Question about my Folding Setup

[hodges]

I run a Cyber Defense Lab at my college and we have 16 Core i5 3.0GHz systems that never see any use between the hours of 7pm and 10am. Often times most aren't being used throughout the day. We image these computers when needed which can be on a day to day basis. Obviously imaging would mess up the progress of a WU. Is there any way I can setup install foulders on a shared folder on our Active Directory server and then have the computers on the LAN pull from the server? When the WU is complete it would push from the computer to the server and then upload. Would I have to setup proxy settings for this to happen?

Any help for this topic would be appreciated!

[bruce]

Welcome to foldingforum.org, hodges.

The FAH clients can be installed on any drive, including network drives or USB drives, so yes, it's possible, as long as each client is installed in a unique place. If your machines happen to run Linux or OS-X, this should work fine.

Assuming Windows, however, there's a problem with ghost or other image management. The Windows FAH client places a unique node identifier in the Registry. If that identifier gets stored in your image, the servers will treat all machines as being the same node and you'll be assigned an awful lot of duplicated work. If that identifier is missing from the image, a new one will be assigned every day, but the result will appear to come from a different node than the one it was assigned to, disrupting the points system in a different way.