HomeLab: Crunching For Covid

When I've been looking for interesting stuff to do with my homelab kit it has occurred to me that it would be good to put some of the resources available towards a good cause. I've decided to donate some computing power and installed Folding At Home.

Folding has been around for years. For those that haven't encountered it, it's a very clever distributed computing system that runs using donated resources from users all over the world. There isn't much worth expanding on that isn't covered on their site.

The VM is running 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, and 32GB of space on an SSD. I have it set to run flat out using all resources. This means that if I need the computational juice for something else I can just pause the VM, and set it going again when I'm done.

I initially installed on Ubuntu Server, which was fine, the documentation covers that. What is a little patchy is the info regarding post-install config. I then discovered after an hour of tinkering, while grabbing links for this post, that there is in fact an ESXi appliance. Here. What a bellend.

Anyhow, for anyone that does feel like the Ubuntu server approach, use the documentation on the website, and then on your VM go to /usr/share/doc/fahclient/ and copy sample-config.xml to /etc/fahclient/config.xml:

cp sample-config.xml /etc/fahclient/config.xml

and then

nano /etc/fahclient/config.xml

and edit to taste.

For reference, here's my config:

But wait...! Turns out the appliance is a bag of spanners that doesn't take any of the settings given to it during config/deployment. And my Ubuntu method actually works... Good job I didn't delete that shit!
Maybe not such a bellend after all.