ANN: SETI Service 1.0 Release

ANN: SETI Service 1.0 Release

[Ted Dennison]

I'm pleased to announce the initial public release of the SETI@Home
Service. It is now available for download both in source and binary
form. The sources might be of particular interest to users of this
group, as they constitute an example of creating a NT service using Ada,
along with examples of interfacing to the Win32 process and registry
facilites. The bindings used are thick bindings which I plan to release
on their own (possibly in the public domain) at some later date.

Version 1.0 of the SETI@Home service is now available for download from
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/SETI/SETI_Service.html . The
SETI@Home service is a Windows NT service that controls a SETI@Home
command-line client. Since it is implemented as a service, it is only
usable on systems running Windows NT or Windows 2000.

The goal SETI@Home Service is to help maximize your system's SETI@Home
work-unit output. It uses the command-line client, which elimiates
processing cycles that would otherwise be lost to displaying graphics.
As a further boost, even the client's text output is disabled. The
client is run as a background process, so that it can continually work
without impacting anything else you may want to do on your machine.

But the main benifit to running the client as a service is that it runs
the client as long as your machine is booted. You no longer need to
leave yourself logged on to process work units. Likewise, if your
machine is rebooted while you are away from it for any reason (eg: power
outage), the SETI@Home Service will resume processing immediately after
your machine reboots. A third way the SETI@Home Service helps you is
with network outages. If your network connection happens to be down when
the SETI@Home client completes a unit, it will quite likely termiate.
This can leave you without any SETI processing for an extended period of
time until you come back to the machine and notice the client's window
is gone. The SETI@Home Service automaticly detects termination of the
SETI@Home client and restarts it.

The SETI@Home Service is a free software project. This means that you
have the right to a source distribution if you would like to experiment
with the service's source code, or just see how it was written. To
ensure the most reliability and maintainablity possible, the SETI@Home
Service was written in Ada. To build the SETI@Home service from sources,
you will require an Ada compiler. There is one available at no cost at
ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/3.13p/winnt/.

For more information, visit the SETI@Home Service website at
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/SETI/SETI_Service.html

--
T.E.D.

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