Cav's Place

Was still in bed today when I decided I wasn’t going to even attempt to write that review over the weekend, one of the reasons being that, on top of simply not feeling like I could manage it, my parents were about to leave for a while, so I was going to fix myself something to eat while alone instead of struggling to at least start the review soon after waking up. Instead, I decided to update Comodo Firewall and try to see whether BOINC is the cause of an issue I noticed a week ago, then write a post about what happened. So this is that post.

The issue I mentioned was that, on the 9th, after installing this month’s Windows updates, I finally bit the bullet and updated BOINC from 7.4.42 to 7.6.22, after having waited to clear all SETI@home work units and then detach from the project, to prevent any other issues that may appear when attempting to resume after updating the client. It was still installed as a service, but had turned off the client before updating and it didn’t ask for a reboot, so I only rebooted days later, when it was all still fine. However, the next time, when I actually shut down the computer, as well as the next time I rebooted after that, I was greeted by an error listed in event logs, stating that the previous shutdown had been unexpected, which was obviously incorrect.
At first I was completely confused, since I hadn’t installed, updated or modified anything that may affect shutting down between the last normal reboot and the first such error. However, then I realized that what started when the system booted up on the 9th was BOINC 7.4.42, so even though what shut down along with it that next time was 7.6.22, that wasn’t the version that logged on, so that was a difference I could test. Not that I particularly cared to, as after that last reboot everything seemed stable and I didn’t care to risk anything, but now that I had to reboot to update Comodo Firewall anyway, I turned off BOINC first and noticed that the error didn’t show up again, adding weight to that assumption. Now let’s see if they’ll say anything about it.

Actually rebooted twice today, turning off BOINC first both times and not seeing that error either time, but the reason why I rebooted twice was that once again Comodo Firewall lost all HIPS rules after rebooting to update itself. Granted, before it seemed to be quite random, simply booting up and noticing them gone, and I’m hardly the only one experiencing that, but it’s been a while since it last happened and it actually required me to import the settings three times before it actually worked. So that second reboot was after the first failed attempt, as I knew from previous experience that sometimes it simply won’t load HIPS settings until you reboot again, but then they didn’t show up after first importing after that second reboot either, though simply importing again seemed to have finally fixed the issue. Hope I hadn’t made any important changes in the month and a half since that most recent export…
Did trigger another issue now and it’d take another reboot to fix it, but I rather knew that would happen and you can in fact consider this as managing to reliably replicate it for the first time, after finally figuring out what seemed to be causing it a while back. So I think I’ll wait a while longer, especially since everything seems stable at the moment and something doesn’t usually like multiple reboots in the same day, much less in a row, so getting away with those two is already quite nice and I’d rather not push my luck. If something else will seem clearly out of place, I may reboot again earlier, of course, but otherwise I’d rather not until at least tomorrow evening, and possibly even longer if I’ll manage to make myself simply ignore something that probably only looks strange, without actually meaning much.

Otherwise, until yesterday I was actually quite sure that Romania’s friendly against Spain was this evening and not tomorrow, so was planning to just watch it and have another excuse for not doing much else, but I guess it’ll work as an excuse for not even starting that review tomorrow either, knowing there’s no way I’ll finish it. Not that there was much of a chance of finishing in one day anyway, but that was why it was a matter of either starting right after waking up today or not bothering with it at all this weekend, since I’ll probably run again Monday, so I won’t get to it early enough then either. May try to start Tuesday, but then again I may not, and of course may eventually decide to not write it at all.