Saiweb

For those not in the know Folding@Home is a piece of software that runs in the background of your desktop, server, heck even your PS3.

I originaly started out back in 99/2000 with the united devices cancer research client, their website of UD.com however seems to have long since slipped into web history, no doubt due to their nature of charging for CPU time on ‘thier’ grid, which was made of donor machines … Folding @ Home however is Open Source and not run by some shady business but by a variety of labs and Educational bodies (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/About).

Ok so what is this ‘folding’ all about?

When protein chains combine in your body to form more complex chains, and eventualy cells the process of combination is called folding, and problems during the ‘folding’ stage can lead to Cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s disease etc …

The problem faced when looking at protein folding is the shear number of possible ‘folds’ for each different type of protein, of course this is where computer power comes in, but even that has it’s limits this is where distributed computing helps.

Rather than a large super computer which is limited in budget, size and power distributed computing takes place by assigning a small work load to a ‘volunteer machine’, what this has lead to is a virtual super computer larger than any other, driven by software, and at the time of writing claims some 260,000 Active CPU’s

So please install this small piece of software on your machine by visiting the downloads page here: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download

Once you have the client running please join the Saiweb team 156680

Cheers

Buzz

NOTE:

I will be dedicated several machines to this, they will appear in the team members list prefixed buzz_ , one core from our Dedi server has also been dedicated to running F@H.

Part 2 has finally arrived …. don’t all cheer at once now …

In part two I will cover how to run an IP range scan using bash script, and if the host can be pinged retrieve the MAC address of the connected host.

Now bare in mind this script was written to run from a MAC running OSX Leopard.


#!/bin/bash
#colours
function colours {
CLEAR='\e[00m';
GREEN='\e[0;32m';
RED='\e[0;31m';
YELLOW='\e[1;33m';
}
#ipscan
function ipscan {
IPS_START=1;
IPS_END=254;
IPS_RANGE=192.168.1.
echo "Now running IPSCAN $IPS_RANGE$IPS_START - $IPS_RANGE$IPS_END"
for ((i=$IPS_START;i<=$IPS_END;i+=1)); do
RESULT=`ping -c 1 -t 1 $IPS_RANGE$i | grep "bytes from"`;
if [ -z "$RESULT" ]; then
echo -e “$IPS_RANGE$i:$RED DEAD $CLEAR”;
# If you comment out the above to report just the alive hosts, bash gets a bit funny about not processing anything here, so uncomment the below to keep it happy
#holder=$i;
else
MAC=`arp $IPS_RANGE$i | awk ‘{ print $4 }’;`;
echo -e “$IPS_RANGE$i:$GREEN ALIVE $CLEAR ($MAC)”;
fi
done
}
colours;
$1 $2


To make this work on your Linux distro replace -t in the ping command with -W and check the awk entry for the arp output, a display of (no) means that no ARP entries could be found for the host, and change the IP range to that of your network.

That’s it for this part, dump this is a file and chmod +x as useual and run with ./script.sh ipscan.

As I sit here tapping away on the iMAC currently in use whilst I wait on my Mac Book Pro, I am looking at various projects around the Google APS API … One notably of which is the Google Docs, file sharing and collab system.

“MacFUSE implements a mechanism that makes it possible to implement a fully functional file system in a user-space program on Mac OS X (10.4 and above). It aims to be API-compliant with the FUSE (File-system in USErspace) mechanism that originated on Linux.”

Not much to the end user, but basically will allow you (with some programming) to mount pretty much anything as a file system volume.

The techdemo video lists implementations such as docFS (Google Doc’s API) and rssFS (rss feeds as a file system).

Looking at the hello world example on the macFuse wiki it should be fairly simple to implement pretty much anything as a file system.

More to come once the MBP arrives.