?

In addition to the boinc software requirement(?) of the previous paragraph, today F10 seems to prevent adjustment to /etc/passwd from becoming immediately effective. I have not seen such delay in previous years. A system reboot will make the change effective, and sometimes waiting for 15(?) minutes will allow the old assignment to expire. I am taking this to the Fedora team for review.

Thus I have developed only an attitude that perhaps early F10-Preview has been a surprise. As for isolating a problem with boinc software, there is no "smoking gun". All critical reviews of this work are welcome, and suggestions will be tried here.

[KSMarksPsych]

I'm going to email the Fedora package maintainer. I believe this is more of a possible packaging bug, rather than a bug with BOINC itself. I'll leave the ticket open until I confirm.

[mjakubicek]

Hi,

I think I've found the problem: the init script I'm using in Fedora comes from Eric Myers and specifies BOINC home dir simply by "cd" into it. This seems to be not enough (anymore?), one has to pass correct "--dir" argument to BOINC. When starting BOINC with "--dir /db/BOINC" it correctly switches to the given directory.

Please could you test whether it works for you? Just download new RPMs from the following URL: ​http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=996647

I'll release an update for F8-F10 as soon as possible (F8 is going to EOL in one week) and close this bug once the update will be pushed to the update repository.

[davea]

BOINCDIR is used by server components, not the client: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration#Environment_variables

[Nicolas]

No, it's definitely not used by server components. BOINCDIR is used by the init.d shell script; not by the server, client, manager, boinccmd, or any other BOINC component. It's a shell variable set in /etc/default/boinc and used by /etc/init.d/boinc to know what the BOINC client data directory is.

This bug should have been closed as invalid long ago, because it affects the Fedora package which is not maintained by BOINC developers.