:: 31-Oct-1999 18:28 (Sunday) ::

One of the benefits of insomnia is that from time to time you can get a
lot done in the middle of the night when you cannot sleep.

I closed out a lot of the tiny bugs in stats last night, and added a new
feature which I think will be quite popular. Major issues, in no
particular order…

o Your participant listmode is now honored much more reliably. Most
of the places on stats that didn’t previously honor a request to
“list me using my real name” now correctly do so.

o the “neighbor” list on the bottom of each psummary page now also shows
current rate as well as overall rate.

o Each participant can now select up to five other participants as
“friends” and those other participants will be listed/linked on the
participant’s summary page. You can see an example on my summary page at
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/psummary.php3?id=1
You can edit your own list from your pedit participant editing page.
The interface is extremely crude at this stage, it’s just five boxes
which allow you to enter other people’s participant IDs. You’ll have
to look up your friends’ ID numbers manually for now.

:: 31-Oct-1999 06:29 (Sunday) ::

Due to some minor technical glitches on the keymaster, block processing was delayed
right around 22:00GMT. Accordingly, blocks submitted between 22:00 and 00:00 did not make
it into the day’s stats run. Don’t worry; no blocks were lost. “Missing” blocks were only
delayed by a few hours and will make it into the following day’s stats.

:: 19-Oct-1999 00:45 (Tuesday) ::

This is a “heads up!” that stats will be much slower than usual tonight. If you’ve
read my previous plan entries, you will see that I’ve been re-processing a lot of
blocks from about a month ago. Almost all of those blocks will make it into tonight’s
stats run, and accordingly, it will take more time to process the extra data. The ~30k or
so that weren’t able to make the midnight cut will be in tomorrow’s run.

To top it off, a partition on statsbox filled up right before the statsrun should have
started, so some manual intervention was required in order to launch stats for the
evening. Stats finally launched the daily run at ~00:45 and all is looking well.

Enjoy, and please email me (dbaker@distributed.net) if you have any questions about your
blocks being “recovered”.

:: 18-Oct-1999 12:38 (Monday) ::

Sorry for the delay, folks. “Missing” Blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/199
are now very quickly being processed by the keymaster.

This should explain the very high RC5-64 rate that is being displayed on
proxyinfo now.

Your stats will not reflect that these blocks were done in the past; they will show
up in today’s (or tomorrow’s) stats as if they were just submitted recently. Because
of this, your “daily rate” will surge if you were missing blocks.

I expect this process to be complete within the next 48 hours. I will post here when
I have a better estimate.

Enjoy!

:: 13-Oct-1999 22:58 (Wednesday) ::

I have good news! After a long process of recovering and preprocessing the “missing”
blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/1999, I have begun to feed them back
into the keymaster for re-processing. I just began the actual re-processing a few
minutes ago, so I don’t have any idea how long the whole process will take. I’m sure
that the keymaster isn’t fast enough to finish before 00:00GMT (statsbox daily run
time), but it is possible that it will be completely finished by time for tomorrow’s
run.

Your stats will not reflect that these blocks were done in the past; they will show
up in today’s (or tomorrow’s) stats as if they were just submitted recently. Because
of this, your “daily rate” will surge if you were missing blocks.

I’ll post more information about how long it will take to complete this process at
a later time.

Enjoy!

:: 12-Oct-1999 12:24 (Tuesday) ::

distributed.net spent US$2,600 yesterday in order to upgrade our main
server (nodezero) and bring a second web server online. For an
organization that effectively has no income, this is always a scary
thing. Our cash reserves are down to just over US$10,000 which is
about as low as I’d want to see it get. Our ability to properly
maintain the server network and stats server are directly affected by
our ability to buy the hardware we need.

The most important way you can help distributed.net is to continue to
run the client and encourage your friends to do so as well. However,
if you’re inclined to help in a more direct manner, there are a number
of ways you can do so. First, we are a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation
and donations are tax-deductible for you .us folks.

There’s also a way to donate money to distributed.net that’s free —
www.iGive.com

iGive has basically funded our group, having donated more than US$19,000
since they were founded in 1998. Basically you earn money for yourself
and/or distributed.net by viewing advertisements and purchasing things
through iGive vendors.

