Version 7.16.11 of the BOINC client software has been released for Mac OS and Windows.

Download at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php

Release notes at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Release_Notes

Bill F
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In October of 1969 I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
There was no expiration date.

Gianfranco has also pushed the 7.16.11 into buster-backports for those of you running Debian.

If you are running Ubuntu he has a ppa here

Yes, the new client has a change that does not allow an empty gui_rpc_auth.cfg file anymore.

To get around the permissions problem of accessing gui_rpc_auth.cfg with the new client and return the client and manager to somewhat the same behavior as previous versions you need to add a new file with a pointer to the data directory.

.. so after some research, this happens due to these changes merged in March: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/pull/3709

Fortunately, previous behaviour can easily be restored by adding a /etc/boinc-client/config.properties file containing:

> data_dir=/var/lib/boinc

That points boincmgr and boinccmd where to find the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file to read the password from.
In order for a random password (in case of an empty file) to be written successfully, I think I had to change the permission for either the sym link /var/lib/boinc-client/gui_rpc_auth.cfg or the actual file in /etc.