The Scottish Boinc Team

From the project, post is click here

Posted: 14 Nov 2015, 20:11:20 UTC

Please don't create special virtual machines for my project <- in my opinion is not fair in relation to other. For now i had sent 3 warnigs message to user to abandon that way of crunching.
I don't want to have situation like was with FreeHal project.

Posted: 19 Nov 2015, 20:13:00 UTC - in response to Message 77.

2 days ago I had to ban and delete 3 user account with more than 150 VM's.
Today I sent next warnings to 3 users.

Guess the message is don't do it even those that are hunting down those WUprop hours

Hmm, I'm not sure what I think about that to be honest.
Seems a bit harsh if you're prepared to put in the time and effort to set up all those VM's. Is that really cheating?

Silver wrote:Hmm, I'm not sure what I think about that to be honest.
Seems a bit harsh if you're prepared to put in the time and effort to set up all those VM's. Is that really cheating?

I guess it depends how it is defined. The project admin seems to think so.

Janos wrote:

Silver wrote:Hmm, I'm not sure what I think about that to be honest.
Seems a bit harsh if you're prepared to put in the time and effort to set up all those VM's. Is that really cheating?

I guess it depends how it is defined. The project admin seems to think so.

I would say not at all, as long as valid work is returned then people putting in that level of effort should be encouraged not banned, but ultimately it's the admins project.
That said, if no VM's are allowed then it should be specified in the project start page, and secondly, I find it unfair to ban users and strip credit especially as the units returned were valid for the project. Bit of a poor show really I know if it happened to me, I would be pi$$ed and would never run that project again and ensure , at the very least, that everyone on here was aware of what had happened.

If the purpose of the VM is to generate credits above the physical limits of the hardware, effectively gaming the system, then I would say it is wrong.

Janos wrote:If the purpose of the VM is to generate credits above the physical limits of the hardware, effectively gaming the system, then I would say it is wrong.

Very true unless the results returned are all valid. As long as that is the case then I see it as a win / win for project and cruncher. We all did it on the T4T / vLHC challenge which only allows 1 unit per computer under normal circumstances. Whilst it is the admins project and ultimately his decision, I think he should specifically state that no VM's are allowed on the project join up page. That way there can be no grey area, hard and fast 1 unit per app per system.

What if you're running VMs for other project crunching as the primary purpose? Wonder if that is ok or this of limits?

Who knows ? I did think of your case of running a linux VM for better credit on Universe. I can only presume that it is for the worst offenders ( 150 VM's is a tad excessive or a decent research lab ) I guess a few VM's would be too far down the food chain to get noted

Well I set all the VMs to no more work for Goofy but it keeps giving me more. Can't say I didn't try

scole250 wrote:Well I set all the VMs to no more work for Goofy but it keeps giving me more. Can't say I didn't try

If you set your VM network to "bridged adapter" rather than NAT then each machine has a seperate IP and MAC address. I don't think you could identify it as a VM.

That's how they're all set. Wonder of the offending person is the same guy from Team China who pulled the BU job?

I don't know. I do know that he needs to be careful on this one. Mumps is running for Zombie right now so Z can be the 1st to 1M. He has over 100 machines and ALL of them run a Linux VM. He does all of the crunching in 1 VM per machine.

Since he hasn't banned Z's account (he is #1) then I'm assuming that someone had a bunch of VMs and all of them had the same MAC address.

scole250 wrote:Well I set all the VMs to no more work for Goofy but it keeps giving me more. Can't say I didn't try

That's a known bug for this project...

Bryan wrote:He does all of the crunching in 1 VM per machine.

You mean one VM per project/per machine (So each of his machines has as many VMs as they host projects) ?

Dirk Broer wrote:

Bryan wrote:He does all of the crunching in 1 VM per machine.

You mean one VM per project/per machine (So each of his machines has as many VMs as they host projects) ?

No, the computer has native Windows Server. Mumps installs a Linux VM on the machine and crunches all projects on the VM. That way the native Windows doesn't get screwed with. So there is only 1 VM per computer ... but he has bunches of computers to do that with

Go to Goofy Grid and search on Zombie67. Z doesn't hide his machines so you can see what I'm talking about ... currently he has 176 hosts listed that have been active in the past 24 hours. Those are REAL, no cheating as defined by the admin. There are another 48 that have been on his account in the past few days.

EDIT: since he runs everything in a VM he very limited on what he can do on projects like Vlhc, Atlas, etc that use BOINC w/ a VM. You can't install VBox inside of a VM.