LHC@home

I got my account number and d/loaded BOINC and all seemed to be going well. But I'm unable to connect to a project. I used the URL http://lhcathome.cern.ch and have made sure that I put in my account number properly, but it complains that "BOINC couldn't get main page for http://lhcathome.cern.ch. Please check the URL and try again."
Am I doing something stupid?? Have I completely messed up?? Can anyone help??

Steve

Do you have some sort of firewall on your machine?
Win Xp SP2 might cause trouble because of its new built in firewall.

Give us some more information about your system.


Christian Søttrup
LHC@home Developer

I'm running windows xp home and I have Norton firewall AND SP2, but I think the Windows firewall is switched off (due to it's being hopelessly inadequate beside Norton!). Is there a port I should open up, or is there something else going on? It seems like BOINC is having problems linking to the website to d/load the project, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with ports., but I don't understand how it can have difficulties accessing a website when there is no problem for Internet explorer/Mozilla.

I hope you're able to give me some help,

Many thanks,

Steve

> I'm running windows xp home and I have Norton firewall AND SP2, but I think
> the Windows firewall is switched off (due to it's being hopelessly inadequate
> beside Norton!). Is there a port I should open up, or is there something else
> going on? It seems like BOINC is having problems linking to the website to
> d/load the project, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with ports., but I
> don't understand how it can have difficulties accessing a website when there
> is no problem for Internet explorer/Mozilla.
>
> I hope you're able to give me some help,
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Steve
>
The XP firewall must be told about every application that you wish to allow to connect to the internet. By default all applications except the browser are off. BOINC needs to connect to the internet on port 80.

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.

I've just confirmed that the XP firewall is definitely off. Also, I temporarily disabled the Norton firewall to see if this would help, but I'm still getting the same error message.

If I type in some random web address into the URL field then the connection attempts fails straight away as would be expected, but if I use the correct URL it takes a while before it fails. Naively this implies that my computer can "see" the lhcathome website, but something goes wrong after that.

I'd really like to get this working as I think it's a really good idea, and could possibly get more of the "general public" interested in CERN's activities. Any advice to help me get this up and running is greatly appreciated.

Steve

> Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
>
> I've just confirmed that the XP firewall is definitely off. Also, I
> temporarily disabled the Norton firewall to see if this would help, but I'm
> still getting the same error message.
>
> If I type in some random web address into the URL field then the connection
> attempts fails straight away as would be expected, but if I use the correct
> URL it takes a while before it fails. Naively this implies that my computer
> can "see" the lhcathome website, but something goes wrong after that.
>
> I'd really like to get this working as I think it's a really good idea, and
> could possibly get more of the "general public" interested in CERN's
> activities. Any advice to help me get this up and running is greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Steve
>
One problem that I have read abou that was similar, the problem was a disabled Zone Alarm that was interfering. The solution was to remove Zone Alarm. I wonder if there is some similar problem where one of the two firewalls does not step out of the way completely if disabled. Try turning on both firewalls, and see if they can be configured to let BOINC through. BOINC only needs to communicate on Port 80 to talk to the server.

The final straw.....

I can't seem to get it working at all. I've noticed that the lhcathome server has been having a few difficulties over the last few days, so I haven't been trying too often. I tried when it said the the server was "up, but low on work", which suggested that I should be able to get something from it. However, I've had no luck.

Time for REALLY stupid questions. Is the URL I should be entering "lhcathome.cern.ch"?? Is the account ID it asks for the same one I used to sign onto this page??

If this doesn't work, I'm afraid I'll have to go back to devoting all my spare CPU time to SETI :(

Thanks again,

Steve

> The final straw.....
>
> I can't seem to get it working at all. I've noticed that the lhcathome server
> has been having a few difficulties over the last few days, so I haven't been
> trying too often. I tried when it said the the server was "up, but low on
> work", which suggested that I should be able to get something from it.
> However, I've had no luck.
>
> Time for REALLY stupid questions. Is the URL I should be entering
> "lhcathome.cern.ch"?? Is the account ID it asks for the same one I used to
> sign onto this page??

Yes to both.
>
> If this doesn't work, I'm afraid I'll have to go back to devoting all my spare
> CPU time to SETI :(
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Steve
>

For some reason it's now working!! There must have been some initial problem with my setup. After this was solved the lhcathome server ran out of work, or something like that, and this prevented me from d/loading jobs.

All seems to be fine now.

Thanks for all your help,

Steve