Hi,

I've been running seti@home since 2000 with wu's going to team Amateur Radio Operators. I had set setidriver & setispy to handle my accounts and left the computer on 24/7/365 since 2000 to help out. The only time I would deal with seti was when I would upgrade computers and change OSs.

Two days ago I went to look at the team averages for the first time this year and the web page was different and I am not shown on the team. Trying to get to my user stats didn't work as my password was no longer working. I had to have an account key sent to my email address. It shows my last statistics listed was Mar 15 2005 yet I submitted over 3,000 WUs since March. Where they went team wise is a mystery. What angers me is all this happened with no notification that "something" happened on March 15 to remove me from the team or at the least, to make that the last date on record for my submissions. That information came from my seti@home stat page.

Fortunately setispy has the proper number of submissions I've made but the berkeley web pages do not reflect that.

So I read on the seti@home page that on Dec 15 the traditional seti@home is closing down and everything is moving to BOINC. I download BOINC for the windows platform and it will not use my old login/password but it accepts the account key. I tell manager to use the seti@home website and I am assigned to Amateur radio operators.

So far so good...

Now I find I'm running a program I have seemingly no control over and no way to make changes. For instance;
under the projects tab there's tasks & websites listed on the left. It looks like this may be where I can make changes to the default operation. None of the buttons work. If I highlight the seti@home project or not, the buttons don't work nor is there any clue as to what to do if they don't.

Under the "help" tab it offers; boinc manager, boinc website and about boinc manager. The only button to work is about boinc manager (says version 5.2.7) but even clicking on the website url at the bottom of 'about boinc manager' does nothing.

This thing is running on my computer and won't let me adjust it or access any information from the projects page.

Lastly, for some reason all crunching was stopped. It said the user had suspended (forget the exact term used) processing and I had to shut the manager down & restart it for it to go back to working.

Is this the normal operation of BOINC?

FWIW, None of my considerable thousands of Wus over the last 5 years are reflected in BOINC and maybe that is the way it is but I was never notified of any changes in the program when on Mar 15 seemingly everything stopped record wise for me.

So if you have read this far & have a clue:

why is the user interface not working under projects?

How am I supposed to get help information if none of the help buttons work?

How are you supposed to make changes Ie: preference changes

Any idea what happened on March 15 and why I was removed from the team I was on (I was like 35th place out of 400+ participants)

Will my last 5 years work be reflected on BOINC someday or is that a will-o-the-wisp & gone forever?

This has not been an intuitive transition and the folks in charge need a class in how to inform their volunteers about changes they need to know about.

Thanks,

Gary

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CQ DX de KA1J

why is the user interface not working under projects?

That is a good question. because you wrote about SETI@spy, I believe you are using Windows as Operating System and I don't know any issue with Windows blocking this buttons.

BOINC only start the default browser, mostly the Internet Explorer, on my hosts for example the Firefox browser. My first(and at the moment only) idea is, that there is someething wrong with your configuration of the default browser.

How am I supposed to get help information if none of the help buttons work?

The best source for help on SETI@home and BOINC are the message boards on the SETI@home homepage. And there is a very good website with a lot of informations about BOINC and the projects (like SETI@home): BOINC wiki

How are you supposed to make changes Ie: preference changes

On the SETI@home website, as on all BOINC project websites, you will find link to the "Your account" area. There you can set your preferences. In BOINC wiki you may find a lot of information about the configuration, if you need it.

Any idea what happened on March 15 and why I was removed from the team I was on (I was like 35th place out of 400+ participants)

The migration from SETI@home Classic to SETI@home BOINC is a project specific thing, not a normal BOINC function. The SETI@home team has moved the existing SETI@home Classic accounts to BOINC in March 2005. This accounts will be updated after the 15. December 2005 to the last values. The BOINC credit system is different from the Classic system and so there is no transformation of WUs and CPU time, this is saved as frozen statistical information with the BOINC account. To use this migrated account, you have to get it on the SETI@home page. There is a link for SETI@home Classic users.

