:: 14-Jan-1999 07:09 (Thursday) ::

DES-TEST-2 is coming along very nicely. Our key checking rate seems to be holding
stead at about 100 gigakeys a second.

However, we still need everyone to install clients wherever you can and upgrade
to fordbr’s new x86 DES cores.

Remember, DES-III is less than a week away and we will only have twenty-four hours
to snag the key. Be sure to devote all your power to DES.

:: 14-Jan-1999 03:10 (Thursday) ::

For all of you who had problems downloading clinets todoy. Everything should be back to normalnow. Please simply redownload any clients that you are having problems with.

Thanks

:: 13-Jan-1999 12:45 (Wednesday) ::

I’ve talked to our coders about the problems some users have been having with
connecting to the proxy network. If you are getting a ‘Fetch::Bad request’
message, then the proxy is either out of DES blocks, or your http proxy switched
servers during the middle of the transmission. If you get this message during
flush, then it’s simply a proxy problem. Make sure you’re using the closest
possible round-robbin (euro80 or us80 for example), or as a last case effort,
try using a specific proxy that’s close to you.

If you are seeing other network errors, _and_ you can pin them down (when the
errors occur, what the error message is, what your current config is, what
affect different config settings have, etc.), then please email info to
rc5help@distributed.net.

Of course, for _any_ bug reports, make sure and include your actual version
number. ‘The latest client’ could be any client…

For you depressed stats mongers ;), Nugget has gotten most of the log files into
the stats-box, but they haven’t been audited yet.

:: 12-Jan-1999 19:55 (Tuesday) ::

428 Clients Pulled

We’ve pulled all -428 clients due to a tendency to fail the self-test for
some people. We’ve not been able to identify any common element that is
present for all the people experiencing this intermittent behavior.

No additional information is available at this point. Expect to hear
from the coders as they diagnose the situation. In the interim, the -427
clients are the preferred version.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

:: 12-Jan-1999 19:06 (Tuesday) ::

With few bumps, DES-TEST-2 is now underway. If you haven’t done so already, please
upgrade your clients (http://www.distributed.net/clients.html) to v428. Not only
will you see increased functionality, but a huge speed improvement for x86 clients.

Keep cracking, keep upgrading, and expect an announce@ post from me shortly in
regards to DES-III.

:: 12-Jan-1999 11:11 (Tuesday) ::

After one complaint too many, I’ve been volunteered to do Solaris/x86 builds
for a while. I’ve just uploaded v2.7104.428 (dynamic) clients, so expect them
to appear on the FTP servers soon.

I also built a v2.7104.428 RISC OS client, which I will upload shortly. I’d
like to be able to include the RC5PC module, but there is a bug somewhere
in the interaction between the client and the module which causes problems
with 2^31 key blocks. If we manage to get it fixed soon, I’ll include it.

Oh, and it’s my birthday :)

:: 11-Jan-1999 23:20 (Monday) ::

okie dokey. after reading through all of the helpful feedback that I
received in response to the 300 and 301 releases, I am releasing a new
build 302 which attempts to correct as many of the issues that I have
been able to verify.

windows nt service installation should work now.

blocks should be requested up to maxready now, connections still
triggered by minready.

documentation for ignoredip section updated.

no longer attempts to request des blocks when des is closed.

-repair and -unlock should no longer hang if your buffers have loops
in them anymore.

lots of possibly problems that could lead to buffer corruption have
been fixed.

contest start times that have already passed are no longer given to
clients when they connect.

console output now indicates which contest when blocks are requested,
received, delivered, etc.

proxy should no longer request infinitely many blocks when your buffer
thresholds are too low.

keyserver/bindip now actually works.

many issues that could cause invalid size blocks to be saved or given
to clients have also been addressed.

If you are running 300/301, it is greatly recommended that you upgrade
to 302 (be sure to run the -repair option first) as soon as possible.
Users who are still running a build 280 and are not comfortable
running code that is still under development and testing are
encouraged to continue running their build 280 until all issues are
resolved.

Continue to look for problems and send them to me as you find them.

:: 11-Jan-1999 13:58 (Monday) ::

DES MMX version 2 is a goer. The code now passes the
test keys.

Not as fast as I had hoped but a definite improvement.

90 clocks per key on a PII.

:: 10-Jan-1999 06:20 (Sunday) ::

I just notified our DES-TEST-1 winner via telephone that one of his Macintosh PPC’s
running rc5des v2.7103 had successfully solved DES-TEST-1. While there was no prize for
this contest, Daniel Preston (dprestn@ucla.edu) seemed thrilled to have beaten
the odds. The best of luck to him and everyone else in future contests.

:: 10-Jan-1999 04:51 (Sunday) ::

well, b15 of the mac client has been released (see link in previous .plan update)
and it contains many bug fixes from the previous public release. Please test it out
thoroughly and email me with any problems you encounter.