First of all, I'm not new to BOINC and its wonderful work (I had SETI@Home running between '04-'05 I believe). That was until my parents bought me a new computer for my 13th birthday.
I just started RAH yesterday, and as I was watching the folding, I started wondering was there:
A) A program that could leech idle CPU time from other computers in a LAN or
B) A script that would let my computer download a WU, distribute it to the other two computers in my LAN, let each computer run through the computations, send the results back to my computer, reassemble the results into a single package, and then send the entire package back to the server, etc.

Now that I think about it B might not be such a good idea seeing as how my family has computers of varying speeds

If anyone has any information on either of these points it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank You

If "A" were possible, it would mean the target machine has successfully been infected with a "virus"... so operating systems and settings tend to prevent that.

I don't believe anyone has written a script as you describe in "B". I've been thinking of such a thing for some time. But it's generally just too much simpler to have each PC connect directly to the project to exchange tasks anyway.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

You can do A using something like Beowulf but that's an OS.

you can run boinc from a remote machine over a network if that's any use. It's not ideal because network interruptions can kill the process, but it works pretty robustly on a wired network. All you have to do is:

1. Create a boinc installation that's ready to run (i.e. connected to a project and has tasks ready to run) on your machine (the server) in a folder other than your normal boinc folder**.
2. Share that folder.
3. On the client create a mapped drive of the shared BOINC folder on the server.
4. Create a scheduled task on the client that runs boinc.exe whenever the machine is idle for x minutes, and set it to end the task when the machine is no longer idle.

That scheduled task must be running under the same account as the logged in user though - otherwise it won't detect that the computer is in use and will carry on running.

** The easiest way to do this is to just copy your current boinc folder to another location and share that. Then open the file 'init_data.xml' in the boincslots folder and change these lines to the new location:
<project_dir>c:Program FilesBOINC/projects/boinc.bakerlab.org_rosetta</project_dir>
<boinc_dir>c:Program FilesBOINC</boinc_dir>

Also, if it's any use, when I'm setting up a computer I use this batch file to quickly create an account with a password and have it hidden from the logon screen (you can do all this manually but this is a lot quicker!):

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rem @echo off
net user BOINCUser Password /add && net localgroup administrators BOINCUser /add
echo Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00> c:hide.reg
echo [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogonSpecialAccountsUserList]>> c:hide.reg
echo "BOINCUser"=dword:00000000>> c:hide.reg
REGEDIT /S c:hide.REG
DEL /Q c:hide.REG
Exit
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You can use an account like that to run boinc fairly invisibly which is good when people don't mind it running as long as they don't see it and it doens't annoy them with messages etc.

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