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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Is there an anonymous reporting system for obscene or threatening forum posts?


Yes, the function can be used as follows-

In the bottom left corner of every post in the forums there is a series of small icons (buttons) that can be used to "Rate" each post. The last of these buttons is a small red box with an "X" in it that looks like this - .

If you click on that box, you will be provided with a reporting form. Fill in the requested information and submit the form by clicking on the "OK" button.

This will generate a report to a Forum Moderator who will then review the report and take appropriate action.

{NOTE: No user specific information relating to the reporting user is provided to the Moderator when using this function.}


Moderator9

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Can I contact the forum moderators directly by e-mail?

At the request of the user community a method of contacting forum Moderators "off forum" has been established. David Baker has decided to leave it up to the Moderators as to how they wish to handle the matter. Based on this decision, each Moderator will decide for themselves if they wish to provide "off forum" communications to the user community. To that end, Moderators may establish an email account that will allow off line contact, but they are not required to do so.
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However, before sending mail to a Moderator account, it must be clearly understood that the address of the senders account will be revealed to the Moderator. In addition, certain kinds of requests that are sent to the project team, may be forwarded to these Moderator accounts to be handled as a moderation function, and when that happens, it will be necessary for the project to provide contact information to the Moderator so the issue can be addressed.

To send to a private message to a moderator account, send an e-mail to

Moderator9 - Rosettamod9 at yahoo dot com (replace the "at" and the "dot" with the correct symbols to properly format the address)

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Do the forum Moderators have access to my personal information?

Typically volunteer Moderators do NOT have access to personal information such as e-mail addresses and other information related to users. However Moderators who are also project administrators DO have access to this information.

In the event that a user contacts a Moderator using any form of e-mail, the users return e-mail address will become available to the Moderator. Not all Moderators have provided a means for users to contact them directly. The few that have, may have questions referred to them by the Project Team, and in those cases the Moderator would be provided the necessary contact information to assist the user.

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Who are the Forum Moderators and what is their function?

The Rosetta@home project uses a mixture of full time project team members and volunteers from the user community to Monitor posting activity in the forums. These individuals are called "Moderators" and whenever they post a message, that titles will appear beneath their user ID. In some cases the actual user ID will be "Moderator" followed by a number (IE. Moderator1, Moderator2, etc). These IDs are provided to the volunteer Moderators so that there is no confusion when they act in an official capacity.

Moderators are responsible for organizing the forums, assisting users with problems and issues, removal of unacceptable materials and postings, and maintaining the decorum of exchanges between users by enforcing the forums rules.

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Can I appeal a Moderators decision to delete my posts?

Yes. But Moderators have a great deal of individual latitude with regard to the actions they take to preserve a proper forum environment. If you feel the action taken was not appropriate, you should first appeal directly to the Moderator who first took action in your case.

If you still feel that the action was not appropriate in your situation, you can appeal directly to the project team using the links from the Rosetta@home home page.

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. I received an e-mail telling me that one of my forum posts has been moved/deleted. What does this mean?

Deletions
Generally speaking receipt of an email indicating that a post has been removed is an indication that the post was determined to be unacceptable for one or more of the following reasons.

1) It contained profane or obscene language, or quoted a post that contained such language.
2) It contained obscene imagery, or quoted a post that contained such images.
3) It contained a threat against another user or the project or quoted a post that contained such threats.
4) It was of such a personally inflammatory or insulting nature that it incited a series of rebuttals of the nature of personal attacks ("flaming").

(in some cases these violations of forum policy may result in the deletion of the entire thread)

Moving of posts
If one of your posts has been moved, this would generally indicate that there is nothing wrong with the content of the post itself, but that it was perhaps off topic for the thread where it was posted, and was moved to another thread appropriate to the topic. In some cases, a particular thread may be available for a specific purpose. One example would be the gathering of information related to error data, These threads are generally not open for discussions but instead are intended for posting very specific kinds of data. In this case posts that do not provide the type of information sought will be moved to a thread for the discussion of the issue.

For a discussion of the criteria that might be used to evaluate the appropriateness of posts and their removal see this thread

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Are there any rules at Rosetta@home for using the forums?

The Rosetta@home forums are provided as a place for open exchange of ideas within the Rosetta user community. Users are encouraged to post their ideas, exchange information with one another, assist each other, and bring issues to the attention of the Rosetta Project team.

