24th of June

I thought I'd share a couple of couple of screen shots. These are BOINCtasks view of Marks Rpi Cluster, except I have chopped off the computer names for security reasons. BOINCtasks is a great program if you have more than one computer running BOINC. You can get it from https://efmer.com/boinctasks/

This first shot is the Tasks tab showing the 4 Pi3 model B's tasks in flight.

The second screen shot is the Tasks tab showing the 12 Pi3 model B+ tasks. Its actually gone off the bottom of the screen because there are too many and I have to scroll up and down to see them all.

As you can see from the images I am running just Einstein@home at the moment

16th of June

Nothing much to report this week.

The 16 port switches arrived and I spent a couple of hours getting them in. I also took one of the Pi cases off the floor and put it onto one of the shelving units, The two 16 port switches are smaller than the old 24 port switch so I had some space available..

The Pi3 model B’s are slowly getting their average credits up since they were added back into the cluster. The Pi3 model B+ have an average RAC of 541 (each) at the moment but its too early to tell what the model B’s will settle on.

10th of June

Older Pis back in service

I have put 4 of my older Pi3 model B back into service. They’ve been put into the prototype Pi^4 case and are powered by a 5 port USB charger. This brings the cluster up to 16 Pi3’s doing number crunching.

Networking issues

I had some issues when I got to the last one where it refused to connect to the NFS server. After trying various things unplugging the network cable from the NFS server and plugging it in again got it going.

I had a problem previously where one particular Pi would not be contactable and have to be powered off and on. I swapped the SD card, swapped the Pi for a new one, swapped network cables, swapped power supply, changed network port but it was always the same one that locked up. The only common factors were the 24 port switch and the router.

I did try swapping cables around on the 24 port switch that they’re all plugged into. I guess the 24 port switch is the culprit so I have ordered two 16 port switches to replace it.  Its about 5 years old. The same model is still made and comes with a limited lifetime warranty these days, however I don’t think it had that when I purchased it. Why two 16 port ones I hear you ask? It gives some redundancy (less chance both will fail at the same time),  allows me to split the network traffic into the router across more than one port and the 16 port has a larger network buffer than the 24 port model.

Raspbian updates

The foundation put out new firmware for the Bluetooth on the Pi. It adds a new Bluetooth helper service that I didn’t want so I promptly removed the pi-bluetooth package on all the Pis. I disable the WiFi and Bluetooth on them as I prefer to use the wired network which is usually faster and more reliable.