I will be going overseas for 3 1/2 weeks & I want to keep my 2 pc's
crunching SETI while I am gone.

If you have sufficient Fire, Electrical and realtime Hardware Monitoring protection (or
someone to look after your machines at least once a day), not a bad Idea.
It really depends on how much you trust your machines, and how well they are prepared for
a worst case scenario.

Just imagine a Power Supply going bad and delivering faulty voltages to the Motherbard, a
few days after you leave :p
(in ~182000 operating hours so far, this happened to me twice with AT based machines, and
once I exchanged a somewhat odd/disturbingly smelling ATX Power Supply ahead of time).

In both cases, the failure was catastrophic and destroyed the System.
On one of the occasions, I woke up by a beeping Bios Alert in the middle of the night and
noted already intense smell of smoldering PCB. Within maybe 2-3 Minutes, the Voltage
Regulators of the AT Motherboard were on their way to melt through the PCB :p
On the other occasion, the System was Shutdown in less than a minute after the Bios Alarm
went off.
Still, the CPU & its Cooler reached in excess of 150 Degrees, and the Motherboard
Capacitors were about to blow their caps.

So generally, I would never leave an AT based System running unattended for more than 1-2
days maximum, since there's nothing (except external devices or sensors) that can shut
them down in case of trouble.

A Fire hazard is usually very remote with computers, but I never put this worst-case
catastrophy completely out of consideration, since the risk does exist.

I am using SetiGate & I figured that I would download enough work units for
4 weeks, doing my last send/receive just before leaving for the airport & do
a send receive as soon as I get home.

Would this a good or bad idea?

4 weeks cache is way too big.
All Units returned will be long processed by other Users, leaving the Results useful for
your Stats counter only.

I'd recommend you configure your Server for Auto-Dialin a minimum of once every 48hrs.
I used to do this when I was away from home for more than a week, and it worked very nice.

I have thought about the SetiGate auto connect, but I don't know how to set
up a once per week dialup for my modem.
My other idea is to drive 50km (30 miles) & have friends look after my pc's
& SETI for me.

Depends on OS your running.
If you're using Windows, simply set it in the Browser and/or Dialup settings.
There, you can also specify after how many minutes of inactivity your Server logs off
again.

But of course, you should test this setup before you leave ;)

Greetings
FalconFly

Webmaster
http://www.falconfly.de
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