SETI@Home Caching with SETIQ.
(Based on v 3.03.2.2b)
(Warning the images total 3Mb on this page)
1. Introduction1.1 Features1.1.1 Star map with Work Unit Progress
1.1.2 Overall Stats Report
1.1.3 Flash Animated Star map
1.1.4 Work Unit info on the Star map
1.1.5 Connections to and from SETI@Home
1.1.6 Work Unit Levels within your queue
1.1.7 Average Time to Complete a unit for all clients using the queue
1.1.8 Results returned to SETI
1.1.9 Results per day
1.1.10 User Status Report
1.1.11 Queue Status Report
1.1.12 Client Status Report
1.1.13 Overall Summary Report
1.1.14 Work unit status
2. Installation
2.1 Download and Install
2.2 SETIQ Setup
2.2.1 SETIQ Settings
2.2.2 Server Settings
2.2.3 Connect your SETI Clients to SETIQ
2.2.4 Queue Settings
2.2.5 HTTP Server Settings
2.2.6 Install SETIQueue as a Service in NT/2000/XP
3. Administration
3.1 Login
3.2 Change Server Settings
3.3 User Settings
3.4 Maintenance Tools
SETIQ is a caching program
designed to cache work units for the SETI
Project. It works by downloading work units from the SETI@Home
server and queuing them so your SETI@Home
clients can connect and process them. SETIQ
is most suited to working in a networked environment, however it will work happily
in a standalone situation. The program effectively acts as a proxy server for
you machines and passes the work units to the relevant clients across the network.
The server can also distribute stats to any machine on your network using a
web browser and be administered remotely. The stats offered by SETIQ
are very comprehensive. It will support multiple SETI
UserID's and have a queue dedicated to each of them with stats for each client
within each queue. The console of the server has a Star Map of the sky that
the Arecibo telescope can cover and puts all the work units received/sent by
SETIQ on the map with different
icons whether each unit is complete,late or in progress. SETIQ also has the
ability to search for "sweet" work units. This is really designed
for fast connections where you can get a series of VLAR (long processing time
with windows clients) work units so SETI will allow a delay between downloading
these units so that you don't end up with a whole load of them at once. You
also have option of routing VLAR units to *Nix (Linux etc) clients that will
process them more efficiently than the windows client. The program supports
several types of Internet connection and can be configured to work through a
firewall/proxy or use your dial up networking connection to connect the SETI
server at times of your choice. It also has the option of manually connecting
whenever you feel like doing so.
There are many features including graphs of just about every statistic of the
work that passes through your queue. These are all accessible using a web browser.
Here are some screen shots from my server, demonstrating the main features.
1.1.1 Star map with Work Unit Progress
The star map showing your seti Work units and is accessed from the console by double clicking on the SETIQ icon in your systray.
All of the features from here on in are available through a web browser.
The stats page shows your overall stats for your SETIQ
installation.
There is also a Flash enabled animated sky map available using a web browser. Each work unit in progress currently in progress has a rotating disk to tell you it is in progress. Moving the mouse over the discs give the tool tips shown in next section. All the following screens are taken from the web browser interface with SETIQ. We'll come to how to access that in the installation section.
1.1.4 Work Unit info on the Star map
The star map gives information of all the work units that have passed or are passing through your queue. You can view the information by passing your mouse over the symbols on the map. Tool tips will then appear with the appropriate information. The key below shows the meaning of the symbols.
Key to Symbols
Pending (currently processing)
Queued (awaiting processing)
Pending Result and Ready to Return to SETI@Home
1.1.5 Connections to and from SETI@Home
1.1.6 Work Unit Levels within your queue
1.1.7 Average Time to Complete a unit for all clients using the queue
1.1.8 Results returned to SETI
This page shows the number of users for your Server.
This page shows the number of Queues on your server.
This page shows the number of clients as well as the work units in progress
or overdue. In order to get progress shown as bars you need to click the show
WU detail at the bottom of the page!.
The summary screen shows all your current info on one page.
The info under the work unit heading is self explanatory. You can get the information on all the units waiting, pending, results and a history. You can click on the sky map or flash map at the bottom of the page to show these units on the map, again you get tool tips to show detailed info.
2. Installation and Setup
2.1 Download and Installation
First you must download the files for installation.Download it from here unzip and install. SETIQ is installed by default into the startup directory. Go to Start-->Programs-->Startup-->SETIQueue to run the program. You will be presented with the Star Map shown above. We now need to enter various information to configure SETIQ. To do this go to setting on the menu then choose general to bring up the settings applet.
Here you need to enter your email address, SETI Name, Maximum and Minimum Queue depth. I usually set the minimum to 7 days and Max to 10. The SETI servers send out units again (for checking, possibly several times) to another user after 7 days, however you will still get credit for work units after that time. This will allow you to set the maximum number of days to cover a long vacation, there is a maximum which we'll come to later on. I leave all the debugging unchecked as that was put in for beta testing. Check the email on revision changes and start minimized if you want to minimize to the tray on startup.
