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December 18, 2005
SETI, BOINC and Solaris 2.7
I've been running SETI@home on and off since Dec 16, 2000 and yesterday the project switched over to a new software package called BOINC, which is designed to allow people to donate CPU power to a variety of different projects, including SETI.
I've spent a bit of time today converting one of my machines over to the new software.
The basic idea of the SETI project is to record incoming radio signals from outside the solar system and use a huge collection of computers to analyze those signals to see if any of them seem like broadcasts from intelligences, instead of natural radio transmissions.
So far no such signals have been found, but its fun to participate.
Normally I run that sort of software on my Sun machines, as they stay on almost all of the time and I don't want to slow down my main machine (a G5 Mac). I didn't have any trouble at all with the old SETI client, but the new client does have some issues with Solaris 7 (an older version of Solaris, but still seen on a lot of machines).
Many folks will have gcc installed on these machines in the /usr/local directory. Some applications (and the BOINC client is one of them) need libraries that are in /usr/local/lib but won't look for them there. The normal way to point the application in the right direction is to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable, which some consider a poor practice.
I set the path in the shell script that opens the application, "run_client", which is recommended over setting the path globally for the user.
The second problem was that BOINC's graphical manager, which makes it easy to configure the client, wouldn't load — it complained about missing libraries. I ended up installing both Expat and libiconv using the Solaris package installers available at Sun Freeware. Installing those libraries allowed the program to run.
An alternate solution would be to install BOINC on another computer and control the Solaris client from there. I tried that as well, and it works fine — you just have to create a "remote_hosts.cfg" file on the Solaris computer that tell BOINC to allow remote control.