The Rosetta user community is international, and open to people from all walks of life. For this reason communications between users in the forums is expected to be polite, and suitable for all possible audiences. Threats and profanity are unacceptable, as are language and images of an obscene nature. So called "flaming" is not acceptable.

This concept has been distilled into a simple statement displayed each time a user posts in any of the Rosetta@home forums.

"Don't use obscene language or images, and don't threaten other participants; otherwise we may delete your messages."

Forum Moderators have the authority to determine if a posting falls within the acceptable guidelines established for use of the forum. If in the estimation of a Moderator a particular post or group of posts is unacceptable, they can act to move or delete such posts. Usually when this occurs the author of the post will be notified by e-mail of the action taken.

Moderators also have thee responsibility of keeping the forums organized so that the project team and the larger user community can locate information of interest to them. As a result, on occasion Moderators may start new threads for discussion or gathering of information, move posts that are not topically correct for a particular thread, or highlight a thread topic by anchoring it at the top of the forum thread list.

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Q Exited with zero status but no 'finished' file?

A. This is a BOINC problem, it's harmless, just ignore it.

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Q. Master file fetch failed?

There are two possibilities when you get this error,

A1. This means the Rosetta@Home 's server is down. Give it a few hours and then try again.

A2. Your internet connectivity may not be working properly. Try to browse the Rosetta@Home web site, and have a look at the server status page, the link is on the Rosetta@Home home page.

To fix your internet connectivity (generally shut down everything including your router (if you have one), modem, DHCP server (if you have one) etc... start every thing up in the correct order and and try again).

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Q. Why am I getting a 'Reason: Access Violation (0xc0000005) error'? *

A. An error occurred somewhere on the computer, it could have been BOINC or Rosetta@Home or any programme that your computer was doing at the time. This is not a Rosetta@Home specific error, as far as I am aware it happens, on occasion, in all of the BOINC applications. Keep Rosetta@Home in memory and ignore this problem if it's not getting out of hand.

If you get one of these errors you can report it Here

Thanks to hugothehermit for his work on this FAQ.

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Q. What does the error "Maximum Time Exceeded" mean?

A. The Maximum time exceed error occurs when a work unit requires more time to complete processing than was anticipated by the project at the time the work unit was created by the project server. The maximum time allocated for a particular work unit is measured in CPU cycles. If the system requires more that the predetermined number of cycles to complete processing then the BOINC client software is designed to abort the processing and notify the user that the maximum time for the work unit was exceeded. This feature is designed into the BOIC software to prevent a work unit from entering into an endless loop where it might continue processing indefinitely.

There are very few things that can be done on the users computer that will reduce or eliminate maximum time exceeded errors. The project team will have to make an adjustment to the work units before they are sent out to permanently solve the problem. If you are seeing these errors frequently, you should notify the project by posting a message on the appropriate forum, so they know that an adjustment is required.

If you get a Max Time Exceeded Error, you should report it Here

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Answer provided by:

Snake Doctor
Team MacNN

Rosetta generates an error telling me that I must free xxx.x MB. I don't understand, there's gigs of free space on this system....

Example from message log -

Fri 20 Jan 2006 10:05:32 AM EST|rosetta@home|Message from server: No work sent
Fri 20 Jan 2006 10:05:32 AM EST|rosetta@home|Message from server: (there was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated)
Fri 20 Jan 2006 10:05:32 AM EST|rosetta@home|Message from server: No disk space (YOU must free xxx.x MB before BOINC gets space). Review preferences for minimum disk free space allowed.
Fri 20 Jan 2006 10:05:32 AM EST|rosetta@home|No work from project


Your problem is not the actual hard drive space on your disk, but the amount of space that is allowed to be used on your hard drive for Rosetta, which is specified by your online account settings.

-Go to the Rosetta home-page, then click on the link to 'Your Account' under returning participants heading.

-Once logged in, go to edit general preferences, and once there, adjust the settings for the disk and memory usage.

-Once you save the settings, open Boinc Manager, and on the 'Projects' tab, click the update button. This will load your saved preferences onto the PC, and this should solve the issue.

In the prefs it is not really clear what all these settings actually do. A few things are not intuitive about the space settings.

1) First the "use no more than xxx GB" applies to BOINC space used. Everything for BOINC not just rosetta or rosetta slot space. You are unlikely to violate this one with any normal size queue.

2) "Leave at least xxx.xx GB" refers to the total space that must be left on the disk before BOINC will be allowed to run the project but it is not a BOINC space use number. If loading anything from a project would violate that value BOINC will not allow that to happen. You can also violate it outside of BOINC and stop BOINC from running.

