BOINC

I’ve been running SETI@Home on a Windows box for years. Recently, they’ve switched from a dedicated processing program to the BOINC project, which lets you volunteer CPU cycles to projects other than SETI.

I installed the Linux version 5.2.13 of BOINC per the instructions.

The BOINC client failed to download any work units until I opened port 123 UPD in and out on my firewall.

Then the client was running, but the BOINC manager (GUI) wouldn’t connect to it. I kept getting a dialog box that said The password you have provided is incorrect, please try again. The solution that I found was this:

su -
su boinc
cd /var/lib/boinc
/usr/local/BOINC/boincmgr

I have BOINC installed in /usr/local. Switching to root first is necessary because the boinc user has no password.

-or-

(as root)
$ cd /var/lib/boinc
$ echo somepassword > gui_rpc_auth.cfg
$ service boinc restart

(as any user)
$ cd
$ echo somepassword > gui_rpc_auth.cfg
$ /var/lib/boinc/boincmgr