I wish to use BOINC Manager to remotely access my two old desktops which have the BOINC Client installed.

When I went to install boinc-manager on my RPi 3 it wanted to install boinc-client as well.

Is the Client really required when I do not intend to do any crunching on my RPi?

My understanding was that the Manager would issue RPC calls over the network to the desktops for status and control messages therefore ignoring the locally installed Client.

I hope someone can clear this up for me!

Rich.

In general, BOINC installers are monolithic - they assume you want to run both major components (the client and the manager) on the same computer, and install both components without giving you any freedom of choice.

Of course, having the client installed doesn't mean you actually have to run it. Simply not attaching to any projects will prevent it using scarce RPi resources. But again in general, starting the Manager interface will often attempt to start the client on the local machine, and then nag you with 'attach to project' wizards each time you start it.

I'm a Windows user, so I can't give you specific RPi advice, but it should be possible to:

a) prevent the local client starting at power-up
b) invoke the Manager with command-line switches that connect it directly to a remote machine. I'm having difficulty finding the relevant page in the Wiki, but I should be able to find some examples later.

In the meantime, you will need to allow remote RPC access to the clients running on your desktops - that's in Controlling BOINC remotely.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your reply.

I am aware that on Linux, the manager does not load the client. This has to be done separately ie manually started on CLI or started on boot (default on RPi).

I was hoping someone knew of a way of getting JUST the manager installed. I will test installing the manager with the client and then manually uninstall the client and see what happens.

As for the RPC access, this is all ready to go. This has been tested using my Windows BOINC Manager which will be retired after this is set up.

Sounds like you're ahead of the game, so you're probably familiar with this already, but I'll post it anyway for other readers to refer to.

D:\BOINC>D:\BOINC\boincmgr.exe /h
Usage: boincmgr [/h] [--verbose] [/a] [/s] [/n <str>] [/g <str>] [/p <str>] [/b <str>] [/i] [/c] [/m] [/nd]
/h, --help show this help message
--verbose generate verbose log messages
/a, --autostart BOINC Manager was started by the operating system automatically
/s, --systray Startup BOINC so only the system tray icon is visible
/n, --namehost=<str> Host name or IP address
/g, --gui_rpc_port=<str> GUI RPC port number
/p, --password=<str> Password
/b, --boincargs=<str> Startup BOINC with these optional arguments
/i, --insecure disable BOINC security users and permissions
/c, --checkskins set skin debugging mode to enable skin manager error messages
/m, --multiple multiple instances of BOINC Manager allowed
/nd, --no-daemon Not run the daemon

Hi again Richard,

Thanks for the info. It got me on the right track.

I was able to start the manager, with a remote connection, from the terminal using:

boincmgr -n XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX -p XXXX

With n being the IP address of my desktop and p being the password set in gui_rpc_auth.cfg

One issue that did arise was that the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file CANNOT have any new lines in it. You MUST pass the -L flag to nano to prevent it adding a new line at the end of the file. This caused me an hour of confusion!

I then needed to learn how to edit the LXDE Application Menu to update the default boinc-manager.desktop file to use the new command (FYI http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Menu#.2A.desktop_files)

As I was unable to uninstall the boinc-client package (boinc-manager depends on it so they are intrinsically linked) I instead had to prevent the client from starting on boot. This turned out to be easy:

update-rc.d boinc-client remove

(FYI http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Stop_or_start_BOINC_daemon_after_boot#Ubuntu.2FDebian)

I still think the developers should allow us Linux users a bit more leeway by separating the dependency as it would alleviate all the above work.

Please note that the above is based on Debian and LXDE and other distributions and Desktop Environments may be different!

Happy crunching!

Happy crunching!

Sounds like a result - happy crunching indeed :-)

Since BOINC Manager can only connect to one client at a time (unlike Windows add-ons like BoincTasks), the only other thing I'd suggest is to add -m to your command line, so that you can run two copies (one for each remote). Then I guess you should be able to set up duplicate menu entries, one named for each of your desktops, and not worry about having to exit one when you want to check the other.