Frankie 2012

[Flying Fox]

To me VirtualBox is still a step below VMware. I tried to keep an open mind but once I tried it, I uninstalled almost immediately. The experience simply wasn't that good. I will probably give it another 6-12 months before I try again to see if they have improved. But Hyper-V on Windows 8 Pro is catching up.

[BIF]

...I'm being stubborn, in that I really do want to keep this Q9300 overclocked at 3Ghz (from its native 2.5Ghz) for performance reasons. Lots of good people have noted that this invites instability and that could be the root cause of the lockups during overnight Folding...

Crashes that happen overnight only and never during the day? Is it possible that your AC or air circulation stops at night?

Here's my train of thought: I wonder if maybe during the day your hardware is running just this side of its heat failure threshold, and it doesn't fail because you have some circulation (ceiling fans? AC? People walking around?). Maybe at night when your house, office, or garage air circulation goes to sleep, the still air is incapable of removing those last few heat calories from your heatsinks and... BONK! You're down.

Just a thought...

[arpstorm]

To me VirtualBox is still a step below VMware.

I've actually had tremendously good luck with VirtualBox running on an OS X host machine. On the same machine I run VMWare Fusion and Parallels and they are all solid. But under Linux as a host OS I'm not experiencing the same goodness in VirtualBox. I am willing to allow this is rather anecdotal and want to spend some quality time with VirtualBox - after I take the step of restoring the BIOS to its default settings to remove the overclocking.

Now I have had excellent results with running KVM under Ubuntu and should probably just go that route. KVM is not as fully featured as the commercial VMWare and Parallels packages but KVM is like a rock. So is VMware's free ESXi type 1 hypervisor but that takes over the machine and I like my desktop machine to stay that way.

[arpstorm]

@BIF

I should set up a little temperature recording system to monitor the room temperature. It's an unheated room in the carport but it's very well insulated and the heat of the Folding farm keeps the room shirt-sleeve comfortable. That little USB-based thermometer sitting in a box will come in handy after all.

[BIF]

Hmmm, the carport probably gets cooler at night, not warmer. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

I forget if you said that system was Linux or Windows. If Windows, you might be able to find the time of failure in the event logs. It might help narrow things down; evening or early morning when the sun is shining in a window or on the garage door? Or sometime after midnight? Or maybe random?

Squirrel!

[arpstorm]

@BIFF

The machine runs Ubuntu 12.04 and the logfiles live in /var/log. I did check them but the system did not panic, it just froze up, and Linux was unable to execute any instructions after that to report. There are no bread crumbs. It's been Folding fine since I got up this morning and restarted the client.

The Q9300 box will complete one final 2300 point job for TRFrankenbot in 5 hours, just in time for it to count for today. The MacPro will complete a small 1217 point job in 1.5 hours for TRFrankentbot.

Go Frankie 2012!

[PhilipMcc]

Hooray ! We made it over 4 million with a few hours and a few points to spare.

[Flying Fox]

Will reach our highest point total on a single day today? Can we do 250K points by the end of today?

Congrats everyone!