saving over a network

[crash893]

I have three computers that are running prime95 right now that could be wisked away at anytime to be formated and disturbuted


I tried makeing 3 diffrent folders on a machine that was going to be there longer and then exe it from the network drive but it was awfully slow and it used alot of bandwith

does anyone know a way were prime will back up its progress every so often to a diffrent drive than it lives

?

[PrimeCruncher]

From undoc.txt:

In prime.ini you can force the program to use different filenames for 6 files.
This is in response to a user that is running security software that prevents
writing to any file with a .ini extension. There may well be other uses.
You can also change the working directory (identical to the -W command line
argument).
prime.ini=your_filename
local.ini=your_filename
worktodo.ini=your_filename
prime.log=your_filename
prime.spl=your_filename
results.txt=your_filename
WorkingDir=your_directory_name

[crash893]

so change WorkingDir=your_directory_name to \\whatevercomputer\whatever unique folder?



does it work over the network ( if you know off the top of your head ) im going to test it here in a bit


thanks i saw that before but i never saw the workdir part (guess i need to read better) thanks

[PrimeCruncher]

I assume it works over the network, though I haven't actually tried it. But yes, \\computername\shared_folder_name should do it.

[crash893]

good news

\\whatever\c\whatever works


bad news


prime runs at about 16% and the network useage on a 100mb full duplex lan goe to about 12%


so is there a way to have the working dir the dir that prime is in but save one back up file localy and the other over the network?

i dont need prime to work off the other computer but just to store a back up there incase it gets tapped to go out on the floor or something like that

[geoff]

Maybe there is a problem is with the network? The only real traffic caused by Prime95 is a few MB to load the .exe then a few more MB each time the save file is created (assuming you are LL testing), it should not even be noticable.

[crash893]

its a enterprize grade network

we have 500 employies i dont know how 12mb could take that long espasually since they are both on the same switch


try it your self see if you get the same results

[smh]

Is there any difference if you map a drive letter to your share and then write to that drive letter?

[Reboot It]

My experience is that it can take a long time (may be as much as two minutes ) to load from the first save file when you restart Prime95, during which time the CPU load varies a lot, maybe between 10%-30% (YMMV, though), but when it finishes loading and says "Resuming primality test..." (or whatever), the CPU goes to 100% as expected.

Writing the save files, although taking longer than on a local hard drive, is much quicker - a second or two?

[S00113]

Originally Posted by crash893

does anyone know a way were prime will back up its progress every so often to a diffrent drive than it lives?

I run mprime on Linux machines with work dir in a subdirectory under /tmp, and a cron job which back up the files to a NFS share every two hours. Works quite efficiently, since mprime writes to local disc and backup is run while mprime is working.

I had a method for Windows 95 too back in '97, involving a Samba share on a Linux machine, and a couple of registry entries to run a batch file which backed up to that share on startup and at user login. But that would require Administrator access with modern Windows, I think. And with modern Windows you probably have a cron equivalent which can schedule the job at specific times. I don't know if regular users can set up cron jobs on Windows.

The Samba share had the same name everywhere, but by Samba magic that share would be a separate directory for each machine mounting it. The machine local batch file just called another batch file, backup.bat, on the server. This way I could improve backup.bat without reinstalling it on a lot of computers. First backup.bat checked if Prime95 was installed. If it was, it would back up the directory with the save files. If not it would reinstall Prime95 with the save files on the server, and set up to run the batch file at startup and login in case that information was lost too. When a machine was reinstalled, I just had to run the backup script from the Samba server to get it back up and running Prime95 with the old save files. I could run the same script on new machines to install Prime95 for the first time.

In fact I think backup.bat was generated on demand by the Samba server. It generated a local.ini with the netBIOS name of the Windows machine as ComputerID. It must have got that from Samba (I think more modern Windows' have this in an envirorment variable. %COMPUTERNAME% or something.)

Unfortunately the server was retired in '99, and the batch files have gone to heaven.

Disclaimer: I am not a Windows user. Last time I did anyting useful on a Windows machine, except running Putty or setting up prime95, was in '98. There are probably far smarter ways to do all this on Windows in 2004, and I don't even know if my old way would work anymore.

[PrimeCruncher]

Originally Posted by crash893

good news
prime runs at about 16% and the network useage on a 100mb full duplex lan goe to about 12%


so is there a way to have the working dir the dir that prime is in but save one back up file localy and the other over the network?

i dont need prime to work off the other computer but just to store a back up there incase it gets tapped to go out on the floor or something like that

Well then maybe set up Prime95 on each computer locally, set the folder to be shared, then on the safe computer, set up a scheduled batch file or something that copes files like worktodo.ini, prime.spl, and the save files (should be easy to find since it doesn't have a file extension) and saves them on the safe computer.