It seems that BOINC expects that we are all connected all the time. I\'m a dial-up user. So, when BOINC needs to communicate with the project (climate or SETI) it can\'t when I\'m not connected. So, it gives a message that it will try to connect some hours in the future. Isn\'t there a way I can tell it to manually connect and complete it\'s comm needs?

Dial-up issues are a known problem in BOINC, and unfortunately they seem to be a low priority for the developers. The Boinc client will not respect the connection preferences that you set on the project webpage.

There are a couple of things you can do.

1) When you're offline, set the BOINC client to "Disable BOINC Network Access" in the File menu. This will prevent the client from trying, and failing, to communicate with the server, and thus prevent the exponential backoff from ramping up. It will also keep it from attempting to dial your modem. NOTE: This setting is not presistant. If the client is restarted (ie. you reboot the computer) then network access will be enabled again.

2) When you go online, re-enable network access. The client will most likely try to connect right away if it needs to. (Assuming that the backoff time has elapsed.)

3) With network access enabled, if the client does try to connect automatically, or you want to manually force, then go to the client "Projects" tab, right-click on the project, and select "Update" from the pop-up menu. Repeat for any other projects you have.

[begin rant mode]
Why is this such a damn low priority for the developers? And why is this such a damn hard thing for them to get right? The old Seti Classic didn't have difficulties with dial-up. There are lots of programs out there, both professional and amateur that can automatically detect when the network is available, and either sleep or auto-dail if it's not. For example, every Instant Messaging program, many e-mail clients, time-sync deamons, etc.

Seriously, there's got to be lots of resources out there for code to deal with dial-up network connections like this. How much effort is really needed to fix this problem. It's been a known problem for at least 3 months.

And while I'm ranting.... how much effort would it really take to make the "Disable network access" setting presistant? There's alreay an INI file. There's already saved preferences for proxy settings. What would it take: about half an hour of coding to add this setting to the INI file? That would at least make life easier for modem users until they fix the network access problem.
[end rant mode]