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The Ultimate FAH Network Install is born...

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Wedo

Senior Kitty Power!
Joined
Oct 31, 2001
Location
Lost Angeles
Howdy Folders,

Say you're sitting there at your work, school, or local Internet Cafe and the admin says "Sure, please install FAH to all 200 of my machines, but can you do it in one minute? I have to go get some nachos."

You open your sweaty palm and look fondly at your USB flash drive keychain fob which holds your edited One-Click and wonder if "it's in you." Then a wave of cold reality set in as you know that there is not a set of Nike's in the world that will bring your butt across this whole room of blinking goodness fast enough.

As a tear forms on the corner of your eye you fall to your knees, tilt your head back, and cry out with arms raised to the heavens, "Why have you done this to meeeeeeeeeeee.....?" You wonder why the folding gods have dangled this carrot in front of you only to snatch it away for a Nachos Supreme with a Diet Coke.

Never Fear, Wedo's Here!

Introducing THE most kick arse install that has ever been brought forth from the loins of my secret underground dungeon.

-----------Neon Flashing Lights Here ----------------

The FAH Deployer Version 5.02

-----------Que Jay Leno Band------------------------

what, What, WHAT, you ask??? A simple way to install FAH on a network??? Like mana from heaven the warmth begins to rain over you.

One of our members (who shall remain nameless until he decides it's time for you to know) is about to throw down with a Mega-Borg. I'm talking about the kind of borg that would cause a rolling black out here in California. So he PM's me and asks if I have an easy way to install the One-Click on a network that contains more computers than politicians have lies. The One-Click can't really run as a network install without some advanced Admin skills taking advantage of Active Directory and the Group Policy editor. Even then you wouldn't be able to pick the machines you wanted to install FAH on and when the install would be initiated.

After a few hours of pounding the keys I have completely revamped an old network install from The Ultimate Install sticky and created a five step deployer that will enable an admin to install FAH as a service, with flags, on 1 to 1000 computers in about 30 seconds (longer for larger networks).

This can also be used to update your entire home network in one simple process as it will install FAH on any Windows workgroup or domain that you have admin rights and permission to do so.

The greatest thing about this install is that you have complete control over every aspect of installation. Say you want it to install on the computers for the reception office, but not to the web-server, no problem or you want to install half of the computers with one FAH username and the others with another name, again, no problem. You can also manipulate the client.cfg for all of the computers at once prior to running the final Install.bat or install some with one client.cfg, then others with an edited version (say to turn BigPackets on with some rigs, but not others).

Whoops, I think I just pee'd myself in all the excitement....

Anyway, download it from here and read the readme.txt!!!! I cannot stress this enough as you have in your hands a powerful tool that will add files, install a service, and edit the registry on every computer in your network... please use wisely, read the directions, and get permission first.
 
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w00r!! Thanks big time Wedo for taking my request :)

This here people is a dedicated BORGAGE MAN! :clap:
 
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Exactelly how many GHZ are you borging? For 32 right?
But wow wedo... your amazing!
I gotta check this out to figure out how it installs over the network without anyone doing anything to each machine...
 
I just gave it a test run on my lan.....ITS A GO! So now that I have updated everything on my lan to 5.02 the borging shall begin.

I'm not sure exactly how much power will be coming our way as I'm not the sole person responsible, its a buddy of mine, who shall remain nameless unless he decides to speak, but he got permission from his school's admin for asimalation... I mean borging ;)

And everything I do is for team 32 :D
 
*watches for jump in PPD of members*

this is for team 32, right? plz tell me it is... :(

'n I'm sure I'll have more questions later(like what if there are diff. pw's for admins in diff parts of the network) but I'll read the readme before I formally ask any
 
Here's a snipet from the readme.txt to give you all an idea of what's going on with this bad @$$ borg tool:

Step 1. Edit the client.cfg in the deployment directory with notepad and edit "Wedo" and replace it with your fah username.

Step 2. Edit the computers.vbs file by right clicking and hit "Edit".

-----Editing the computers.vbs----

Where it states workgroup below change this to your domain name or workgroup name.

Set object=GetObject("WinNT://workgroup")

eg, if my domain or workgroup was Geo-Corp i would change this to

set object=GetObject("WinNT://Geo-Corp")

----------------------------------

Step 3. Run the computers.vbs. It will take a moment to find all the computers on your network and you will get a pop-up notifying you of completion. It will then create a file called "computer.txt" in your C:\temp directory (make sure you have one before running the app). Use this file for the next step.


