Multiple agents on one box?

[Fozzie]

I have limited machines at home on a 'Net conn and wanted to up my production, how should I go about getting multiple Dimes running?

[CaptainMooseInc]

impossible.

One instance of DIMES per PC.

The whole idea of DIMES is to measure and map the internet. You would just be duplicating results by making more than one agent per PC.

-Jeff

[em99010pepe]

That's your secret plan?
I tried for the previous version without success. It's a java aplication and you can't run several copies of javaw.exe.


Carlos

[meep]

Captainmooseinc, that is not quite true. It would take FOREVER (well nearly) to complete every measurement possible from one PC out across the internet. Given that the internet is constantly growing and so changing... Running one agent per PC on a small workgroup via one internet connection (done by most) is no different that running more than one per pc.

However, technically due to its use of Java, it is as mentioned previously, not possible.

[FluffyChicken]

Virtual PC installations, using their built in NAT routers (eg VMWare5)
have a few low memory level windows installations running and there you go. Your own personal network.

Now I just thought of this idea and it does sound like a good one :) as we're not using much cpu power it should work....

[ffenliv]

would that provide the DIMES people with useful measurements .. because I could add 20 or 30 virtual machines.

The reason I haven't is that I didn't really know if it wold be useful measurements, all coming from the same spot.

I suppose they would be as long as they're al treated as individual machines, which I suppose they would.

[FluffyChicken]

I would have thought it's not the place they are comming from but the place they end up.

They're looking to make a map and find AS thingies

Not knowing so much how their scripts work I couldn't say, but assuming there's some random part to the destinations we ping/trace then I would think it's all good.

Or
another way to think of it is
Anyone else on your ISP will run through the same ISP servers so if vitual machining/actual networking was no good, then all of us behind the ISP server shouldn't bother.

Off to Find VMWare again and Find some Win98 discs
(for the lower memory foot print :))

[ffenliv]

if i recall correctly, DIMES doesn't like win98se, although i dont now aobut plain old win98. If i were you i'd go win2k with microsoft virtual server. I can run 12 virtual machines on a 2.2ghz amd with 1gig of ram (overclocked mobile 2500+), with each machine have a 2gb harddrive and 48mb of RAM.

What I did to make them faster was simply to copy the folders it creates for the harddrive, rename them and set them up as new machines in virtual server. with 48mb of RAM allocated to them they run things just fine, nothing fancy, mostly just testing network configurations (also tested DIMES on them, worked fine) but they're not usable for actually doing things just turning on and running networks and dimes and whatnot

freaken_ffenliv@hotmail.com on msn if you wanted to talk about setting it up.

Jer

[Fozzie]

I gig VHDs using 92mb of RAM running basic Win2k installs as the image.

Setup one VHD with the image up to the install of JRE and then clone it.

Ther are other things that you have to do but if you haven't got Virtual PC or whatever it's immaterial.

[ffenliv]

we run a similar setup then, i for some reason use 2gb hd's but only 48mb of ram. If the computer powers down unexpectedly .. it takes almost 2 hours for them to power on because of the lack of RAM and all the hd access, but saving state takes 5 seconds to restore them.

I ran out of RAM well before anything else.

[FluffyChicken]

I'll give it a gor this weekend hopefully.
I'll be using VMWare5 so I just click the clone button. Probably bridge the connections rather than use the NAT router to start with.

I'll give 98 or SE a go first before Win2K (even harder to find those CD's :rolleyes: in the pile)

Unfortunatly i'll be testing on a 1GHz Laptop with only 512MBram.
setting harddrive size isn't a problem as it's dynamic under VMWare.

[ffenliv]

for what it's worth, i strongly recommend virtual server .. running just one or two vm's with virtual machine slowed my machine to unusability, but im able to run 12 with virtual server.

[willebenn]

Micro$oft has a downloadable free 45 day evaluation version of VirtualPC. :)
Anyone give that a try yet??

[willebenn]

Well in case anyone is interested IT WORKS like a champ. :D

[em99010pepe]

I am going to test VirtualPC.

Carlos

[em99010pepe]

Originally posted by willebenn
Well in case anyone is interested IT WORKS like a champ. :D

I have here VirtualPC 5.2 but I can't figure it out how it works. Help needed!

Carlos

[Fozzie]

Create a folder on a largish HD.

Create a virtual hard disk using the new v hard disk wizard.

Once done create a new virtual machine of the flavour you have an OS for,

Install the OS and JRE.

Copy the hard disk file to a save location

Rename your VPC to DIMESVPC1 so that your clones don't conflict once you fire them up on the network.

Configure Dimes on the VPC, I used static IPs with DNS specified as my router.

Repeat until you have reached the limit of RAM or storage or start getting wierd NIC issues.

[em99010pepe]

Originally posted by Fozzie
Create a folder on a largish HD.

Create a virtual hard disk using the new v hard disk wizard.

Once done create a new virtual machine of the flavour you have an OS for,

Install the OS and JRE.

Copy the hard disk file to a save location

Rename your VPC to DIMESVPC1 so that your clones don't conflict once you fire them up on the network.

Configure Dimes on the VPC, I used static IPs with DNS specified as my router.

Repeat until you have reached the limit of RAM or storage or start getting wierd NIC issues.

Too much work! Thanks anyway.

Carlos

[LichtJF]

Look Here: http://free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9425

[mmonnin]

How much CPU usage does running a Virtual PC take? I am also running FAH on my machines and was wondering if this would help w/o hurting FAH.

[Bok]

It can be customized, but it definitely does draw some CPUtime away from any main project, as much as 5% per vpc IIRC. I've not done much with it personally as I use linux on most machines.

Bok

[mmonnin]

Hmm it might best to add as much RAM as possible to a slower machine and run the VPCs on them instead of my faster PCs running folding.