3) "Use no more than xx%" refers to the total FREE space on the disk no matter what is using it, it is not a BOINC space use number. But if loading something for BOINC would violate it BOINC will not allow that to happen. And it too can be violated outside of BOINC and stop BOINC from running.

So in practical terms, these all play against each other as "OR' factors not "AND" factors. But you can force an "AND" condition. Violate any one or more of them in any combination and BOINC will give you the not enough space space error.

If BOINC would use more than XXX GB of space (1) it will not run (or load work). OR if you have less than XXX.XX GB of total free space (2) on the disk if BOINC added new data BOINC will not run. OR If your total use of a disks FREE space exceeds xx% (3) no matter how much is BOINC or anything else then BOINC will not run.

Part of the problem is the difference between these values as calculated by the system. To most people 1Kb is 1000B, but to the disk system it is 1024B. So the system thinks it has more data that the person reading the numbers unless you take that difference into account. And for BOINC there is no gray area on this. Go over the parameter by so much as a single byte and it will fail.

So the first setting at 100GB should work fine, you can set this to a value bigger than your total disk space and it will usually not hurt anything. Set parameter 2 to something small like .001GB. For the third setting try something like 80% or less. you will have to balance these numbers for your system until you find what works.

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Answer provided by

JDHalter
Team - XPC

My results page says I had a "Client Error", will I get credit for the time my computer worked on this work unit?

Yes. The Rosetta project runs a process every night that awards credits for work units that are reported with client errors or fail for any reason. These usually appear in your "Results" list as "Client error" and show that no credit was granted.

However, if you click on the actual "Result Details" link on the left in the listing, the awarded credits will be shown as credits granted at the bottom of the Result Details. The credit is added to your total credit count as well, just as normal credit awards would be. The Maximum credit award for errors is 300 points, but typically the awards match the claimed credit for the work unit.

You must allow at least 24 hours for the credit award process to run after the work unit is reported back to the server.

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Q. Why do I have Work Units assigned to me that I don't have?

A. This seems to be caused by BOINC and the Rosetta@Home server losing the ability to communicate properly, and it can safely be ignored.

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Q. Why is it reported that I have more computers than I actually do? / How do I merge my computers?

A. When you detach and then re-attach to the same project, BOINC assumes that it's a different computer, You can merge these computers so they are one again, Your computers click on the computer you would like merge click Merge this computer (down the bottom of the page).

NOTE: This function is temporarily disabled. It will be functional with the next server software upgrade.

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Q. Why can't I get new Work Units from Rosetta@Home ?

A. If your computer is doing more than one science application (Seti@Home and Rosetta@Home for example) BOINC decides how much work you can have so that that the Work Unit deadlines are not reached. Either allow BOINC to do this or if you are more interested in one of the science applications you can change the resource share Rosetta@Home preferences ->Edit Rosetta@Home preferences and change the resource share. Alternatively you can suspend the other application(s), BOINC Manager -> Projects (tab) click on the application you would like to suspend and either click on the Suspend button or the No New Work button (to allow BOINC to finish the Work Units it has on hand but not to get new ones), on the left hand side.

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Q. Should I use Hyper Threading?

A. Yes, it gets you a small gain over not using it. If you are very low on memory and don't want to use more than x CPUs then Log in (if your not already) -> Edit Preferences (down the bottom) -> On multiprocessors, use at most N CPUs.

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Q. Can I move work from one computer to another?

A. The short answer is, yes it is possible. BUT, the true answer is that moving work from one machine to another is neither recommended or supported by the Rosetta@home project team. One major problem with moving the work between systems occurs when the work is finished and ready to upload. The entire BOINC system is designed such that the computer that originally downloaded a work unit must also return the work unit. So systems statistics, credit claims and many other elements of the BOINC system would no longer operate as they were designed.

In addition, some work is actually customized to some degree based on the processor to which it will be send. Even if the work is successfully downloaded to a machine, moved to another machine and processed, and then moved back such that it is returned by the correct machine, the process could still adversely affect the results that are returned in unpredictable ways.

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Moderator9
ROSETTA@home FAQ
Moderator Contact

Q. Why am I getting an error every time BOINC runs a benchmark?*


A. Update your BOINC version to 5.2.13 or higher as it no longer removes applications from memory when doing a benchmark.


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Thanks to hugothehermit for his work on this FAQ.