Step 4. Copy the file c:\temp\computer.txt you just created to the directory this readme is in, which will be the directory you run the fah-install.bat from as well. Edit the computer.txt so you remove any computers you dont want in there (eg boss's machine, PDC, BDC's, linux boxes running samba, mission critical app servers, file-servers, you get the point).

Step 5. Run the fah-install.bat wait till it completes, then sit back and relax, knowing that you just installed Folding@Home accross multiple machines and set it up as a service all from the comfort of your office chair. :)

I'm going to go back to doing the happy dance... "tappity tappity tap tap tap"
 
MLMIB said:
this is for team 32, right? plz tell me it is... :(

Of course :D I'm not working against my fellow team members!

Its very straight forward... I took it upon myself to be the guinea pig and did my home lan, it was all done in a short while.
 
now if WEDO could do this so I can do it remotley without any intervention from people on there machines...ahh well so much for this idea..maybe when my package arives Ic an get my minifarm up and give it a whirl...excellent job WEDo! Once again you have saved me lots and lots of work!
 
JDXNC,

Hmm I am the one who PM'ed you to ask Wedo about it.
So it all started with me!

Tut Tut JDXNC.
 
musawi said:
JDXNC,

Hmm I am the one who PM'ed you to ask Wedo about it.
So it all started with me!

Tut Tut JDXNC.

You didn't ask me to ask Wedo about it.... you didn't know who to ask so I found the best person for the job ;)

As long as you borg all those rigs for team 32 it doesn't matter what user name they are under or who is responsible for it all :)

Now what are you waiting for.... commence borging! :cool:
 
I have a class with the science teacher on Wednesday I will ask him what he thinks about it. Hopefully then I can talk to the head teacher. So until Wednesday keep your hands crossed, though when the teacher was reading it, he liked it a lot and mentioned SETI (useless). So he knows how it works.
 
WOOT! Great job Wedo! This will help everyone. I've got a humongous potential borg that just got a lot easier because of this. Thanks.

Clint
 
Where do you get your hosting from Wedo? At any rate, if you ever need any more hosting, PM me, I'd be glad to help host your one-click and this new installer, I would imagine you see quite a bit of bandwidth usage?
 
Mr. Chambers said:
Where do you get your hosting from Wedo? At any rate, if you ever need any more hosting, PM me, I'd be glad to help host your one-click and this new installer, I would imagine you see quite a bit of bandwidth usage?

Thank you for the offer, but Nik and I have our own managed dedicated server from Liquidweb that hosts my personal site and about 20 other sites of our clients. We have 1600GB of transfer each month so the One-Click and such doesn't even make a dent. :D
 
Wedo said:
Thank you for the offer, but Nik and I have our own managed dedicated server from Liquidweb that hosts my personal site and about 20 other sites of our clients. We have 1600GB of transfer each month so the One-Click and such doesn't even make a dent. :D

Holy bajesus, that's a whole lot of transfer bandwidth! :eek:

Excellent work on the new installer. Would this work on my college's network? If I would even attempt to approach the network guys, it would HAVE to be easy to install and/or uninstall, with hundreds and hundreds of computers involved.

I'm not entirely sure of their setup, but most of the machines are Win2k, with WinXP being installed recently on some (I think they're slowly moving everything over to XP Pro). I do know you have a username and password that you must put in in order to log onto a machine, so perhaps the client boxes are just dummy boxes, because I don't think you can even save anything to the hard drive...
 
If the machines are thin clients, only processing locally when logged in but using apps from a server, then you can't install FAH on those boxes. Furthermore, if the network is setup so that the HD gets wiped clean every night and ghosted the next morning, no FAH on that either.

However, you can use this installer for a network of with the normal client/server setup which contains hundreds and hundreds of machines.

Here's the breakdown on what happens:

1. A .vbs script goes out and finds every computer on the network and puts it into a .txt file.
2. The Installer.bat runs and uses that names of the computers from the .vbs output to install FAH.

There's editing that can be done all over the place, but that is the general drift of what happens.
 
jw how bad the network strain is during this install, and if anyone knows how much average bandwith is used per computer per day for folding....so I have some hard numbers to approach with, not just "it dosn't use that much bandwith..."
 
Mr. Chambers said:
Holy bajesus, that's a whole lot of transfer bandwidth! :eek:
He forgot to mention 240GB of space too... anyway, great job on the installer Wedo, can't wait to try it out (with my username of course :D).
 
the only problem I have and these are minor things for most, but a BIG stopping point for me. the vbs script is halted by AVS secondly the pop-up window. if both of these could be stopped we could crawl to the top. machines around the world would be folding ;)
 
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