Hive Slave setup

There exist two installers for the Hive Slave:

• HeuristicLab.Clients.Hive.Slave.SlaveWindowsServiceSetup: This setup installs and starts the Hive Slave Windows service. The service runs in the background and connects to the Hive server, from which it fetches jobs and calculates them. If you don't want the slave to always calculate jobs, you can install the Slave Tray Icon where you can control the behavior of the service.
• HeuristicLab.Clients.Hive.Slave.TrayIconSetup: Installs an application which sits in the Windows Taskbar and shows you information about your locally installed slave. Besides the information it shows, you can use the Tray Icon to pause or stop the Slave service. There is a shortcut created in the Start Menu as well as in the Autostart folder so the Tray Icon gets started automatically when a user logs in on the machine.

Please note that you need local administration privileges on your computer to execute the installers.

The installers ask you for the installation path and if you want to install the application for all users. The defaults should be ok. The Slave Windows Service is now visible in the Windows Service Viewer and can be started and stopped from there:

The Slave Windows Service Setup also creates an Event Source. You can view entries with the Windows Event Viewer. If something goes wrong while executing jobs, the slave tries to get the exceptions to the server so that the user can view them in the Experiment Manager. In cases where the slave doesn't know how to react to an exception and has to shut down, these exceptions are logged as Windows Event entries.

The Slave Tray Icon application shows on the first page an overview of the slave. The Kill button lets you stop the Windows service. If you are not logged in as administrator, UAC asks you to confirm this operation and the tray icon restarts with administration privileges. You may notice that the icon on the kill button changed and if you click it now, the service is stopped. The Stop button can be used to pause the Slave. This means that the slave is still connected to the Hive, but the server doesn't send new jobs to the slave. Start resumes operation. If the service is stopped, it tries to start the service. If the slave is paused, it tells the service to accept new jobs. The Jobs page shows a list of all currently running jobs and their execution time and the Log tab page displays all messages logged by the service.

For testing purposes or if you don't have local administration privileges you can use the HeuristicLab.Clients.Hive.Slave.ConsoleClient-3.4. The Slave console client is a simple console application which you can execute without the need to install it. It starts the slave and shows information as output on the console: