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Subject: Remote Engines in Shredder Classic

Author: Stefan Meyer-Kahlen

Date: 04:22:12 04/22/04

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This is a short description of how to load engines “remote” in Shredder Classic.
This means that the engine and the GUI are running on different machines. It is
also possible to load two (or more) different engine on two (or more) different
machines simultaneously, very handy if you want to play engine matches or
tournaments with every engine running on its own PC. Those remote machines could
be Windows, Linux or whatever PCs and can be located in the local network as
well as somewhere in the Internet.

Here are two examples how to use remote engine in Shredder Classic. One is for
telnet access and one for ssh access. I use the tool plink.exe as a ssh and
telnet client which is available for windows in the internet for free. The
examples should make clear how it is working. Basically the GUI is loading plink
locally as the “engine”, and plink is loading the remote engine and is
forwarding all communication to the remote machine.

For debugging it is useful to start the remote engine from the windows shell
first to see if you can access the remote machine and are allowed to start
program there.

You have to create an eng file manually and place it in the Shredder Classic
Engines directory. Shredder will then show the engine in its load engine dialog.

In the engfile you can specify a “Parameter” for starting the local engine
(plink here) and also up to three commands which will be sent to the (local)
engine after starting it. You can also set “UCITimeout” in seconds to change the
default value how long the GUI is waiting for uciok and “StopTimeout” if the
engine gets kicked out to early if the communication is very slow.

123.45.67.89 is the ip address of the remote machine
username is your account of the remote machine
password is your password on the remote machine
chess is the engine name of the engine on the other machine

Please note again these are all more or less undocumented features in Shredder
Classic and that I don’t want to spend too much time giving support for this.

Here are the two examples how the eng file should look like.

SSH:

[ENGINE]
Name=Shredder via ssh
Author=Stefan Meyer-Kahlen
Filename=c:\winnt\system32\plink.exe
Parameter=username@123.45.67.89 -ssh -pw password /home/username/chess

TELNET:

[ENGINE]
Name=Shredder via telnet
Author=Stefan Meyer-Kahlen
Filename=c:\winnt\system32\plink.exe
Parameter=-telnet 123.45.67.89 -l username
SendCommand1=password
SendCommand2=./chess


Have fun
   Stefan



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Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

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