[Sosa]

Greetings,

I've been enjoying my iBook for the last few days and decided to join Team MacNN, something I've wanted to do for a while, thanks to all the laughs I've had with your team page! Anyway, I have a few questions that your excellent online tutorial did not answer.

I have installed and run the OS X unix client for Seti. It is running now and does not seem to have a noticeable effect on my other applications (itunes, IE) even though CPU monitor is at 100%! The fan on my iBook is not even on. Question #1: Will this type of use of the CPU incease wear and tear on the iBook? I can't afford to have it fail on me because of this.

Second, I like the idea of running SETI from the console and skip the GUI when I'm sleeping. But won't my hard disk spin down after some minutes? Will I have to set the hard drive to never sleep if this is to work? Having to do this every night seems like a chore.

Third, were do I download that CronniX utility? I don't want to have type the team macnn server info every time I run SETI. Will CronniX run SETI automatically even if I log in through >console?

Fourth, is OS X SETI Client faster than the 9 and X applications?

Thanks for your help and here is hoping to help out Team MacNN even if just a little!

[reader50]

Welcome

I have installed and run the OS X unix client for Seti. It is running now and does not seem to have a noticeable effect on my other applications (itunes, IE) even though CPU monitor is at 100%!
This means SETI is running at a low priority, where it gets out of the way of any other user process. (this is good)

The fan on my iBook is not even on. Question #1: Will this type of use of the CPU incease wear and tear on the iBook? I can't afford to have it fail on me because of this.
Does the fan come on at other times? If the fan is good, then your CPU temp does not hit anything dangerous. You can download GaugePro from NewerTech, it shows (among other things) the CPU temp. Note that CPU overheating or excessive wear on the fan would be the concerns here. Just using the CPU does not harm it.

Second, I like the idea of running SETI from the console and skip the GUI when I'm sleeping. But won't my hard disk spin down after some minutes? Will I have to set the hard drive to never sleep if this is to work?
Your hard disk should spin down because X should cache the writes to disk (the data would flush to disk the next morning, when you access anything else that causes a disk seek). Note that >console is not too much faster than the CLI.

Third, were do I download that CronniX utility? I don't want to have type the team macnn server info every time I run SETI. Will CronniX run SETI automatically even if I log in through >console?
CronnniX will launch SETI every time. Though you may need to put SETI on root's crontab for it to launch in >console. Test it though first, to see if it will launch from your normal user crontab. Putting stuff on the root crontab should be avoided if you don't have to.

Fourth, is OS X SETI Client faster than the 9 and X applications?
It is faster than the X app. The 9 app used to be a little faster when every tweak was applied, I believe the CLI client is faster now that Apple has done more X optimizations.

[Sosa]

Thanks for your response reader50.

Regarding my hard drive sleep question, you are saying that the hard drive will go to sleep if I am in console running the SETI program? So that if I wanted to crunch SETI at night I will have to set the hard drive to never sleep correct? Jesus, let me just test this and find out! I did it last night and didn't think to check the blinking sleep light.

Also I downloaded guagepro as you suggested and installed it. However it doesn't seem to run. I double click it , the screen flashes, and nothing. How is this program supposed to work? Under OS 9?

[reader50]

The hard drive should go to sleep, and SETI should continue crunching happily. My HD is set to sleep after 15 minutes and SETI is not bothered by this. The OS will cache all SETI's disk accessess until the next morning, with no speed penalty.

Gauge Pro is an OS 9 application. I just tried it, and it does not seem to like running in Classic. It fails on launch for me too. Sorry about that.