:: 17-Dec-1999 05:22 (Friday) ::

Beta 9 of the Mac Client lives.

ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/beta/dnetc449-macos-ppc-beta.sit

This isn’t a traditional “beta” so much as a pre-release. If you find
any major bugs, we’d of course love to hear about them, but we by and
large think we have the bug situation under control.

Major release-blockers we know about are two in number: the client has
no CSC AltiVec core (hurry up sampo!) and it doesn’t properly detect
modem connections unless you restart it after dial-up. We may go ahead
and release anyway if only one of these bugs has been fixed as of early
next week.

If you find a bug beyond these or what’s currently in Bugzilla, please
add it and/or notify me of its existence.

(Bugzilla, for your reference, is at http://www.distributed.net/bugs/ .)

The people responsible for the Mac port of the distributed.net client
are Michael Feiri (mfeiri) and Don Bruder (Dakidd). They deserve your
eternal gratitude. Send it. Direct all flames / complaints / inquiries
at yours truly instead, as the coders’ mailboxes are full already.

:: 15-Dec-1999 17:22 (Wednesday) ::

At long last the baby is here. Ethan James Wilson was born at 12:40 a.m. Saturday, Dec 11 (06:40 Saturday UTC, for all
you stats freaks). He was 8 pounds, 13.5 ounces and 20 inches. Tricia and Ethan both came home Monday, and we’re trying to
figure out what “normal” means all over again.

As you know, we will be starting work on OGR soon. OGR brings a whole mess of problems to what you know of stats today.
When keymaster hands out an OGR node, there’s no way of knowing how much work that node will require – it can even vary by
CPU. To give full credit for your work, stats will have to keep track of how much work you actually had to perform.
(You’d certainly like more credit for 10 nodes of 1000 effort than someone who did 10 nodes of 100 effort.) It’s also not
possible to say how much work we’ll have to do at the project level, so concepts like “percent done” and “odds of finishing
today” are pretty meaningless.

On top of this, we’re learning some things about managing multiple projects in a single database. Currently, a new project
means a new family of SQL tables, PHP scripts, a new import and a new stats run. For our sanity, we’d like to reduce the
duplication as much as is reasonable. I’m putting together some prototypes of options for the next generation of stats so we
can poke and prod them to see how well they work. If you notice some drool on the stats database, that’s probably because I’m
holding Ethan while typing. I’ll get it all mopped up before we do anything to the stats you know and love.

I’m also informally collecting ideas for ways we can rank individuals and teams across multiple projects. In particular, we
want to allow participation in any open project to contribute to the overall ranking. As it stands now, there’s a lot of
motivation for teams to stick with RC5-64 to protect their ranking, instead of helping out with CSC. Just think how fast we
could be demolishing CSC with a keyrate in the 80’s instead of the 20’s!

Happy cracking!

:: 15-Dec-1999 12:14 (Wednesday) ::

Statsbox is up to it’s old tricks again. }:8( Several of the pages
seem to be running off of Dec 13 data, instead of Dec 14 data.
Unfortunately, I have to be on a plane to Detroit in just over an
hour, so I couldn’t stay up late last night to look into it. With
(a lot of) luck, things will correct themselves with to-night’s run.
If not, I’ll have to look into it tomorrow.

:: 14-Dec-1999 01:14 (Tuesday) ::

The following clients have been updated/added:

– dnetc-win16-x86.zip Windows 3.1 [x86/MMX-CSC]
– dnetc-dos-x86.exe DOS [x86/MMX-CSC]
– dnetc-openbsd-sparc-aout.tar.gz OpenBSD [sparc/aout]
– dnetc-bsdi4-x86-elf.tar.gz BSD/OS 4.x [x86/ELF]
– dnetc-bsdi2-x86-aout.tar.gz BSD/OS 2.x/3.x [x86/ELF]
– dnetc-linux-x86-glibc21.tar.gz Linux [x86/glibc2.1/MT/MMX-CSC]

The Linux glibc2.1 client has been fixed and is now available again.
Thanks for your patience