And the migrated account must be in the team, but as long as there are no BOINC credits collected on this account it is not to see on the team statistic. I think taht is the problem you write about.

Will my last 5 years work be reflected on BOINC someday or is that a will-o-the-wisp & gone forever?

Please see my above answer.

This has not been an intuitive transition and the folks in charge need a class in how to inform their volunteers about changes they need to know about.

I am sue they do their best, but it is more then difficulty and to much work for the less people. We all believe it should be working better, but thats all that is possible.

Greetings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler
Webmaster http://www.bonc.de/

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Jens,

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, I am using XP SP2 with Firefox as my default browser and an XP2600 processor. I use Nortoton Internet Security.

Tomorow I am putting into operation an Opteron 880 dual processor system but will be running the same XP software.

I have disabled Norton yet the buttons remain dead. Present and clickable but they do nothing whatsoever that I can see.

"BOINC only start the default browser, mostly the Internet Explorer, on my hosts for example the Firefox browser. My first(and at the moment only) idea is, that there is someething wrong with your configuration of the default browser."

I have no idea what this might be. My only modifications to the browser is to have Google advanced be the startup page.

In manager with the TAB buton under "work"; the show graphics button does work.


"The migration from SETI@home Classic to SETI@home BOINC is a project specific thing, not a normal BOINC function. The SETI@home team has moved the existing SETI@home Classic accounts to BOINC in March 2005."

Then Seti@home should have informed me that they were doing this. They had my email address and could have informed me. Perhaps this is a good enough reason to join a different team instead.

Thank you for all the replies you offered that I did not respond to. I will try and make changes based this way.

There seems to be a bug at least as far as how manager works on my computer. Not to be able to configure anything or get help from within the manager itself is not to me, a program I feel trust in.

All the best from Snowy Indiana

Gary

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CQ DX de KA1J

Then Seti@home should have informed me that they were doing this. They had my email address and could have informed me. Perhaps this is a good enough reason to join a different team instead.

I believe to remember a mail about this update long time ago, but I am not sure. May be it was the seti@home newsletter. But since 2002 this update and the end of SETI@home Classic is anounced in all boards, web pages and many news releaded to Berkeley and SETI@home.

And I know that a mailing and some info with the classic Client should happen too in the next time. I am not sure what happend if you have denied to get mail from SETI@home. I wouldn't care about this, but maybe Berkeley do. I don't know.

Gretings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler
Webmaster http://www.boinc.de/

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Then Seti@home should have informed me that they were doing this. They had my email address and could have informed me. Perhaps this is a good enough reason to join a different team instead.

I believe to remember a mail about this update long time ago, but I am not sure. May be it was the seti@home newsletter. But since 2002 this update and the end of SETI@home Classic is anounced in all boards, web pages and many news releaded to Berkeley and SETI@home.

And I know that a mailing and some info with the classic Client should happen too in the next time. I am not sure what happend if you have denied to get mail from SETI@home. I wouldn't care about this, but maybe Berkeley do. I don't know.

Gretings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler
Webmaster http://www.boinc.de/

I never tell a group I join not to allow the administrator to contact me. At least I never remember ever doing that in my 15 years on the Internet.

If they sent it, I'd have it and looking at my email address I use with SETI, there's nothing to me from them or BOINC. I did get a notice when I joined the forum here, that's the only seti related notice I have ever had except the ones you got setting up the classic client (email addy & password). The only thing I can say is it never came. FWIW,I do remember wanting to know if it was my work unit that was the one to have uncovered the proof of ETI so I'm sure I would have enabled this feature back in 2000.

As to the boards, web pages & all areas that discuss seti; I'm a Doctor & have so many irons in the fire that my time to browse forums is limited. I ran setidriver, set the folders to store 50 work units and I just forgot it. The only time I'd think about what's going on with seti was when I'd see the antenna icon upside down in the work tray & then I'd discover there was a problem with the Berkeley connection. Other than that I set it & forgot all about seti.

