Anyone know how to help this guy at the boinc forum?:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=1904

jonross wrote:

I know of a financially company that has 100s of nodes that are idle after the markets close. They'd like to donate the CPU time to the world. BOINC seems like a good fit.

Here is the catch: The nodes are not and can not be connected to the internet (security auditors being what they are). However, a server could be set up to proxy/relay info to/from the nodes.

Ideas?

Sounds like it'd be a welcome addition here!

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BOINC Manager under Advanced->Options has HTTP and SOCKS proxy setup.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

I assume they aren't allowed to access the internet, even via proxy... i think he was hoping they could run from a central server that did the net connections itself.

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ya someone needs to make a BOINC proxy, rather then an internet proxy. Here's an outline (see the lower section of the article).

I've been thinking of an alternate model, where the client PCs would actually believe that the BOINC proxy machine is the project. They would hit it for new tasks and to report results etc. and the BOINC proxy machine would simple open connections to the true project servers and pass along the same requests. A more complex model would allow the BOINC proxy machine to actually PROCESS the requests and deliver a task from a cache it maintains etc.

To my knowledge, such a system has not been hacked up yet.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

From the same link...

Hosts that are not directly connected to the Internet, but share a LAN with one that is, can participate in BOINC using an HTTP 1.0 proxy such as Squid for Unix or FreeProxy for Windows.

... that is how I read the OP's requirement. We would seem to need more details. The crunchers nodes are not connected to the net, but can be connected to a server. Presumably this is by a LAN, and in order to function, the server must be connected to the net, how else can it send/receive from the projects?

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

From the same link...

Hosts that are not directly connected to the Internet, but share a LAN with one that is, can participate in BOINC using an HTTP 1.0 proxy such as Squid for Unix or FreeProxy for Windows.

... that is how I read the OP's requirement. We would seem to need more details. The crunchers nodes are not connected to the net, but can be connected to a server. Presumably this is by a LAN, and in order to function, the server must be connected to the net, how else can it send/receive from the projects?

I would assume that he would be using a 'sneaker net' to transfer the files from the internet to the isolated LAN. I am in the same boat for the computers I have at work. If I can figure out how to transfer the units to and from an isolated network I can utilize 100+ systems as well.

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Ryan, since that post I made here last Summer, I have created a cacheing proxy server. I haven't yet implemented a means of handling the uploads of results, but could do so.

The basic idea is that your 100 machines are all in a local LAN, and somewhere, accessesable to them, is another machine running Apache and PHP. This machine has internet access and does all of the internet activity for the 100 other machines. This PHP machine does NOT allow any inbound internet connections (enforce that with a firewall), and so should make auditors smile. The 100 machines all share the same copies of the downloaded files, so that makes the Rosetta servers smile.

No sneakernet. No customized BOINC clients on the 100 machines. Just an Apache server with a few PHP programs I've written, and a couple of Gig of disk space on one system.

If that would get you what you need, send me a PM.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/