freebsd-ports/astro/setiathome/files/setiathome.1

.\" Copyright status unkown
.Dd April 19, 1999
.Dt setiathome 1 LOCAL
.Os FreeBSD
.Sh NAME
.Nm setiathome
.Nd the SETI@home client program
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Op Ar options
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm
is the UNIX version of the 
.Tn SETI@home
client. It downloads radio telescope data from a network server, analyzes
the data looking for signals of extraterrestrial origin, and uploads results
to the server, repeating this cycle indefinitely. See
http://setiahome.ssl.berkeley.edu for more information.
.Pp
The first time you run
.Nm
it will interactively ask you for email address, name, country etc. This
info is stored in a file and no interaction is needed when you run the
program subsequently.
.Pp
After this you can run
.Nm
in the background, and direct its output to
.Pa /dev/null
if you like.
.Pp
.Nm
can be freely aborted and restarted. It saves its state in files,
and will pick up where it left off.
.Pp
.Nm
requires about 0.5\ MBytes of disk space in it's working directory, and about
12\ MBytes of memory. If you have ample physical memory, it's work load
should be almost undetectable.
.Ss Starting setiathome
This port to FreeBSD includes a start-up script (usually found in
.Pa /usr/local/etc/rc.d/setiathome.sh )
that starts
.Nm
at system start-up. You can also use this script to set up a working
directory
.Pa ( /var/db/setiathome ) ,
and lets you register with or log in to
.Tn SETI@home
by calling it with the argument
.Ar register .
.Ss Setting up setiathome manually
If you'd like to run
.Nm
on a SMP system, and therefor would like to run multiple
.Nm
processes at once, or would like it to run under a different user ID than
.Sq nobody ,
you have to set up one or more suitable working directories yourself.
.Pp
For each
.Nm
instance you'd like to run, create a directory, make it owned by the user
you'd like to run
.Nm
as, and run
.Ic setiathome -login
in that directory.
.Pp
Then, arrange for
.Nm
to be started automatically.  You can easily do so by adding a line similiar
to
.Bd -ragged -offset indent
.Li */10 * * * * cd 
.Va working directory 
.Li && Nm -email >/dev/null
.Ed
to the user's crontab.
.Sh OPTIONS
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Fl login
Login or create new account.
.It Fl countries
Show list of country codes.
.It Fl version
Show software version
.It Fl nice Ar N
Set "nice" priority to 
.Ar N
(default 1);
.It Fl email
Send email (to login email address) on errors. Useful if you run in
background directed to
.Pa /dev/null .
.El
.Pp
.Sh FILES
The program generates several files with 
.Pa .txt
extension in the directory from which it's run. These should not be
modified.
.Pp
If you want to run multiple instances of setiathome
(on a multiprocessor machine, or on multiple machines
that share a filesystem) each one must be run
in a different directory.
.Pp
setiathome uses a lock file 
.Pa ( lock.txt )
to prevent multiple instances from running in the same directory.
.Sh AUTHORS
.Tn SETI@home
was developed by
.An David Anderson , Jeff Cobb , Charlie Fenton , David Gedye ,
.An Kyle Granger , Eric Korpela , Matt Lebofsky , Peter Leiser , 
.An Brad Silen , Woody Sullivan , 
and
.An Dan Werthimer .
.Pp