Messages, Discovering the Meaning of The Message Tab's Contents

From Unofficial BOINC Wiki

[edit] General

With default General Preferences, each hour that your machine runs, the BOINC Client Software should switch between the SETI@Home Project and the Einstein@Home Project automatically. When that happens you will see a message about it in the Messages Tab of the BOINC Manager and you will see under the Work Tab that one project is suspended or preempted and the other is running and this will change back and forth. This is perfectly normal behavior for the BOINC Client Software. If you see a message you don't understand, you can always look it up in the the Unofficial BOINC Wiki. From the Main Page of the Unofficial BOINC Wiki and you can type in the keywords from message into the search box and this should find all references to messages where these keywords are used. They will be presented as a list and you can click on the most appropriate looking "hit" to get the full details about the message.

By doing this regularly, your knowledge and understanding of what is going on are bound to improve. At first it might seem like "geek" words are being answered by even more "geek" and "nerd" words but you have shown a capacity to persevere and assimilate knowledge so I'm sure you will eventually "get there" :).

As an example of what to do now that you have a client error for your first Einstein@Home Result, try out the following:

• Go to the "Your Account" Page on the Einstein@Home Web Site and click on the "view" link by the line "Results".
• Click on the Result ID for the Result listed as "Client error" (also see "Results For User" Page for an explanation of each line's contents).
• You will get a page of info about the Result including the actual error message (also see "Result" Page for an explanation of each line's contents).
• Here is part of yours:

core_client_version 4.45 message WU download error: couldn't get input files: file_xfer_error - file_name - l1_1097.5 error code -200

So now we have enough information to chase this up in the Unofficial BOINC Wiki. The keywords in the message are "Work Unit download error" so type those into the search box and click "search". You will get a list of 20 "hits" displayed. They are all numbered so check out each numbered line and notice how #2 has the exact words!! So click on the text of the title line #2. You will get a page of examples of where this message turns up. Read the page and try to get a feel for the format and for how the information is presented. Try to find an example that exactly matches your error message. And there it is, the second example with this heading:

"Unrecoverable Error - WU Download Error: Couldn't Get Input Files - Code -200"

Now you can read a line by line explanation of the message. After that you will see further links including one to the "error codes". If you follow that link you will get a table of error codes which hopefully might tell you more about the precise nature of the error. In this case the code -200 is listed as " wrong size"

So having digested all of the above, here is my best guess as to what caused your client error:-

When you first installed the BOINC Client Software, a large (6-8MB) data file has to be downloaded from the Project's Data Server. In your case, the name of this file is "l1_1097.5" as shown in the Error Message. Once that file is downloaded, the actual Work Units that you crunch have to be "sliced out" from this data file using small sets of instructions that are sent by the Scheduling Server each time you need new work. You received the small "instructions" but there was a problem in sending the large data file and you only got part of it ("wrong size"). This would probably be due to the nature of your Internet connection. Maybe things are a bit "unreliable" with Internet connections in Tehran :). By the way, what sort of connection do you have? Maybe you accidentally terminated the connection. So if the transfer of the large data file didn't go to completion then the work unit would "error out" and you would get the sort of message you did.

I hasten to add that this is all just surmise on my part based on a quick look at what is freely available for me to see. I haven't actually come across this problem previously so I don't know if my analysis is correct.

Since the second Work Unit is now listed as crunching away, I assume that eventually the BOINC Daemon sorted out the problem itself and finished off the download of the large data file. By clicking on the second Result I can see that it is indeed sliced from the same large data file and not a different one.

You can also look up the Messages using the "list" of all known Messages using the link off of the first page of the Unofficial BOINC Wiki entitled "BOINC Messages" (look for that line under the heading "The BOINC System").

See if you can follow all the above commentary. If you can, it should help you learn the skills you need to start understanding the messages that come along from time to time.

Good luck!!!