How-to Seti@Home on Cloud Ubuntu CLI

I needed to test the performance of a bunch of cloud machines this weekend, and what better way to do that then by running up a whole load of Seti@Home instances.

I did this by following these steps:

1. sudo apt-get update - Some cloud images were out of date and produced errors if this wasn't run before installing any software.
2. sudo apt-get install boinc-client - Some Clouds had 12.04 which needed about 350MB of downloads, some had 11.10 which only needed about 250MB.
3. sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart - Not sure this was really required, but it was a nice check to see that it was installed correctly and would stop and start again.
4. boinccmd --lookup_account http://setiathome.berkeley.edu email@address password - This returns the authentication code which you need for the next step.
5. boinccmd --project_attach http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ authentication_code - This attaches the client to the project. Use a different URL for a different project. This also assumes you have a project username which you used in the previous step.
6. boinccmd --set_network_mode always - Allows transfers to happen any time. Not sure if this is persistent.
7. boinccmd --set_run_mode always - Allows the client to run all the time. Again, not sure if persistent.
8. boinccmd --get_state | more - Make sure that the project has been registered correctly, and that it is getting work-units and tasks.
9. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade - Most cloud images seemed to have an out-of-date kernel and needed some other stuff after the large download earlier.
10. sudo reboot - After all that patching, make sure the machines are clean. All the cloud images I was testing had persistent images, so no problems restarting them.

I now have 35 cloud instances of Seti@Home running in addition to my small local server. It was very apparent how much difference there was in each instances performance, with some virtual machines taking 3 time longer to set-up than others.

I've been using the remainder of the £50 credit I got for Infiniserv, and 3 beta instances on the HP cloud.

Have you guys had and differing experiences?