Folding@Home HFM.Net Task Tracker

[Nick Name]

I finally got this installed and it works pretty well. If you've used BoincTasks it looks similar to that but it doesn't have have the same type of control. You can pause, fold or finish and that's it. That's ok as the web or advanced control don't use much resources and work well. What it does have that the standard F@H controls lack is a decent task history list. Unfortunately it's Windows only, so if you're folding on Linux you'll need to either run it on a Windows machine or use WINE.

F@H forum discussion here

GitHub page here

Download page here

You'll need the .NET Framework v4.7, if it's not installed you'll get prompted to download it when you install the program. I wasn't able to get the portable zip version to work but the full .msi package for 0.9.17.1040 did work. I'm not thrilled about installed unsigned software packages but this has been around several years and there aren't any complaints about malicious behavior on the F@H forum.

Once installed and running you will probably need to add the clients manually. You'll definitely need to do that if you want to monitor clients on remote machines. Just go to Clients -> Add Client and enter the name (can be whatever you want), IP address (127.0.0.1 for the local client) and password if you've set that up.

The main reason to use this for me is the work history. To see it, go to Tools -> Work Unit History Viewer, or Ctrl+K. There are a lot of columns , you'll need to expand the window to see everything.

There's also an interesting tool called Benchmark Viewer: Tools -> Benchmark Viewer, or Ctrl+B. I haven't figured out exactly what it's telling me, but it's kind of neat.

 

[doneske]

I used the program about 8 years ago when I still had a Windows instance running and it worked reasonably well back then so I imagine it is better now. I tried to get it to run under Wine last month when I was playing around with the F@H client but ran into a plethora of missing reqs and coreqs on Centos using the Wine from the EPEL. I already have BoincTasks running under Wine on Ubuntu and am not totally happy with it but since I don't have a Windows instance, I got to do what I got to do. It's a resource hog and it acts up and needs to be restarted about once a day. After battling the F@H client installs on Linux I didn't have the stamina to fight with HFM and just dropped it. I didn't try it with Wine on Ubuntu.

 

[Nick Name]

I've run BT under WINE and didn't notice any issues, but it's been a few years. I'm sure I wasn't paying as much attention to it's load as you are though. Have you looked at BOINCTUI? I think it also supports remote clients although it's been a long time since I used it.

I guess it's not a surprise that HFM doesn't work out-of-the-box in WINE, really these features should be built into the F@H control. I expect they will be when there's an open source version available.

 

[doneske]

It's not HFM as much as it's all the different versions of Wine depending on the distribution you are using. I'm moving away from Ubuntu and toward Redhat/CentOS. As a result, they are further back than Ubuntu (Version 4 kernel, Wine 4.x etc). I know I could go to Fedora and be closer to the leading edge but I had some bad experiences with Fedora updating the kernel and causing havoc with apps that hook into the kernel like video drivers and virtualbox. When installing HFM on CentOS 8 with Wine 4.x it would complain about missing Windows support. I suspect it was using newer Windows things that weren't in Wine 4.x. It might have worked using Wine 5.x but that would have presented new challenges. I have looked at BOINCTUI and it does attach remotely to clients but you can only look at one machine at a time. You can't see the entire landscape like you can with BoincTasks. Other than that it would be fine. BOINCTUI is machine centric while BoincTasks is BOINC centric

 

[Nick Name]

I have looked at BOINCTUI and it does attach remotely to clients but you can only look at one machine at a time. You can't see the entire landscape like you can with BoincTasks. Other than that it would be fine. BOINCTUI is machine centric while BoincTasks is BOINC centric

Ok, thanks. Sounds like it's no better than opening multiple BOINC manager windows then, which would also work but be a giant pain. Honestly I'm a bit surprised that better multiple/remote client management hasn't been added to the standard manager after all these years. I know a lot of folks are running multiple machines.