Folding Forum

Hey all,

I recently found the Folding @ Home project and I'd like to contribute in a more meaningful way.

I'm a Sys Admin for a library system and we have about 800 PCs that are mostly idle day/night.

I have a few questions about and concerns about implementation & management at such a large scale.

Enterprise Support:
Is there any official enterprise-level support for the app? I’m considering proposing this initiative to our Board of Commissioners, as it would not only help the cause but also be great for public relations.

Deployment and Management:
We use MECM (Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager) for managing and imaging our machines. While I can easily deploy MSI installers, I noticed the app is an EXE. Is there a way to install and configure it silently via command line for mass deployment?

Proposal Examples:
Has anyone here successfully pitched this project to their organization or board? If you have any templates, documents, or tips, I’d appreciate your insight. Otherwise, I’ll be building a proposal from scratch, and I want to ensure it’s as compelling as possible.

If this post would be better suited for a different board here, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

I don't know of any official enterprise level support. There has been some work in the past to create containers for deploying on servers, I am not current on that development progress. Also during expansion for COVID in the Spring of 2020 there was some discussion here and as I understand on the F@h discord about how to deploy the client across multiple systems such as at an institution like a school or in your case a library.

Some issues to keep in mind:

The client installs can all use the same username and passkey. The passkey can also be used with more than one username if you want to distiguish between groups of systems.

The client will usually need to be installed separately on each system. However if you do system installs on your systems by creating an image that you clone to each machine, the F@h client can be installed as long as that image doesn't connect to the internet. The first time the client runs and connects to the F@h servers it downloads the updated GPUs list and gets a unique ID assigned.

For the v7 client there are command line options to configure the client. They are not heavily documented here or on the F@h support pages. Most documentation is through the built in help, fahclient --help on the command line. The running client can also be connected with using local telnet on the command line - telnet 127.0.0.1 36330. Either way can be used to start and stop folding as well. The FAHcontrol portion of the install can also be configured to monitor and control multiple systems remotely.

The v7 client is considered obsolete, the last update was a bit over 4 years ago. The current public release is v8.4.9. The web based control for it can be used remotely and monitor and control multiple systems. I don't know if there are any specific limits on how many systems, but it could get tedious scrolling through a long web page for more than a few dozen systems. V8 does not have telnet access, and I am not too familiar with command line options yet.

I believe v8 will detect a change of hardware id and generate a new fah id for the client. I expect this would make mass installation less error prone.

I