:: 30-May-1999 21:45 (Sunday) ::

The rc5des443-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz was removed due to
problems with glibc2.1 systems. Sorry for any problems it may have
caused. We are working to correct the problem.

Thanks

:: 30-May-1999 20:38 (Sunday) ::

The following clients have been updated:

rc5des443-freebsd4-x86-elf-mt.tar.gz
rc5des443-linux-sparc-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
rc5des443-linux-x86-aout-nomt-libc4.tar.gz
rc5des443-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
rc5des443-linux-x86-elf-mt-libc5.tar.gz
rc5des443-linux-x86-elf-nomt-libc5.tar.gz
rc5des443-netbsd13-x86.tar.gz
rc5des443-netbsd-sparc.tar.gz
rc5des443-win32-alpha-cli.zip
rc5des443-win32-alpha-gui.zip

IMPORTANT!

Starting with v2.7110 clients distributed.net clients now support
block sizes up to 2^33 – because of this buffers CANNOT be shared with
older version clients. Client version 2.7111 and up require a Personal
Proxy of at least build 306 because of the big-block changes.

:: 29-May-1999 14:27 (Saturday) ::

FINALLY

Bugzilla is back – after hand reloading all the bug data

dave

:: 29-May-1999 13:22 (Saturday) ::

Well, fetch@distributed.net and flush@distributed.net, the addresses to get your blocks by email, are working again. Enjoy!

:: 28-May-1999 03:04 (Friday) ::

For those of you who’ve been getting mysterious emails from bugzilla recently,
that would be because we’re in the process of putting the old bugs back in
the system. You can safely ignore them, and as soon as all the bugs are in,
we should be able to bring bugzilla back online.

:: 16-May-1999 03:36 (Sunday) ::

Well, with my studies done and college graduation done for me
tomorrow, I’m finally able to announce that build 306 of the personal
proxy is making its way onto the FTP mirror sites. Only builds for a
few platforms are currently available, but we should have FreeBSD and
a few of the other Linux builds up within the next day or so.

Since the release of the pre-release beta, we’ve tried to improve the
rate-detection and block-window adjustment by increasing the sampling
period that is considered. There have also been a few modifications
of some of the console messages and the period at which others are
displayed.

We are currently aware of the fact that lurkonly mode does not operate
correctly in this final release of 306 on win32. This problem will be
addressed in a future release.

All users running any previous version of the personal proxy are
highly recommended to upgrade to this new version. All new users are
also recommended to *thoroughly* read the text file that accompanies
the proxy. There are significant, but subtle changes in the proxy’s
operations. Network connectivity compatibility should be greatly
improved, especially for HTTP users, or users who were previously
unable to connect out of their firewall through any other means with
the addition of the new “generic proxy” mode.

Do not ask about the 1000 block limit! Read the documentation!

:: 14-May-1999 16:22 (Friday) ::

Wow… It’s like I dropped off the face of the net, isn’t it?

I realize that things have been pretty static on statsbox for a few weeks
now, and I apologize for the frustration that it’s surely caused.
There’s lot on my plate right now, and recently stats has been the area
that’s suffered the most visibly.

Last weekend I was afk to celebrate my one year anniversary with my
lovely wife. Lemme tell ya, if you can find a wife who’s not afraid to
wear a FreeBSD t-shirt in public, you’ll do just fine. :)

I’ve got an inbox FULL of mails from team coordinators who need their
team passwords. If you’ve mailed me for this, don’t look for a reply. I
am going to get the team password mailer operational today. As in, now,
the next hour or so.

The other big request is people wanting to retire old, defunct email
addresses. If you’ve mailed either myself or help@distributed.net for
this, please be patient. We do have to do a little leg-work before
blindly handing out passwords to people just to ensure that the request
is legitimate. Your mail hasn’t been lost and we’re all churning through
them as quickly as we can. If I had a nickel for each time someone told
me that they’d lost their old address ‘rc5@distributed.net’… :)

I’ve also been wearing my new hat quite a bit, too. There’s a lot going
on behind the curtain here at distributed.net. This week we got a $4,100
cheque from iGive which is a significant boost to our bank account and
will really help us buy some much-needed hardware. Drive space is
getting tight on statsbox and on the keymaster, and we really could use a
backup strategy on statsbox that doesn’t involve flooding my ISDN for six
hours every week. In light of this most recent iGive bounty, I felt
motivated to mention them again. Rather than re-hash my glowing praise
of these guys, here’s a pointer to the archives:

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/cgi/planarc.cgi?user=nugget&plan=1998-12-15.15:16

Got lots of little administrivia stuffs to handle. We’re going to sit
down and re-work the DCTI by-laws to make the organization a bit more
robust, it’s time for distributed.net to re-visit its mission statement
as well. We need our public statement to reflect the refreshed sense of
motivation and direction that we’re all feeling and it’s time to start
laying out a map for the mid-term and long-term goals of the
organization.

Plus, gotta put some more time in on stats!

It’s a pretty exciting time to be involved in distributed.net, and some
really amazing things are just around the corner. Hang on…

:: 11-May-1999 14:45 (Tuesday) ::

ok, time for a quick update. There have been lots of reports of the MacOS
client reporting an error when running on version 8.6. This is a known
problem and we are in the process of fixing the last few bugs, OS related
or not, before releasing a new client. The current client will continue to
function on 8.6, but the key rate (especially on MP machines) may be degraded.
Thanks for your patience.

:: 07-May-1999 02:38 (Friday) ::

The following clients have been updated

rd5des442-linux-sparc-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
rd5des442-linux-x86-aout-nomt-libc4.tar.gz
rd5des442-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
rd5des442-linux-x86-elf-mt-libc5.tar.gz
rd5des442-linux-x86-elf-nomt-libc5.tar.gz

Enjoy!

:: 06-May-1999 04:24 (Thursday) ::

As users of the newer (440+) win32cli client may have noticed, many of
the features that have been requested by users of this list have already
been implemented. Work has begun on a remote administration feature and we
would like some feedback on this, please send your suggestions by May 14th
to rc5@lists.distributed.net. You can also check
http://www.distributed.net/~pice/console for current status.

This program will actually be three programs,

1-client
It will be change so that it can receive request for changing *some*
of its config info, among then we can have:
block size
network setting
log options
blocks processed
overall keyrate

One item will *not* be allowed to be changed:email, please do not
ask.

2-node program
It will act like a really to handle config info generated by the
console and sent to a client
It will act like relays to handle config info to be sent to the
client and no contest info like blocks.

3-management console
So that the user can check/change client configuration working like
a config info server

How will it work ?

The client will connect from time to time to one of the nodes and check
if there is a console requesting communication with it. If such a console is
found the config process is started. Clients connected all the time and
without any firewall problem can inform the node this status and just wait
until something arrives for it.
Of course all this communication will be encrypted so that you cannot
request a client that is not yours to change any info!