Development for LHC@home

A new feature has been added. The screenshot that is captured in the event of an error during the job execution is now displayed at the very bottom of the result page. So, if a task errors out, the state of the VM at the time of the error can be seen in the task's results.

We would greatly appreciate any feedback on this new feature.

Thank you for your invaluable support!

https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/result.php?resultid=323087

---

Mad Scientist For Life

It seems that the actual state of the VM was the one displayed by the screenshot since as far as I can see it is working for other cases e.g.

https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev_ops/db_action.php?table=result&id=322790

Disable the screen blanking in the VM's for all sub-projects is the solution and already a long term wish from the volunteers.

It would also be useful for test purposes when the tester wants screen capturing every few minutes and not able/want to be at the machine all the time.

btw: your link is only accessible to admins.

Sorry about the link. Here is one that should be working:

https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/result.php?resultid=323055

About the screen blanking, it is actually disabled for Theory and it will be for the rest of the apps as soon as we feel satisfied with the way Theory works.

About the screen capturing, the most important and crucial part of the VM's life is the moment a task errors out, so that is what we are trying to capture. Periodical screen capturing could be done but it would have to be on an ad hoc basis (e.g. using a script).

Yeah, I already found your example result with the captured screen.

I had a script in the past for capturing, but it was not useful when the screen turns to black after a few minutes.

My windows-script (NL-time format) (where of course the vm-name has to be changed):


@echo off
set nap=60

:START
set dategroup=%date:~9,4%%date:~6,2%%date:~3,2%
set timegroup=%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%%time:~6,5%
set timegroup=%timegroup:.=%|| delete seperator
set timegroup=%timegroup:~0,6%|| trim hundreds
set timegroup=%timegroup: =0%|| insert leading zero for hours < 10

"%vbox_msi_install_path%\VBoxManage" controlvm boinc_a6f079d732a6ace5 screenshotpng D:\vLHC\Images\%dategroup%-%timegroup%.png
timeout /t %nap% /NOBREAK >NUL
goto START

exit

The disabling of the screen blanking was announced earlier, but did not work.
Maybe in this latest version. I'm testing it now.

Tested: The screen blanking is still enabled. The screen turns to black after about 10 minutes.

The screen is blanking indeed. I will look into it. As a temporary workaround you could add a keyboard space (0x39) input to your script right before the screenshot to "wake" the VM. That is what the vboxwrapper is currently doing.

The screen is blanking indeed. I will look into it. As a temporary workaround you could add a keyboard space (0x39) input to your script right before the screenshot to "wake" the VM. That is what the vboxwrapper is currently doing.

Thanks for pointing me to that possibility.
I use Left-Alt (0x38). That's what I normally do by hand when waking up a guest console. For the host I normally use Left-Shift.
For me 'space' is still an input character that theoretically could be stored in documents or whatever.

... adding the kernel parameter "consoleblank=0" to the bootmanager.

Have you ever tried this solution?

https://lhcathomedev.cern.ch/lhcathome-dev/forum_thread.php?id=324&postid=4454

We were going with "setterm -blank 0", but it obviously wasn't working. Trying to understand why. Possibly not surviving reboots

We were going with "setterm -blank 0", but it obviously wasn't working. Trying to understand why. Possibly not surviving reboots

You may read this:
https://superuser.com/questions/152347/change-linux-console-screen-blanking-behavior

To me it seems that setterm does not work on every terminal while consoleblank=0 as boot parameter works directly on the VM´s kernel.

this one worked but I assume it was lucky timing?

https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/result.php?resultid=136767548

I tested consoleblank=0 on one of my own linux VMs.
It completely disables the console screensaver as expected and therefore does not need any workaround to wake a sleeping console.

Do I miss a requirement that makes it impossible to use this solution?

As we are using CernVM, doing this is not straight forward which is why the the setterm method was tried. It is being followed up.