:: 12-Apr-1999 04:49 (Monday) ::

OK, Team creation is now online.

http://stats.distributed.net/newteam1.php3

Let me know if you have any problems.

:: 12-Apr-1999 04:29 (Monday) ::

All the invalid participant IDs have been renumbered. If your
participant ID number was greater than 500,000 then you’ve been
re-assigned. Sorry for the inconvienence.

Next up, I’ll get the team creation scripts in place. Stay tuned.

:: 12-Apr-1999 02:08 (Monday) ::

I’ve got good news and bad news…

On the good side, both team editing and team creation are finished. If
you look at the bottom of team summary pages, you’ll see that there’s now
a place to enter the coordinator’s password and thereby edit the team’s
information. All team password should be unchanged from the old stats
server. Unfortunately, there is currently no team password mailer,
although I expect to have that online very shortly. If you still have
your password, it should work just fine.

The team creation scripts are also completely functional, as well.
However they are currently not accessible.

This brings me to the bad news.

We got hit with the runaway identity problem again, this time I suspect
it happened when we shut down the server the other day to upgrade the
UPS. Both the participant’s table and the teams table are in the
500000’s and I’ll have to spend some time this evening manually adjusting
the bad identity values. Stats for the night are just now wrapping up
and I won’t be able to begin correction until they’re finished.

If the server seems odd, or you can’t get to stats, this is why. I’ll be
adjusting and tweaking the data this evening to bring the high identity
values down to size.

Once I’m comfortable with the data, I’ll bring the teamjoining scripts
online. Looks like I’m finally going to have to flesh out the main stats
page, too, as these functions really don’t “belong” at the rc5-64 level.

More as it occurs. Thanks again for your patience.

:: 11-Apr-1999 20:14 (Sunday) ::

The following clients have been updated:

rc5des440-win32-x86-cli.zip
rc5des440-dos-x86-cli.zip

All these clients can be found on the distributed.net clients page at:
http://www.distributed.net/clients.html

Enjoy!

:: 10-Apr-1999 03:03 (Saturday) ::

It’s been a month since I last updated my plan, so I thought I’d add another
entry to keep everybody up to date. There exists OGR code for the master
server, the full proxies, personal proxies, and clients. Right now it’s mostly
functional – the list of items left to do include such things as: handling
multiple OGR ruler lengths simultaneously; saving and restoring partial blocks
on disk in the client; validation and testing to ensure that the master
distributes all stubs it should (it’s not as simple as RC5!); and finally
beta testing (we will announce how and where beta testing will take place
soon).

If all goes well, we should see beta testing start sometime this month.
Watch this space!

:: 09-Apr-1999 19:47 (Friday) ::

Ok. The AIX beta is finally up.
This beta will expire Apr. 23, 1999
Please send feedback to coders@lists.distributed.net

ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/pre-release/

:: 08-Apr-1999 21:16 (Thursday) ::

Ok sorry I lied… we had a problem
That version ws removed. We will try again soon

:: 08-Apr-1999 21:10 (Thursday) ::

Ok a pre-release AIX client has been uploaded.

rc5des-aix-beta-2.7109.439.tgz

you can find it at:
ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/pre-release

The client will expire on MAY 5 1999.
Please send feedback to coders@lists.distributed.net

Enjoy!

:: 07-Apr-1999 00:20 (Wednesday) ::

I think I’ve got the teamjoining historical blocks bug fixed up. My query
looked for records where team == NULL and it seems that there’s a non-trivial
number or records in the database where team == 0 instead of NULL.

Should correct itself in tonight’s run, let me know if after tonight you
still think blocks are missing.

:: 06-Apr-1999 12:45 (Tuesday) ::

One down, about a zillion to go…

OK, I’ve figured out what the deal is with the password mailer. When the
password mailer is run, it emails you your password. If you have never had a
password, the mailer first assigns a random password and then mails it to you.

Due to a typo in the code, the mailer was assigning nine character passwords,
yet the database is only set up to store eight characters. So it would mail
you a password with an extra character on the end.

If you re-run the password mailer is will send you the correct, eight-character
password. However I’ve also added code to the authentication routine that will
just arbitrarily trim any password you supply to eight characters, which should
just invisibly correct the problem.

Also, I am aware of the fact that team joins aren’t properly handling
historical blocks. I’ll post more to my plan as I figure out what’s happening.