Folding Forum

I've tried to look this up, but haven't found anything on it. I am trying to run the -configonly on a client installed as a service. I wanted to either put in a -pause as a parameter or require it to ask for upload/download. I only wanted to do this as I need to temporarily shutdown for a few days and wanted to prevent downloading WUs I knew wouldn't finish by the deadline.

I opened Windows' Resource Monitor and terminated the service, then ran the client with the -configonly flag from the Command Prompt. By the time I closed the Command Prompt, the client had restarted itself and downloaded a new WU instead of picking back up on the one it was working on (which is shown as wudata_07.xxx in the work folder and was at 99% completion, BTW).

I now have a wudata_08.xxx series of files. I got the bright idea to stop the client again and move WU #8 to a temp folder, then restart the machine to see if it would revert back to #7. Instead, the client restarted itself again, and now I have WU #9. I hate this because I know this will slow down the results for Stanford.

1. What is the proper way to stop a client installed as a service to change the configuration?
2. Why is the client restarting when I have terminated it?
3. Can I force it back to WU #7 (which only has 1% to go)?

I think I ran into this problem a few weeks back when I tried to re-configure and I resorted to something that I understand is generally frowned upon: I opened the config file and edited it directly. That worked.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

What you're trying to do is extremely difficult. Services are designed to run ALL OF THE TIME so even if you managed to configure it to Ask or to Pause, the system probably won't handle those options correctly.

By default, Microsoft sets up services to restart themselves after an error or if something else stops them (such as -oneunit flag or a -pause flag). Removing files from the work folder was also useless. Even when you run the client interactively, FAH is designed to deal with corrupted work files by discarding that WU and downloading a new one.

The best recommendation that I've seen is to reconfigure the service from Automatic to Manual and to stop it. Then run the client interactively using the -oneunit flag. It should finish the current WU and it won't restart unless you restart it.

Makes sense. Now what about picking up that uncompleted WU? It's not discarded. As far as the servers are concerned, it could just be sitting in the queue and waiting to upload.

EDIT: I did some more digging. I was using the wrong tool to stop the service. I was in Resource Monitor, when I should have used Task Manager. On the Services tab, there is a button for Administrator Services (lower right of the window). In the next screen, find the service, right-click and choose Properties. There are options to stop, start, pause, resume, change the startup type, and add a parameter.

I found a little utility called qfix. It seems its purpose was to force a send of a partial WU after an EUE. It did this by changing the current queue slot to the partial WU, then you would force the upload with the -send all flag. Could this be used to reset the queue # the client should be working on and have it finish the WU? My situation was user error, not EUE.

qfix only works if there is a wuresult_xx file in the work folder and if the WU somehow got deleted from queue.dat. It can't recover a WU which wasn't finished.