:: 05-Oct-1999 19:49 (Tuesday) ::

It’s been a few days since the initial release of our new
self-installer packaging of the Win32 CLI client and we’ve received a
significant amount of good feedback. We’ve taken your responses into
account and have since released an updated version 2.7112.444c of the
CLI self-installer. The actual client is identical to the last one
(and that of the 2.7112.444b zipped version), however some aspects of
the installer have been improved.

Among the things that you may have noticed with our self-installer
Win32 CLI versions is the inclusion of my new “Log Visualizer”
utility. This is actually a separate application that implements all
of the log graphing functionality that was in the original Win32 GUI
client. In addition to improving a number of bugs in the Win32 GUI’s
grapher, since it is a separate application, you can even use it to
view your log files from other rc5des clients on other machines or
platforms. Making the grapher separate also allows you to conserve
memory by not requiring you to have all of the graphing code and log
data loaded while you have the client running all the time.

One of the other exciting aspects about the Log Visualizer is that
full Win32 C++ source code is available for it on our source code
webpage at http://www.distributed.net/source/ This allows experienced
coders to help out by making their own improvements to this valuable
utility and contribute their changes back to the entire
distributed.net community. I encourage interested participants and
Win32 developers and who have spare time to consider helping to
improve it. Inside of its source code distribution zip file is an
initial TODO file listing some possible areas of work. You can email
your modifications back to me and I’ll occasionally update that zip
file with all of the cumulative changes.

We also have a Java Log Visualizer currently in development and will
similarly release source code for it once it has minimal
functionality. We welcome efforts to develop similar utilities for
other platforms! Keep watching for more exciting developments!

:: 04-Oct-1999 13:31 (Monday) ::

It looks as if statsbox decided to be a bit mischievous this weekend
while dbaker and I were both out of town. Certainly nothing critical,
but it was a bit annoying. A strange set of circumstances deep within
a “shouldn’t happen” loop in the stats and logcopying code resulted in
last night’s stats run only incorporating 23 of the 24 logfiles from
the keymaster. Any blocks flushed from 3-Oct-1999 23:00 to 23:59 will
not be reflected in today’s stats.

These blocks will be processed as part of tonight’s run (but still as
3-Oct blocks, not 4-Oct). Sorry for the inconvenience. dbaker and I
are going to spend some time today hardening the log processing code
to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

:: 03-Oct-1999 16:32 (Sunday) ::

Hi all,

As you may know, we have a glibc problem with x86 Linux clients. If
the client is statically linked with glibc 2.0, it can’t resolve
host names under glibc 2.1. And vice-versa.
Previously, we had ‘solved’ the problem by providing two clients, one
for glibc 2.0 and another for glibc 2.1. This is confusing for most
people.

I want you to beta-test another client. This v444 client was build
and linked against glibc 2.1.1 on a SuSE 6.2 system, but this time is
was dynamically linked. I think this should solve the problem, but I
need people to test this client to be sure.
I’m particularly interested in beta-testers on glibc *2.0*
systems. Tell me if it works on your machine or if it doesn’t, but
please include as much details as you can in either case.

Here’s the url :
http://nodezero.distributed.net/~remi/rc5des444-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
and the GnuPG signature :
http://nodezero.distributed.net/~remi/rc5des444-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz.asc

Note to i386 & i486 users : You will see a slight drop in performance
because we can’t link the 386/486 self-modifying core in a dynamic
client. If you want the best performance, you should stick with the
443 client.
We will continue to include this 386/486 self-modifying core in future
a.out and libc5 clients.

:: 02-Oct-1999 05:45 (Saturday) ::

Two quickies (I sound like CmdrTaco (http://CmdrTaco.net) from Slashdot
(http://slashdot.org) now):

First, the stats are currently set to start the stats-run at 1:45GMT
instead of the normal 0:30GMT or so. I’m guessing that this is just a
mistake, but I don’t want to screw with it while Nugget’s out of town,
so it’ll stay this way until at least Sunday night.

Second, I changed the countries page so that it now uses height and width
tags on all the little flag images. This means that the page will display
before all the images are loaded. It’s pretty neat to watch all the flags
pop onto your screen in a random order… of course, if you have a fast
link you won’t see the effect very well, but I guess that’s the trade-off
you’ll have to live with. :)

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the code changed before the stats-run was over,
so the main countries page will be lacking the new tags until tomorrow
night. If you just can’t wait that long, you can see what I’m talking about
at http://stats-decibel.distributed.net/rc5-64/countries.html .

:: 01-Oct-1999 18:53 (Friday) ::

Well, (knock on wood) it sure seems like statsbox is stable once again.
I broke the cardinal rule in troubleshooting and changed a bunch of things
at once, so we many never know which change (or combination of changes)
ultimately fixed the problem. At this point, I’m just happy to have the box
running smoothly again in time for me to go out of town this weekend.

The wife and I will be in Nashville this weekend and it looks like statsbox
doesn’t need any more attention for the time being.

A fresh start on monday when I return… time to turn my attention to the
multitude of stats bugs as reported at http://www.distributed.net/bugs/
and then we can get back into feature additions.

It also looks like functional ogr stats will be needed quite soon, so
that’s on the docket as well. I’d like to, at the very least, get all
the _raw stuff implemented and get cpu/os stats back before we focus
on ogr implementation issues.

And to Kevin Bentz, thanks for the Aerosmith CD. It was the soundtrack for
the statsbox recovery after I ran out of RATM music. :)