:: 23-Dec-1998 12:04 (Wednesday) ::

I’m offline until Jan 4.

:: 18-Dec-1998 00:01 (Friday) ::

More on the Trojan Front…

Seems someone’s been rootkitting linux boxes and installing the client
to crack keys. This is very disheartening that this is happening. I have
worked with two places so far to help them with forensics and recovery
of control of the box.

We know who has been doing this (Duh, you root kit a box, and put your
email address in the .ini file, of course you’re going to get tracked down)
and they are currently in pursuit of criminal action, and I am silenced
to disclosing the name and team of said email address.

All I can say is that once again, Distributed.net does not condone this
practice at all. Ask permission to run clients on all boxes! Violators
will be dealt with, with extreme prejudice.

Also, keep those speeds rolling in… http://www.distributed.net/speeds/

–Pete

:: 17-Dec-1998 17:46 (Thursday) ::

Special thanks go to Tom Huckelberry for pointing me towards
http://www.microx-press.com/online/ who are able to put a P2B-DS
into my hands by tomorrow. Nice folks, *and* they’re in Indianapolis,
my hometown.

:: 17-Dec-1998 15:41 (Thursday) ::

The existing statsbox needs to be carried around the back of the shed and
shot, to put it out of its misery. I only hope we can soon do just that.

Bad news: Someone has apparently purchased every single P2B-DS in
existence and our motherboard is on backorder. *grumble*

I’m fiddling with the old box right now, trying to figure out what’s going
on. Looks like another corrupt index on tot_team, but I’m not positive.
I’m rebuilding the index right now and we’ll see what happens.

You’ll know something as soon as I know.

:: 16-Dec-1998 02:11 (Wednesday) ::

Been awhile, but there is good news to report. Work has continued on the MacOS PPC
v2.7102.421 client mostly through the effort of Peter DiCamillo. A stable fba
version is planned for release shortly after the GUI client. Please do not ask for
a copy of the beta, as there is still much work to be done. Progress is being made,
just hang in there a little longer.

Feature of the month: burst (coalescing) flush: flush 4 to 8 times faster than before.

:: 15-Dec-1998 16:04 (Tuesday) ::

I’d expect that we’ll receive the new ASUS P2B-DS motherboard and the
256Mb DIMM today. If all goes well, I should be able to drop them
into the box around lunchtime. It’ll be nice to have a machine that
I trust again. I still have a bit of concern over the drive
timeouts I have seen from time to time, but that’s nothing which
will stand in the way of my resuming development efforts.

It was a nervous feeling, spending $1,100 on two components, but I
think we’ll all agree that the insurance of stability will prove to
be worth the money. It was a lot easier to handle considering that
we also received a $2,600 cheque from iGive yesterday as well.

(Brief Plug)

If you’re not aware, iGive is an easy way for you to help us fund
distributed.net without much effort on your part. iGive will donate
money to distributed.net in return for your viewing advertisements
on the web or buying stuff from iGive advertisers. distributed.net
is one of the charter non-profits with iGive, and distributed.net
participants have used iGive to raise over US$13,000, which has
made statsbox-ii a reality.
(http://www.distributed.net/legal/ledger.html)

If nothing else, I’m glad that we’re in a position to support an
internet-based business model that in no way involves spam or bulk
email. iGive is a very net-friendly way for businesses to conduct
business and I wish them every success.

If you’d like to help us build statsbox-ii, it’s rather simple.

http://www.iGive.com/html/ssi.cfm?cid=1098&mid=3311

Right off the bat, we’ll get a couple bucks for the new membership,
plus each day you visit the iGive website and view five advertisements,
we get another $.50 or so. All in all, it takes only a few seconds
and given the number of participants we have, it really does add up.

Our relationship with iGive has been nothing but rewarding for both
sides. Excuse the shameless plug, but I really do think that these
guys are on to something worthwhile.

(Ok, advert over)

I’m told by the poor souls at help@distributed.net that they’re
receiving quite a number of inquiries and questions regarding the
retire_to feature on statsbox-ii that I briefly mentioned earlier.
Here’s the run-down on how it’s going to work:

In the participants table (the same place I track your team
affiliation, password, etc) there is now a retire_to field as well.
Normally, this field is just 0, however you can set this to the
ID of another email address and effectively retire all activity
to the other email. This will only work once, after which, the
retired email will effectively disappear from the stats. This
code is complete and in place on the new server. It’ll be working
as soon as we put statsbox-ii into production around new years.

So, say you’re john.smith@someschool.edu and you’ve been cracking
rc5-64 since last october. However, you’ve now graduated and you’re
now stuck with being jsmith@someisp.com while you job search. Since
the old email no longer works, you’ve now started submitting blocks
with the new someisp address. Using the password for the old school
address, you’ll simply “retire” the school address into the isp
address. On the next stats run, all blocks for the school address will
automagically be added to the current address for rankings. Note that
this has no effect on team assignments. If past blocks have been
assigned to a team, they will not be affected as a byproduct of the
retire process.

Also note there are *no* plans to allow team mergers. The retire_to
code only applies to individual participants to allow for participants
to smoothly change email addresses without penalty.

Other than that, statsbox development has been pretty boring. The
current focus has been on moving the log transfer / auto-process code
to a more elegant solution now that I’ve got things like cron and scp
at my disposal. Not much to look at, but still very gratifying to
implement.

Thanks again, everyone, for your considerable patience.

:: 15-Dec-1998 11:47 (Tuesday) ::

Adam L. ‘Duncan’ Beberg has set up a survey at
http://www.distributed.net/survey.html to gauge desire for various
distributed.net consumables. Currently, the tshirt, mug and a write-in
option for some strange thing called a ‘bumper sticker’ are in the lead.

:: 14-Dec-1998 15:51 (Monday) ::

In an effort to fully test all of the DES components of our network in
prepreparation for DES-II-3, we plan to run a full DES contest
simulation. All clients with DES enabled will autoswitch to DES during
this time as they would in a normal contest.

Purposes of this test contest:

– Allow us to practice the DES-enabling process on the keymaster so
there is no confusion on the morning of January 13th, the actual
contest’s start date

– Test the rapid deployment of DES contest data and blocks across the
network

– Obtain an accurate network speed estimate, allowing us to predict the
time required to check the keyspace in full during the real contest.

This simulation will begin on Saturday, January 2nd at 09:00 PST and
will run until we find the key. There will be no cash prize associated
with this test run, but your efforts and CPU power will lend a big hand
in helping us prepare for DES-II-3.

:: 14-Dec-1998 05:10 (Monday) ::

Just a very brief update, I’m mostly focused on wrapping up the
SOTN -announce post we’re trying to get out this evening.

statsbox-ii development has been stalled lately due to some hardware
problems. The two 64mb SIMMs (which were graciously donated from two
different people) simply refuse to play well together. Rather than
sink even more money into what is basically a dead technology (72-pin
SIMMs) we’ve just decided to spring for a real motherboard that will
take real RAM. I expect to receive the ASUS P2B-DS and 256mb DIMM
on Tuesday.

More soon.

:: 14-Dec-1998 00:44 (Monday) ::

The new DES MMX bitslice driver code has been started.

I converted the existing GAS s-boxes to NASM macros and modified
them to the new interface.