I am getting this message when manager tries to D/L a new wu:

11/17/2005 3:47:29 PM|SETI@home|Unrecoverable error for result 22ja04ab.11016.10162.136088.9_0 (Maximum disk usage exceeded)

No clue what this means, I have 6 gigs of HD available, no work unit was in operation (the last wu completed and this error kept showing up an no new unit downloaded. I had to shut off BOINC and then restart it over again. Then it downloaded a wu but it's stalled saying "Computation error"

So much for intuitive...

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CQ DX de KA1J

Gary,

I've read your other thread and I've seen the information that Bill & Jens have given you and I can see that you are almost there. A lot of us have gone through the transition from Seti Classic to projects (including but not limited to Seti) running on BOINC.

One of the deficiencies with classic seti was that it really needed a lot of add-ons, like Seti Driver or Seti Queue to do cacheing and SetiSpy to show you all the details you liked to see. Another deficiency was no ability to run and share with even a different Seti science application, let alone totally different projects. To get around these and other shortcomings, it was decided to put all of the non-science functions like cache management, scheduling of work, handling of credits and stats, uploading, downloading, reporting, updating, etc, into a single, specific framework called BOINC. All a specific science project had to do was take that standard framework and use it. The scientists only have to write and worry about the science code. BOINC handles the rest.

This is a big benefit to both the scientists and the users. It is improving all the time but the real problem for people who have only set up classic seti previously, is that it requires a change of mindset. No longer do you have to micromanage things to get and store sufficient work to take you past weekends or server outages or slicing of fibre optic cables. What did you do in that big outage? These days, BOINC simply switches to an alternative project and carries on. BOINC is designed to be fault tolerant and to work around all sorts of potential problems that the classic seti users had to think about for themselves.

BOINC is designed to be "Set and Forget". The most counterintuitive thing for the classic seti only person is that your preferences are not managed locally. They are managed through your account page on the website of the project(s) you support. If you support several and set up accounts on the various websites using precisely the same email address, you will be recognised across all projects and any change you make on one will be transmitted to the others. This turns out to be one of the convenient aspects of BOINC for people who wish to eventually have several computers supporting several projects. For computers on a LAN you can really have simple centralised management and it can be very interesting to watch what happens and quite fun.

For now, you have an account on Seti and two machines currently crunching but you are getting disk usage errors on both. All that is probably needed is a simple preference adjustment to solve this. I imagine you have installed BOINC in the standard place C:\\Program Files\\BOINC\\? Does your disk have multiple partitions like C:, D:, E:, etc? If it does, how big is C: and more importantly how much free space is on C:? BOINC needs to see a reasonable amount of free space on the partition in which it is installed, irrespective of how big the physical disk actually is.

If you can reply back here about your disk layout, I'll be happy to talk you through everything you need to configure in your preferences to get you running smoothly. Here is a rough summary of what you can check right now:-

• Use your browser to go here. You may need to supply your login details if you haven't already saved them in your browser.
  
• When you get to your account page, click on "View or edit general preferences".
  
• You will see five items in a section called "Disk and Memory Usage".
  
• Make sure 1st is large, 2nd is small, 3rd is large, 4th is 60 secs, 5th is large. My five are 10GB, 0.2GB, 75%, 60 secs, 75%.
  
• If you need or would like to change, then simply click the "Edit preferences" link. When you make changes make sure you "Update" at the bottom of the section.
  

After changing on the website, simply open up your BOINC Manager window on each machine, click the project name on the project tab and the greyed out "Update" button will become active. Just click it to have your local BOINC client read the new changes from the website. If you did nothing, this last bit would happen automatically when the local client contacted the project servers anyway but for changes like this, I like to do them immediately.

Good luck with sorting out your problems!!

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Cheers,
Gary.