I just had to do a clean installation of Fedora 25, and I've installed BOINC, version 7.6.22 (X64). I'm trying to connect to my machine so that I can add projects, but can't. This isn't unusual for me, either, because every time I have to install BOINC I go through the same problem. Alas, I haven't had to do it for several years, so I don't remember the magic incantation. Please help, as I've been a member for years and want to keep contributing.

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Something else that may be significant is that when I have boincmgr open, I keep getting notices that the client has restarted 3 times in the last two minutes. As I'm only using 845MB out of 8GB, memory isn't an issue.

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I got it! As I use Fedora, I did a search on the Fedora Forum and found this: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=313161&highlight=BOINC As I ran boincmgr from ~/.boinc I didn't need to enter the password, it just came right up! Hope this helps others trying to get reconnected.

I just want to add that Fedora in particular sets up the BOINC Client and Manager in a particular way to make it secure. The instructions you linked to undo this. Just so any future reader is aware of that.

Really? How? It's not like it's disabling SELinux, or running the program as root. If there's a security issue, please explain.

Access to the content of gui_rpc_auth.cfg allows anyone to control your locally installed BOINC client. Anyone with read access to client_state.xml can read your authenticator and login with your account at your projects. Securing the client directory and presetting a password was done intentionally by the Fedora packager. This error report comes up from time to time and it's not something BOINC has control over directly.

I'm not saying that this is a bug, or that BOINC should do anything about it. It is, however, a workaround, and the only one I could find that works. I think that I even tried running boincmgr in the same directory as the key and it failed. If you have a safer method, please tell me and I'll post it at the fedoraforum as an addition to that thread.

And, btw, I didn't mention Fedora in the thread's title because I didn't think (and still don't) that either the issue or the workaround was distro-specific. I'll not change it back, but I did want to comment.

Edit:

On further thought, it's trivially easy to remove even read access for all but you and members of your group after you've got BOINC running and that would make sure that other users of that box, if any, wouldn't be able to access it.

On further thought, it's trivially easy to remove even read access for all but you and members of your group after you've got BOINC running and that would make sure that other users of that box, if any, wouldn't be able to access it.

That would be my safer way too. Allow group read access to gui_rpc_auth.cfg and add yourself to the boinc group. That should make it possible for any member of the group to control the client as long as the manager is started within the client directory. Either cd into this before starting the manager or use the commandline argument -d and specify the /var/lib directory.

Fedora is the only distribution (I know of) that by default sets a password. On Debian where the file is also protected in a similar way they don't set a password so users don't experience this problem until they set a password but then they usually already added themself to the boinc group.

I wish I could say this worked for me on F25, but it did not. Other ideas? Thanks!

Group changes take effect after the next login. Did you restart after making the changes? What changes did you make from the linked article? How do you start the BOINC Manager (if you added your user to the boinc group and made the file in question group readable the menu link provided by fedora should work, if not we need to know how things look like on your system)?

On Debian I have a password in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg. In order to run the manager locally I added a desktop launcher but set the properties to "boincmgr --password xxx" where xxx is the password. Its able to connect to the BOINC core client. Without the password it won't.

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MarkJ

Group changes take effect after the next login. Did you restart after making the changes?

This is Linux we're talking about, ChristianB, not Windows. You don't need to restart to make changes like this take effect, just log out and back in again. Just thought I'd mention it.