1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
|
prime-net for DEBIAN
--------------------
The following notes are provided to document some aspects specific to
Debian's configuration and in the hope that you will find them useful.
But they are no replacement for prime-net's 'readme.txt.gz' file which
is much more detailed.
* To configure the client just use prime-net-config.
If you want to participate to one of the ECM or P-1 projects you will
need to do more work. In particular you will have to download the
known factors tables from the mersenne.org site. For more details see
'http://www.mersenne.org/ecm.htm'.
* When you start the client via /etc/init.d/prime-net, it runs
in /var/lib/prime-net/, and logs are sent to /var/log/prime-net.log.
* Make sure you review the rules for participation to the EFF contest. See
the prize.html file.
* prime-net needs to connect to the server to report the results and query
for more work. If you connect to the Internet regularly, say about once
every other day, and you stay connected for 5 minutes or more each time it
should be ok. Otherwise you will know that it wants to connect to the
server when you have regular low frequency CPU usage 'waves'.
But if you want to play it safe you can arrange for prime-net to have an
opportunity to connect to the server each time you connect to the Internet.
The client exchanges very little data with the server and does so rather
infrequently so this is not going to keep you connected for long (just
seconds). Usually one way to achieve this is to place the following code
in '/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/20prime-net' (but it may be different if you use diald
or some other means to connect to the Internet).
#!/bin/sh
cd /var/lib/prime-net && su daemon -c "./prime-net -c"
* prime-net is not multithreaded so if you happen to have a multiprocessor
machine you may want to modify the startup script and start more than one
instance of prime-net using the '-aN' option so that they use different INI
and output files.
* Even though prime-net runs at a very low priority it will still take a
few CPU cycles, 5% or less, when you run other CPU intensive processes.
This is usually negligible but if you find this to be a problem you can
try one of the following two solutions:
- Patch your kernel using the 'sched_idle' patch. With this patch
processes with the lowest priority will never be run. You should be
able to find it for 2.0 kernels over at Linux Mama:
ftp://ftp.linuxmama.com/pub/2.0/sched_idle.bz2
- Use loadwatcher to suspend prime-net whenever the load rises above a
given level. This is only useful if the load spikes are long enough.
You can find loadwatcher at the following URL:
http://www.multimania.com/fgouget/distributed/loadwatcher.c
You may also use loadwatcher if you run both distributed-net and
prime-net, so that there is always one running should one of them run
out of work, but want only one of them to run at any given time. In
this case you would use loadwatcher with the options '-r 0.9 -s 1.9' to
control the process which should normally be suspended.
* If you uninstall prime-net ('dpkg -r prime-net') you will notice that it
leaves behind the '/var/lib/prime-net' directory. dpkg will warn you about
that but this is the expected behavior (at least for now). The reason is
that prime-net stores many files there, in particular the files that keep
track of the progress made, and we certainly don't want to lose these files
each time we upgrade prime-net.
If you decide to definitely remove prime-net from your computer
('dpkg --purge prime-net') this directory will be properly deleted,
even though you will still get the dpkg warning.
* Be sure to visit http://entropia.com/ips/accounts.html to check on your
progress and see the general project's statistics.
-- Francois Gouget <fgouget@multimania.com>
|
