RC5 - Win98 Service - Problems

[wrickard]

Are there any known problems with running dnet as a service on 98 machines?
Version 8010.463b.
I was having problems like, the client initially showing up in the task list
and then disappearing. I couldn't tell whether it was actually running or
not from the logs. But I did know that my keyrate was down. I eventually
setup a pproxy to handle my internal machines to rule out connectivity problems.
Now i have it installed in the HKLM\S\M\W\CV\Run key as a -hide. Runs fine.

 

[JonB]

There is a problem with running as a service IF you used shared buffers over a LAN. That is because the client can be running but not have an "authorized user id" assigned to it, so that the remote PC will deny it access. This is very possible if your shared buffers are on an NT or Win2k box.

On NT/Win2k, you can edit the DNETC service to always use a specific ID and password when it starts itself. If that ID has read/write access to the remote buffers, everything works great at bootup, even if nobody logs into the PC.

I'm not sure how to do the same thing in a Win9X service.

 

[LeBlatt]

I *think* the Run key you mention will start the client as an application when an user logs in, and use his priviledges.
Good point is that it solves the issue of shared folders located on a net share with access rights, if the user has those rights.
Bad point is that the client wont run with none logged in.

However, if you have a local pproxy, file sharing ain't necessary, nor access rights, and you can run the client as a service fine.

Did you enable logging activity to file to see what the client says ?
Or use wintop or other task monitoring tool to see if there is full cpu activity ?

/edit : If I really had to use shared buffers on 98 (not that I would want to), I think I'd start the client as a service, with a large enough buffer, and set a schedulding app to issue the command dnetc -update periodically when the user is logged in. Then the client would run constantly and not run out of blocks. But if you have several clients, pproxy is the way to go IMO.

 

[wrickard]

No shared buffers...
I originally had 2 win98 machines on our internal network running the client as a service. I installed it by copying the files to Program Files\Distributed.net and then running dnetc.exe -install from the command line. I did this because I wanted it to run even if no one was logged on. All this really did was create an entry in HKLM\S\M\W\CV\RunServices.
However with this setup, the client would drop off the task list (Ctrl-Alt-Del). It was logging to a file... but I didn't examine the logs carefully... so it may have been running. Is it supposed to not be in the task list?

 

[OmegaXero]

You mean is the client supposed to be hidden? I run a bunch of machines at work with the -hide option enabled. In win9x if I hit ctrl-alt-del the DNet client is not displayed. However, if I fire up windows' system monitor the CPU is at 100% utilization. In otherwords, the client runs in the background as a service, not an application. It won't be viewable when doing the three finger salute.

 

[LeBlatt]

Right, the hidden client doesnt show in w9x ctrl-alt-del.
It shows however in wintop, or wNT's taskmanager, usually with 99% cpu used.