Add the IP address/Subnet mask of the machine you have installed on (In my case the server address is 192.168.0.1). If your machine is standalone add the IP address 127.127.127.0. The default port is 5517. (I use 5512 as that's the port the previous version used so all my clients were running port 5512). Choose your type of internet connection and your proxy address/port, username and password if required (NOTE: If you are using a proxy you need to choose the appropriate type from the drop down menu. Uncheck the manual connect box, Check both the override pass through operation and override time for empty queues as this will allow setiqueue to download the initial queue. If you want to manually connect SETIQ check the manual connect box.
2.2.3 Connect your SETI Clients to SETIQ THIS NEXT SECTION IS IMPORTANT!
You are now ready to point your SETI clients at SETIQ to download some work units. SETIQ will not initialize UNTIL a client has connected to it. Make sure that you machine is connected to the internet also!! SETIQ needs only one client in order to establish a queue. There are several ways to set up the clients to connect to SETIQ.
Using SETIDriver.
You can use setidriver to get the WU's from SETIQ by setting the desired cache size to 1 (If you don't want SETIDriver to cache as well to give you a double buffer) by checking the Auto Transmit option and setting the proxy setting to 192.168.0.1 and the port to 5517 (assuming a default install of SetiQueue and hence port number). You would need to run the existing SETIDriver cache to 0 first before changing the proxy setting, or install it in a different directory from your current setidriver install.
Using the normal SETI Client.
If you are using the screen saver I suggest that you download the Command Line Client as it will reduce your time per work unit considerably. However you can add the proxy settings show below to the screen saver config. To point the client at setiq you can use the command line switch -proxy 192.168.0.1:5517 or create a batch file to do this for you as follows. For the purposes of the batch file the client is renamed to seti.exe.
If the machine is standalone you can use seti.exe -proxy localhost:5517.
c:
cd\
cd seti
seti.exe -proxy 192.168.0.1:5517
You can download an example batch file here.
Installing SETI as a Service and connecting to SETIQ.
Here's my guide for setting up SETI as a service.
Once the client has connected and collected its unit you can proceed to the next step.
SETIQ works out its queue size based on results per day over a period of time (14 days) however to ensure you get a decent cache size you can override this by going settings-->queue setting on the file menu to bring up the following applet.
Here you need to initialize your queue to cover your production, the best way to do this is enter a value into the max override box (maximum value 50) and multiply that by the maximum number of days you entered in the Maximum queue depth in the settings box above to get your estimated production. Once your have established a queue SETI will offer suggested values based upon your Results per day. I would queue a decent amount initially (7 days or so) to allow SETIQueue to work this out, once this is done I set the values back to zero and let SETIQueue do its thing. If you are planning to queue more than 500 min, 800 max SETIQ will report an error. To avoid this you need to modify the user.ini file in the user.#### directory as shown below.
This applet enables access to the SETIQ http server for stats and sets the admin password to allow you to use the remote admin features via a web browser as detailed in the next section.
Before starting SetiQueue as service be sure to run the application interactively once and set the port # for the SetiQueue Queue Server, and the HTTP administration password.
Once you have performed the normal SetiQueue install, you can run it as a service by performing the following:
To uninstall, stop the service, and run "setiqueue -u".
All the settings can be changed via a web browser. There are some settings that aren't available from the console and have to be changed via the web browser.To connect to the seti http server point your browser at http://192.168.0.1:5512 (or whatever your IP is). You will then be presented with the screen below.
Login using the either the user name adminstrator or admin and the password you set in the http settings above. Hit enter or click login once you have entered you details.
Once you have logged in click on the settings link under general. Go to the bottom of the page and click on edit settings. This brings up the screen below. Most of the values are self evident but the key settings are :-
1) SETI Processing time - With this option enabled and the times set, SETIQ will connect to the SETI server only during these times. This is useful to allow you to connect to the server when the Berkeley campus is using less traffic (i.e. outside normal hours).
2) Inter-WU download gap - Leave this value at 0 as this is the delay between downloading work units. E.g., if you have a fast connection seti@home tends to give you 5 or 6 work units all from the same sky location and angle range.
3) Inter-WU VLAR gap - If SETIQ downloads a VLAR work unit (long processing
time for Windows) this is the delay between getting another work unit to allow
more VLAR to be distributed to other users.
4) Look for sweet WU's - This should be enabled. This means that if SETIQ downloads a High angle work unit (Fast processing) it will immediately download another and override the settings in 2)
NOTE: You must be logged in to modify these settings. Log in before carrying out this section. To get to this screen click on reports-->users-->username then edit settings at the bottom. This is the screen where you can set the VLAR routing. This means this queue will send VLAR units to non-winnt clients as they take longer to process this particular type of unit. The screen is shown below. You can also change the queue and client settings (name, size of queue) by choosing them from the menu and edit settings from the bottom of the page.
To get this screen click on the tools link under the admin section. This will bring up the screen below. Type either admin or adminstrator as the user name and the password you entered earlier during the setup.
These tools are self explanatory, hopefully, but you can drop me a note if they are not! :-)
For more info check out Ken's website.