I am sure you & most everyone else here are just users but ones who have a hobby interest in the day-to-day events surrounding the project. Thankfully there are people with such appreciations for without them I and many others surely would have no clue and remove the software from our systems.

It would be nice to know how to express concerns to those with the ability to make a change.

Thank you again for your kind replies,

Gary

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CQ DX de KA1J

First off, welcome to BOINC. A little quick background you may already know, but other new users may not... BOINC is not SETI and vice-versa; BOINC is a platform allowing you to volunteer for multiple distributed computing projects, of which SETI is one.

SETI "Classic", which started in 1999, is still running, and will finally be shut down about December 15th. Any work you have done on Classic WILL be brought forward to SETI BOINC after the final shutdown - a "preliminary" batch was brought over last March, and that's what you see in your SETI account at the moment. You will NOT "lose" any results done between March and now, but they won't show up on your BOINC stats page until after Classic shutdown.

Because Classic and BOINC are different things, with different websites and different statistics systems, team membership in Classic does not necessarily automatically transfer to BOINC. You may need to re-join the team here. Any Classic credits you have done I'm sure went to the team on the Classic pages, but will not show up on the team records on the BOINC pages. Once you have done even just a couple of WUs, I would suggest signing up at one of the third-party stats sites, which will track your individual and team credits for you. I use www.boincstats.com because I like their display methods best, but I use www.boincsynergy.com for my "sig" because I like their sigs better; you don't have to join their teams to use their stats, you can continue to give your credits to your current team.

Because of the impending shutdown, many of the Classic SETI web pages are messed up or inaccessible. It is hard to point you to anyplace that you can verify your Classic results are still valid. The main "Classic" page is available at http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/. One hint that SOMETIMES works, if you are trying to get to an "old" SETI page, is to put a "2" manually in the url - for example, my classic team stats TRIES to go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_4866.html, which does not work. However, http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_4866.html does work.

You have the misfortune of coming to BOINC _just_ before the Classic shutdown, kindof unintentionally, rather than either with the masses or because of personal interest earlier, as those of us here now did. An emailing is planned shortly to inform everyone of the change. You could have remained on Classic until then, had you not hit the bad webpage issue. However, you are probably lucky to come when you did, and avoid the crush! The transition at the moment is, believe it or not, MUCH easier than it was even a few months ago... BOINC is a much more complex system, and while everyone is trying to make it as easy as possible, it simply can't be as simple as Classic was.

There is a lot of good help in the various project boards, and a lot of good documentation in the Wiki. Hopefully you'll be comfortable in BOINC very shortly, and can go back to just letting the software do it's thing in the background, without requiring any of your time to manage things. And you may find that there are projects besides SETI that you wish to donate some of your CPU hours to (including many with medical purposes, such as Rosetta@home, or Predictor@home, etc.; see the Wiki.)

EDIT:: I answered the BOINC-webpage-button question in your other thread, or rather failed to answer it... as for reaching those who can make changes, well, they DO read these boards, although as you can imagine, they typically only speak up when none of us can help AND when it appears to be a widespread problem rather than a single user. Nonetheless, I would bet that within the next 3-4 days, at least two of the developers and a couple of the administrators, will have read your concerns and noted them.

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Bill,

Thank you for a very nice and time consuming reply.

Ah yes, it was clear that BOINC & SETI are two different things. The computer at work is dedicated to folding so for the moment I prefer to designate my personal computer to seti only, at least at this time.

Untill I get BOINC running smoothly and as expected on my computer I can not think of adding a new variable into the mix.

So far I have run into far more stumbling blocks getting this running than I would have expected. At the moment my last work unit apparently was not quite right and it's processing was stopped. Same for the next one. I have tried to get another wu but under projects tab it says communications deferred for 10 minutes.

At the moment this seems to need more babysitting than a Pedi unit.

hopefully it will resolve itself, I see nothing I can do to make it work as it seems like it should be.

I will re-read the wiki

Thank you again for the kind response.

Gary

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CQ DX de KA1J