Hi all,

I am requesting help in figuring out why Zone Alarm and BOINC sometimes do not work together. To get to the bottom of this, I have put one of my PCs to run Zone Alarm as the firewall.

First I tried the Free version 6.5 and ran that for a couple of days without any problems. Now I am running the ZA Pro 6.1 version (with registration) and still getting nowhere.

So I need your help.
If you are running Zone Alarm as your firewall and you had problems in the past or have problems still at this moment, please post in this thread.

Mention:
- Your Zone Alarm version number
- Is it the Free version or registered?
- Have you set up Boinc.exe, Boincmgr.exe and Boinc.scr to be allowed in your Allow Zones?
- Did you allow Boinc.exe to be server? (!!)
- Which operating system do you run on?
- What is your connection to the internet?
- When do you have the problems at most? (e.g. after a BOINC update?)

I will post this same question on the Seti forums. I also request of everyone who knows of people with problems with ZA and BOINC at other projects to point to this thread or to the other on the Seti forums.

Thank you.

H.

(Can a moderator make this one sticky for a week?)

If you have a problem with ZA post the problem so we can help

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You misunderstand my request, UBT - Halifax--lad.

I am testing this for David anderson and Rom Walton (the developers of BOINC).
And since I can not reproduce any of the problems people have had in the past, I am asking for their help by answering my couple of questions.

H.

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Well you need to rephrase what you send in your post then!

First I tried the Free version 6.5 and ran that for a couple of days without any problems. Now I am running the ZA Pro 6.1 version (with registration) and still getting nowhere.

That sure sounds like a request for help getting ZA working to me

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ZA worked perfectly here with BOINC you just need to tweak a few settings for if you wish to suspend all Internet activity

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Never had any problems with it, except when updating ZoneAlarm, because it then blocks traffic between the manager and the client until you reboot, which means you're rixking an exit code 1. So always best to shut down boinc before updating.

I suspect you're looking for machines with more significant problems, but just in case this is useful:

ZoneAlarm Security Suite V6.5.722.000 (chargeable version)

Boinc client has access to trusted and internet
Boinc manager has trust level 3 ('super'), and also access to trusted and internet. Manager is NOT configured to act as a server.
Boinc screensaver has access to trusted

Boinc version is 5.4.9
OS is XP Professional, fully patched, MS firewall is disabled.
Internet connection is 2MB ADSL with a static IP.

Localhost, 127.0.0.1, and also my static IP are all configured in the trusted zone.

When people ask for help with their firewall, I always point them to this post, and it seems to do the trick:

http://www.climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=4272

But it's usually seems to be Norton or the windows firewall which is the problem, rather than ZoneAlarm.

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Never had any problems with it, except when updating ZoneAlarm, because it then blocks traffic between the manager and the client until you reboot, which means you're rixking an exit code 1. So always best to shut down boinc before updating.

I must say, I have not tried to update ZA yet whilst BOINC is running. That is something for tomorrow though. Thank you for your reply.

Hello,
I wanted to verify problems with Boinc - not necessarily related to Zone Alarm, but demonstrated by Zone Alarm actions, and ISP actions.

Problem: Boinc (like MS Outlook and IE) appears to mark the internet connection 'off' inside itself if the internet connection is disconnected.
- and HANG (no window, right-click taskbar only says 'Close', no restore, minimize, etc. Task Manager states 'not responding).

Scenarios to reproduce:
1) In Zone Alarm, or via the systray icon - pick 'Stop All Internet Activity'. Doing this for 10-20 seconds, has twice this week Hung Boinc. (the time it takes me to view my junk mail, I lock off the net so image tracking in SPAM fails - so SPAM sender cannot verify my email address by me viewing images in emails).
2) My ISP is through a router/firewall (this my PC sees 192.168.x.x) to a wireless Bridge to a major network. This network requires logging in via a http://login.php page via port 80/SSL445? web-page (one of those pages where they embed the SSL, page gets no lock, but viewing page properties says it is 128-bit secured) - attempting to view a http anywhere redirects to this login page without warning (sometimes interrupting SSL sessions - oh well, I am willing to accept a few interruptions for $16/month at 1.2 to 2MB/s).

Result:
Both scenarios can hang Boinc as described in the Problem above.

Fix (guess):
? Add a better retry timeout thread in the program - that perhaps sends a simple ping or if you want to keep http only: a non-commital http request (one that can time-out). A suggestion would be to load the http://boinc.berkeley.edu page looking at the source for some <!-- hidden commented keyword --> to verify indeed the page expected loaded (since requesting any page when I am logged off results in the login page - no 'page not found' errors occur - which may be why IE, Outlook 2002, and now Boinc hang.