Our experiences with iGive have been quite rewarding. These guys are
building a very interesting business model and doing everything right.
These guys don’t spam, or send out annoying adverts. There’s no silly
banner bar you have to find space for on your desktop. You just visit
their site each day, at your convenience, and get paid to look at ads.
If you buy a product from one of their listed merchants, distributed.net
gets a percentage of the sale price at no cost to you. I’ve been able
to raise about $60 for distributed.net just by buying all my audio CDs
and software through cdnow.com and beyond.com, which are two of the
vendors.

Right now iGive is running a promotion where distributed.net gets US$10
for every person who joins by November 15th and makes an online purchase
by November 30th. If ten people sign up with iGive and buy a cheap CD
from cdnow.com, that’s $100 to distributed.net.

To join, just follow this url…
http://www.iGive.com/html/ssi.cfm?cid=1098&mid=3311

To keep an eye on distributed.net, you can see where our money has gone:
http://www.distributed.net/legal/ledger.html

As always, thanks for your continued support and enthusiasm.

:: 10-Oct-1999 07:48 (Sunday) ::

Just a quick update. As you might notice, I just updated the ‘Project’
portion of this plan, so now you all know most of what I’m working on.

Thanks to dbaker’s work, rc5@lists.distributed.net is working once
again, so feel free to start sending messages again. It’s quite dead
right now (not that I’m complaining }:8P ).

Stats-box is definitely looking happy again. Stats-run is down to just
over 3 hours. We’re working on getting a few more drives in the box,
which will allow us to spread the database over several different
drives. This should make a substantial performance improvement, since
the box is very I/O bound. More info as the situation unfolds…

:: 07-Oct-1999 20:58 (Thursday) ::

I fixed (okay, I rewrote most of it, too) the distributed.net rc5-list
web moderation tool, so rc5-list users should start receiving the normal
flow of posts again.

I’ve been working on recovering the lost blocks from the September incidents.
If all goes well, users should expect to see those blocks in the next day
or two.

I’ll post more information when it becomes available. I’ll also have some
more information about new ftp and www redundancy too in the next week. I’m
just a nifty guy, eh?

Daniel

:: 07-Oct-1999 15:37 (Thursday) ::

OK, It looks like x-empt was right… There’s definitely a problem in
stats that’s preventing new participants from being properly added to the
database. You’ve probably noticed that the past several days have shown
“(and 0 of them are brand-new)” on the main rc5-64 stats page.

The strange aspect to this is that not only has the code in question not
changed, but when I run the sql manually I’m unable to reproduce the
problem.

I just ran the sql code by hand on the 6-Oct daytables and it added
the new 6-Oct participants in without a hitch. Yet for some reason when
that exact same code ran last night during the update, it didn’t work.
Very odd.

So far, all I’ve done is just add a bunch of logging to the suspect code
to see if I can isolate the exact spot where it’s falling down. It
just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m going to kick off a re-ranking, which is necessary for the affected
emails to be searchable and appear in on the stats web site. One
side-effect of a re-ranking is that the ranking offsets (the green and red
numbers showing your change from the day before) will all be affected by
this.

I’ll post more information as I figure out what’s going on. There’s no
reason to assume that the code will start working tonight, I’m just hoping
to get a few clues on why it’s failing.

:: 06-Oct-1999 22:06 (Wednesday) ::

The newest installer for the Win32 CLI client, that Bovine
mentioned in his recent .plan, has a few new additions to
help those of you that are use to the Win32 GUI.

This new installer gives you the option to install links
to the more common command line options; -config, -help,
and -shutdown on the Start Menu. For those of you that
install the client hidden, you can opt to not install
*anything* to the Start Menu.

It also puts these links, actually short-cuts with the
options built into the shortcut, into the directory that
you install the client to.

This new installer also gives you the option to put the
client in the Startup Group along with the option to have
the client start from the runservices line, hidden.
The Startup Group addition lets you start the client
minimized to the systray, not unlike the old GUI.

I hope these additions to the CLI installer helps those of
you that are having a hard time adjusting from the Win32
GUI to the Win32 CLI.

Scott Ludwig