I have a 2003 domain controller that was crunching along successfully and last contacted the servers on January 14. Since then the Messages tab keeps saying that it cannot access the project servers and the project must be down. I'm certain this device has network access.

This happened on two other systems and I was able to fix by upgrading BOINC, however, since this is a domain controller I can't install anything newer than 5.10.45. I could force it to upgrade but I'd rather try to understand why it can't connect. I'd copy the Messages here but it's the typical :

Project communication failed: attempting to access reference site
Access to reference site succeeded - project servers may be temporarily down

Any ideas?

Your client doesn't have the correct security protocols in use by the project now. Solution is to get a newer client. Since you can't do that I guess you are done with that host on Seti.

Unless you can figure out how to get the current ca-cert SSL authentication package you are done. For the error messages telling you the problem, turn on http_debug and look at the log file after the client attempts to contact the project.

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Please see this thread. Apparently you may be able to copy ca-bundle.crt from a working BOINC to this one to replace the outdated one.

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I don't think it's the age of the OS. I have a Windows 2000 Professional client crunching successfully, though it can't install anything newer than 7.2.x, and that's old than Win2k3. Proposing an educated guess, I'd say the old certificate file was SHA1 and they finally got around to updating it to SHA256, as is currently the standard.

I successfully copied the .crt file from a working computer to the domain controller, but it is currently on back-off for 23 hours. I'll have to check back. At least it isn't saying that it can't access the project servers.

Thanks for the help!

Charlie, present day BOINC can be installed on a domain controller as long as you install it as a user installation. That problem where the installer would balk because it couldn't make the BOINC limited user accounts is afaik only still present for service installs. The non-service install no longer makes those accounts.

So try 7.14

I remember you telling me that, but I prefer the service install on systems that don't have a GPU to use. Like I said, I could upgrade selecting the user install as you suggested, then manually create a BOINC service but I was just curious as to why it suddenly stopped working so far back and continued to not work.

So the back off period ended and the domain controller went right back to saying it can't connect to the project servers. I even stopped and restarted the BOINC service for good measure. I also checked the .crt file and it looks like it's still SHA1 but has an expiration of 2028. Not even a restart helped.

I also attempted to upgrade to 7.14.2 using the installer but right after clicking Next it would just say that it was interrupted and I had to click Finish.

In the end I extracted the .msi out of the installer using the /a switch, installed manually using msiexec /I boinc.msi, selected the user option, then manually created the system service and it all seems to be working now.