:: 17-Nov-1998 13:44 (Tuesday) ::

Another space-related hiccup last night, and stats sat and waited for
me to wake up and kick them. Thanks for the detective work, Peter.
I’ve moved temp from one drive to another, which should prevent this
from happening again, and I’ve kicked off the rankings. I’d expect
stats to be up within the next hour or so, assuming no further
difficulties.

Much progress has been made on statsbox_ii.

:: 17-Nov-1998 08:52 (Tuesday) ::

It looks like there a few minor problems with the x86 card stuff – not least
of which that the stupid CPU keeps overheating. That’s no doubt caused by
the fact that some idiot has decided to use the air conditioning system to
heat the office.

It seems I’ve had all this work to do as well, so ARM client development is
on pause for the next few days.

:: 17-Nov-1998 04:59 (Tuesday) ::

Been busy with lots of school stuff unfortunately. I have been able
to start on dynamic object support for coff format modules, and I’ve
already begun to restructure my omf object support using inheritance
to make adding support for new formats easier. While you’re reading,
come check out Harvey Mudd’s standings in the recent ACM contest:
http://www.calstate.edu/acm/

:: 17-Nov-1998 02:30 (Tuesday) ::

Just opened tonight’s pile ‘o snail-mail and found this pleasant
surprise:

“…Based on information you supplied, and assuming your
operations will be as you stated in your application
for recognition of exemption, we have determined you are
exempt from federal income tax under section 501(a) of
the Internal Revenue Code as an organization described in
section 501(c)(3).”

As a direct result, my stress level has now fallen about 20 or so
notches. This has been over a year in happening, and it’s a great
relief to have it behind us. Geeks do not make good Tax Attorneys,
and I wouldn’t wish this process on anyone. Still, we’ve weathered
it well (and are only about $1,700 poorer as a result).

:: 17-Nov-1998 01:00 (Tuesday) ::

For those of you interested, http://www.distributed.net/webstats/ is going
to be off-line until we add another 128mb sdram dimm (bringing it to 256) to
nodezero.

The program, analog, we’re using to analyze web logs is fairly memory
intensive which isn’t a Good Thing(tm) on a box that’s low on ram. As
soon as the ram is replaced, I’ll re-enable the log processor and
post here.

:: 16-Nov-1998 22:10 (Monday) ::

statsbox_ii update

Today has been both a good day and a bad day for statsbox_ii. On the
plus side, the *participant* table is now officially complete. This is
the table that tracks each participant, their team affiliation,
password, non-profit vote, yadda yadda yadda. What’s different here is
that now people have been assigned unique ID numbers (just as teams are
handled) which reduces the storage requirements and will speed things
up substantially.

ID #’s were assigned chronologically, so the lower your ID #, the
‘leeter you are. ;)

The bad day part is, one of my 1gb seagate drives (tempdb, if you’re
curious) munched today and I had to swap it for another unit.

:: 16-Nov-1998 15:24 (Monday) ::

Stats suffered two failures last night, both quite minor. We will not
be down for long.

First, due to operator error on the keymaster, one of the logfiles
(-19) was not compressed and therefore never made it to the stats box
for processing. This will auto-correct during tonight’s stats run and
you may never even notice. Anyone unfortunate enough to have flushed
an entire day’s worth of blocks between 19:00 and 19:59 will, however,
notice. As I said, this will auto-correct tonight, so don’t lose too
much sleep over it.

Second, one of the cache tables (tm_members) which stores the daily
team membership data got live-locked and the stats run was unable to
delete the table. Normally, this table is deleted and re-built each
night. As a result, stats got hung up at that point. I’ve just now
restarted them, and we should be back online very soon.

One downside is that the ranking offsets will be lost for last night,
since I’m just going to “be safe” and re-run all the cache tables.

:: 16-Nov-1998 15:25 (Monday) ::

One of the first steps in my DNS/RP/LOC project is complete. The
v27.distributed.net and proxy.distributed.net zones are now generated
by dbakerware(tm).

Rather than distributed.net DNS administrators having to go through
a long and tedious procedure to maintain proxies, now they just
have to edit one file and run dbaker_dns_generate.

You can now obtain all sorts of information via “nslookup” about a
a proxy. For example, “nslookup -type=rp proxy01.hou.tx.us.distributed.net”
will tell you:

proxy01.hou.tx.us.proxy.distributed.net
mailbox = dbaker.distributed.net
text = dbaker.proxy.distributed.net

You could then mail dbaker@distributed.net (change the first . to a @), or
you can do a type=txt lookup on dbaker.proxy.distributed.net for further
contact information.

These features will be automatically implemented into new versions of
proxyinfo and other monitoring programs.

:: 15-Nov-1998 22:44 (Sunday) ::

Didn’t do anything today. Everything seems to be working fine. I’m
thinking about releasing the DOS and Win16 clients tonight.

Yesterday’s news: Fixed the “cannot create console” problem some
win32 clients were reporting at 1024×768 and 640×480. Fixed the win32
restart bug. Speeded up the shutdown procedure a bit. Oh, yeah. Fixed
(what Silby termed a “minor bug”!) the ^2 of the time slice for DES
cores. That was real fun to watch on my NetWare machine.

Friday: worked with chrisb (rather he worked while I just lounged
around) on the x86 coprocessor board support he’s doing for RISC OS.
We giggled half the afternoon away until we finally decided that the
best solution would probably be to stop building RISC OS
clients and instead insist that RISC PC users buy x86 option boards
to run a win32 client running under a WINE binary built for Linux
under FreeBSD which would be running under BOCHS in a DOS emulator
in a Mac emulation which would have been previously spawned by an
XFree session under EMX that had been started by command.com run
by winoa386.mod in a winos2 session running under OS/2.

:: 15-Nov-1998 04:13 (Sunday) ::

I’ve been looking up LOC information on proxies and restructuring the zone
files most of today, preparing the final solution to the proxy naming
problem. I have no idea as of yet what authorities to contact for accurate
un-American location data; it’d be of great help if someone could email me
latitude, longitude and height data for the following addresses:

proxy01.mz.rp.de.proxy.distributed.net
proxy01.nottm.ac.uk.proxy.distributed.net
proxy01.kl.my.proxy.distributed.net
proxy01.hel.fi.proxy.distributed.net

Minor note: http://www.distributed.net/credits.html now has an accurate
and autoupdating Proxy Operators section.