Also - I do not know if Boinc tries as soon as system logs in - i.e. Zone Alarm instantly tries to update it's virus/spyware definition tables as soon as system boots - but 99% of the time, I have not logged in online yet and they fail - if Boinc does try immediately, this could cause problems also...

And for those interested: My Bridge IP is 192.168.0.1, also shown as the XP 'gateway' IP - it is in the Internet zone, all pc's on my 'this side of the router/firewall' are accessable in the range added to ZA 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.20 set as Trusted. Since I do get hits on 192.168.0.1 from the 'local' wireless (pinged, queried, and who knows what else from my ISP address) I keep it in the internet zone.
127.0.0.1 was added to the ZA list by ZA to support IIS / .NET local pages, in the trusted zone (required for developers as ZA failed to support 127.0.0.1 for quite a while causing us software developers many problems).

Good luck,
Todd

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You need to give BOINC a pass lock or whatever it is called this allows BOINC full access even when the internet is suspended, ZA thinks BOINC is the internet due to the way BOINC works.

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Hello,
I wanted to verify problems with Boinc - not necessarily related to Zone Alarm, but demonstrated by Zone Alarm actions, and ISP actions.

Problem: Boinc (like MS Outlook and IE) appears to mark the internet connection 'off' inside itself if the internet connection is disconnected.
- and HANG (no window, right-click taskbar only says 'Close', no restore, minimize, etc. Task Manager states 'not responding).

When you say that BOINC "hangs", do you mean that the Manager freezes up, or that the core client hangs? (which you can tell by looking at the Task Manager
and seeing if apps are exiting because of lost heartbeat).

My setup is very similar to MikeMarsUK above, and I've never had the slightest problem (in six or seven years running SETI, with BOINC since it started. I update ZoneAlarm as the new versions appear.

That's on two PCs - one XP Pro, one Windows 2000 Pro (there's also one running Fedora Core 5, but that doesn't have ZoneAlarm on it).

Do you want me to try anything to see if I can "make" it misbehave?

UBT-Halifax-Lad - what's that ugly airline destination board in all your posts? It's most distracting when trying to read a thread.

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Hi all,

I am requesting help in figuring out why Zone Alarm and BOINC sometimes do not work together. To get to the bottom of this, I have put one of my PCs to run Zone Alarm as the firewall.

First I tried the Free version 6.5 and ran that for a couple of days without any problems. Now I am running the ZA Pro 6.1 version (with registration) and still getting nowhere.

So I need your help.
If you are running Zone Alarm as your firewall and you had problems in the past or have problems still at this moment, please post in this thread.

Mention:
- Your Zone Alarm version number
- Is it the Free version or registered?
- Have you set up Boinc.exe, Boincmgr.exe and Boinc.scr to be allowed in your Allow Zones?
- Did you allow Boinc.exe to be server? (!!)
- Which operating system do you run on?
- What is your connection to the internet?
- When do you have the problems at most? (e.g. after a BOINC update?)

I will post this same question on the Seti forums. I also request of everyone who knows of people with problems with ZA and BOINC at other projects to point to this thread or to the other on the Seti forums.

Thank you.

H.

(Can a moderator make this one sticky for a week?)

Running Zone Alarm with the following details:
ZoneAlarm version:6.5.731.000
TrueVector version:6.5.731.000
Driver version:6.5.731.000

Free Version of Zone Alarm (ZA)

Allow Zones are set with the following for 'Access' Trusted & Internet + 'Server' Trusted & Internet:
BOINC client = YES, YES, ASK, ASK
BOINC Manager for Windows = YES, ASK, ASK, ASK
BOINC Sreensaver = YES, ASK, ASK, ASK

Zone Alarm never 'asked' if BOINC could be assigned as a server.

Microsoft Windows XP
Professional Edition, Service Pack 2, (05.01.2600.00)

Connection on the Internet is via ADSL - on all of the time, except when ISP logs me off for unknown reasons.

Not really a 'problem', but with upgrade from BOINC Release 4.45 to 5.4.9 this so called communication on local TCP port 31416 is causing repeated flashing of ZoneAlarm Tx/Rx which was not the case with BOINC Release 4.45 operation.


The question is why the difference between 4.45 and 5.4.9?
Seems like a lot of activity that a firewall program is monitoring which is a load on the CPU and a waste of CPU cycles.
The internal 'communications/traffic' in Release 4.45 were working just fine and did not 'alert' ZA until upgrading to Release 5.4.9, so why the change?

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