boinc/INSTALL

Installing BOINC

This document describes the generic installation procedure for BOINC

The installation procedure itself is broken into seven steps

    1. Downloading the Source
    2. Ensuring proper programs are installed
    3. Setting environment variables
    4. Configuration
    5. Building
    6. Testing (optional but strongly recommended)
    7. Final install (optional)

Please note that BOINC currently only supports the targets all clean install 
uninstall tar and client_tar. Currently, BOINC is installed into the 
/usr/local/boinc/ directory structure. To install BOINC into a different
directory structure, the macro INSTALL_DIR needs to be edited in all 
Makefile.in files. 

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Downloading the Source

BOINC is distributed via CVS and tarballs compressed with gzip. 

The BOINC distribution includes the scheduling servers, both in CGI and FastCGI
versions, the application library, the client, the test scripts, sample
applications, and test scripts. 

Unpack the distribution in one directory using the commands 
    % gunzip boinc.tar.gz
    % tar xf boinc.tar

If installing from CVS, download the entire CVS tree. 

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Ensuring proper programs are installed

In order for the BOINC server to run, Apache web server and  mySQL database 
server must both be installed and shared memory must be enabled, with a shared
memory segment size of at least 32 megabytes (more is reccomended). 

It is highly reccomended that PHP be installed, as the test scripts and web
administration are written in PHP and will not be usable without PHP installed.

Apache should be configured to allow POST 

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Setting environment variables

BOINC depends on several environment variables to compile and run. 

BOINC_DOWNLOAD_DIR /usr/local/boinc/download
This directory should be set to be web accessible via Apache. If you plan on 
using a different directory, be sure to set the BOINC_DOWNLOAD_DIR properly
so as to point to the correct directory. It is important that this directory
is different from the BOINC_UPLOAD_DIR. 

BOINC_UPLOAD_DIR /usr/local/boinc/upload
This directory should be set to be web accessible via Apache. If you plan on 
using a different directory, be sure to set the BOINC_UPLOAD_DIR properly
so as to point to the correct directory. It is important that this directory is
different from the BOINC_DOWNLOAD_DIR. 

BOINC_PLATFORM_NAME
This is set when configure is run in the client directory. It is used by the
client to determine the name of the BOINC client. 

BOINC_EMAIL mgary@ssl.berkeley.edu
This is currently used by one of the test scripts. It is not critical for the
running of BOINC. 

BOINC_URL_BASE http://localhost/download
This should be set to a url that points to the BOINC_DOWNLOAD_DIR. Currently, 
this is the same as the BOINC_DOWNLOAD_URL, although it may change in the
future. 

BOINC_KEY_DIR /usr/local/boinc/key_dir
This should be set to a directory in which the public and private keys for 
BOINC are to be created. If you wish to place this in a different directory,
change the variable appropriately. 

BOINC_KEY 0xdadacafe
This should be set to any 32 bit hex value desired. To run multiple instances
of BOINC on one machine, each instance needs to have a different BOINC_KEY 
compiled into it. 

BOINC_DB_NAME boinc
This should be set to a valid database name for mySQL. 

BOINC_USER user
This should be set to the user name of the person running BOINC. 

BOINC_UPLOAD_URL http://localhost/cgi-bin/file_upload_handler
This should be set to the url of a valid cgi directory where the BOINC 
scheduling server cgi scripts are located. 

BOINC_DOWNLOAD_URL http://localhost/download
This should be set to the url of the BOINC_DOWNLOAD_DIR. 

BOINC_MASTER_URL http:\\\/\\\/localhost\\\/index.html
This should be set to the master url of your project. The master url is a file
that contains xml tags with information about where scheduling servers can be
found. A sample scheduler tag would be 
<scheduler>http://localhost/cgi-bin/cgi</scheduler>
where the url contained within the scheduler tags points to the BOINC 
scheduling server cgi scripts. 

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Configuration

Like most open source software, BOINC must be configured before it can be 
built. This document describes the recommended configuration procedure for 
both native and cross targets. 

We use srcdir to refer to the toplevel source directory for BOINC. 

In general, BOINC need not be built into a seperate directory from the source.

Second, when configuring a native system, either cc or gcc must be in your path
or you must set CC in your environment variables before running configure. 
Otherwise, the configuration scripts may fail. 

To configure BOINC: 

    % cd srcdir
    % ./configure

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Building

Now that BOINC is configured, you are ready to build BOINC. 

Some commands executed when making BOINC may fail (return a nonzero status) and
be ignored by make.

It is normal to have compiler warnings when compiling certain files. The most
common of these warnings is statement with no effect, due to the use of assert
in the scheduling server, and can be safely ignored. 

To make BOINC:

    % cd srcdir
    % make

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Testing

Once BOINC has been built, environment variables are set, and permissions have
been granted, we encourage you to run tests to ensure that BOINC is working
properly before being installed. The tests are located in the srcdir/test/
directory, and are all php scripts. 

test_suite.php 
This is a script that will run several of the scripts within the test 
directory. If there are any file mismatches or errors, there has likely been an
error in setting up BOINC. 

test_uc.php
This is a script that runs the uc application. The files should match upon
completion of the script. 

test_concat.php
This sript is similar to the test_uc.php script, except that it runs the concat
application. 

test_water.php
This script tests some of the water mark funtionality in the BOINC client. If 
test_uc.php does not work, this script will also fail. 

test_rsc.php
This script tests to ensure that the server will not send unfeasable work units
to a client. Should this script fail, it is either due to your computer having
more than 1 terabyte of available memory and similar amounts of available disk
space or improper configuration of BOINC. 

test_api.php
This script should run even if BOINC has been installed improperly. As long as
a build has occurred, this script should work. This script tests the api and
a restartible minimal application without an end-to-end test of BOINC. 

test_uc_slow.php
This script is similar to the test_uc.php script, except that it uses the 
uc_slow application. The client must be run manually for this script. Currently
there is a bug in BOINC that causes this script to fail. 

test_stderr.php
This script uses the uc application to check client error reporting. 

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Installing

Now that BOINC has been built and tested, you can optionally install it in 
/usr/local/boinc. 

If the location of any of the CGI elements of the scheduling server are to be
changed, the appropriate environment variables must be updated and the code
must be rebuilt with
    $ cd srcdir; make clean; configure; make

You can install BOINC in /usr/local/boinc with

    % cd srcdir; make install

You may also want to run the test scripts now that you have installed BOINC to 
ensure that all environment variables have been properly set and compiled into
the code. 

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If you had any issues with BOINC, please let us know. If you come across any 
bugs, please post them to our bugtraq or email us.