Happy cracking
Moose

:: 13-Dec-1999 11:14 (Monday) ::

I had a little bit of spare time, so I decided to make a quick pass at
rewriting the client speed database pages. The keyrate statistics now
are generated from a single frontend CGI, instead of separate pages
containing hand-built queries for each of the different combinations.
This should also allow us to more easily maintain these pages in the
future. You can see these new pages at http://www.distributed.net/speed/

:: 13-Dec-1999 02:07 (Monday) ::

The following clients have been updated/added:

– dnetc-win32-x86.zip win 95/98/NT/2000 [x86/MMX-CSC]

More clients coming.
Moose

:: 13-Dec-1999 00:03 (Monday) ::

The following clients have been updated/added

– dnetc-linux-x86-glibc20.tar.gz linux [glibc2.0/x86] v2.8003.448
– dnetc-linux-x86-libc5.tar.gz linux [libc5/x86 ] v2.8003.448

The following proxies have been updated

– proxyper311-freebsd-x86.tar.gz freebsd v311

For those of you who already downloaded the
dnetc-linux-x86-glibc21.tar.gz, yes we know there is a problem and it
has been pulled, we are working to fix the problem.

Secondly the Win32 client will be out soon please be patient

Have fun
Moose

:: 12-Dec-1999 23:38 (Sunday) ::

I don’t like posting a .plan update when I don’t have any news to
report, but I sort of forced myself to after breaking a personal rule
and making a release-date announcement a week ago. I’ll be careful in
the future not to do that.

We’re up to beta eight, internally. Nearly all of the bugs you’ve
reported to us have been fixed. There are a few outstanding major ones
that are blocking a release, though: the AltiVec CSC core still doesn’t
pass -test, an infinite loop kicks in when the client is paused, and the
lurk mode doesn’t properly detect when the TCP stack is open.

As soon as one of these bugs is fixed I’ll release a stopgap public
pre-release (not really a ‘beta’, because we know what bugs are
remaining at this point). If a few more days pass and none of the above
are fixed, I may throw out b7 as that stopgap measure (b8 is unstable).

Rest assured that there is -massive- progress occuring behind the
scenes. One of the reasons this is taking so long, actually, is that two
coders both working like mad at the client are occasionally colliding in
midair.

RC5 core news is good. We’ve had reports of 5.8 Mk/s on 450 MHz Sawtooth
boxen. The next public beta will, finally, have the AltiVec RC5 core
in it.

In the mid-term future, we’re looking at an FBA for the massive G4 farms
out there – that “Velocity Engine” is just waiting to be put to use.
We’re also considering implementing a “Send Command…” dialogue a la
Anarchie’s FTP command dialogue…

http://sine.com/dcti/send-command.jpg

Our long-term goal is to have a GUI “controller” application that
communicates with the FBA engine. The CLI would become optional, for
die-hard users who like a commandline. We’re aiming for 100% carbon
compatibility.

But that’s long term. In the meanwhile, please understand that the Mac
effort is not dead – it’s just progressing so fast that its wheels are
wobbling.

:: 11-Dec-1999 14:29 (Saturday) ::

MOOOOO!

Well great news we have our first MMX core for CSC!

More clients will be coming with the core incorporated, but for now
you will need to make do with the following client:

– dnetc-freebsd-x86-elf.tar.gz

So have fun, and yes we are working to get more CSC clients with the
MMX core out, so please be patient

Moose

:: 09-Dec-1999 08:36 (Thursday) ::

It seems that the gremlins aren’t dont messing with statsbox just
yet. For some reason, all the data for rc5 for Dec. 7th is gone.
I looked at the logs, and it did get imported, so I have no idea
where the data went.

I’m re-running stats for Dec. 7th. This will almost certainly
screw up all the ‘ranking deltas’ (those cute little up/down arrows
that let you know how much your ranking changed from yesterday),
so don’t be alarmed when things look a little weird. All should be
back to normal after the Dec. 9th statsrun.