nFoldMonOnly Background

Relationship to nFoldMan

This program, nFoldMonOnly, is a supplement to nFoldMan and cannot meaningfully be used without it. (nFoldMan is a program to monitor and control instances of Stanford's Folding@Home command-line client running on Mac OS X. nFoldMan can monitor Folding clients on remote macs, across the network.)

nFoldMonOnly is a subset of nFoldMan with no user interface. It can be interacted with only by connecting to it over the network. In return, it is able to run as a unix-level process, not a Mac application. This solves a specific, specialized problem I had.

What Problem nFoldMonOnly Addresses

nFoldMonOnly was developed to solve a specific problem: some of the Macs in my home are older machines now used for games and other minor applications by visitors and kids. I wanted to run Folding on these machines, but the users of those machines -- not familiar with computers or Folding@Home -- kept interfering with the setup of the folding application. I wanted to be able to:

• Run folding automatically on these machines; and
• Run folding only at idle times -- starting when the machine was idle and stopping when the machine was reactivated; but
• Not require the use of the Screen Saver feature to do this, since my kids kept installing their own screen savers.
• Also, I wanted to keep the control process out of the dock, because my kids kept quitting it.

It turns out that nFoldMan can do most of these things, with the exception of being invisible to the application dock. nFoldMonOnly was developed to fill this role.