:: 31-May-2000 05:28 (Wednesday) ::

As I’m sure some of you have noticed, the ‘yesterday’ results for teams
are a bit wonky. I’m working on it and will keep you posted.

:: 31-May-2000 00:32 (Wednesday) ::

Well, statsrun was *supposed* to be delayed tonight, but I accidentally
bork the code that’s supposed to disable it. So, it’s currently running
anyway. Oh well…

:: 30-May-2000 23:36 (Tuesday) ::

Well, there’s bad news and good news…

Bad news: Statsrun will be delayed tonight

Good news: Reason for the delay is to re-tune the database engine a bit
to better cope with having only a single CPU

Better news: I’ve re-done some of the team ranking code to pull data from
the team members table instead of the huge master table where appropriate.
My initial testing indicates a *massive* speed improvement. I couldn’t
simulate a full run while stats were live, but I’m hopeful that team
ranking will take well less than an hour tonight (it’s been taking about
2 hours as of late).

:: 30-May-2000 06:22 (Tuesday) ::

Ok, backup is done. Since it’s late and I’m tired and just had to fix some
stupidity, I’m going to vent. :)

Why on earth does RH Linux think that bash is a drop-in replacement for
sh? This:

#!/bin/sh

gets you a bash shell on statsbox. You’d *think* it would get you a sh
shell, since that’s what you asked for, but no, RH Linux knows better than
you what you actually want.

To be fair, from what I understand RH isn’t the only linux that does this.

I just can’t wait for the day that Sybase releases a free version of it’s
server for FreeBSD.

Anyway, thanks for listening, and expect the statsrun to be done in about
5 hours.

Moo!

:: 30-May-2000 04:45 (Tuesday) ::

Some probably noticed that stats were down for a bit. Real observant folks
might even have noticed that statsrun isn’t running right now. Basically,
the backup is interfering with the statsrun. Normally, this backup is run
Sunday night after statsrun, so it doesn’t interfere with anything, but
it’s still running right now (I don’t know if it started late or is just
running really, really slow).

I had web access shut off for a while to try and speed things along, but
I’m not sure it was making a difference so it’s back on again. Statsrun
won’t be happening until the backup is done though, I’m afraid. We’ll
get it going ASAP.

:: 27-May-2000 08:25 (Saturday) ::

Moo.

It’s been a long while since I’ve made a planman updates, so I wanted to
make a post and attempt to get back in the habit of communicating
effectively.

I have very little new to report. For the first half of 2000, my consulting
business and non-computer-work aspects of my life have occupied most of
my time. Accordingly, little time has been left for significant
distributed.net projects. Regardless, I’ve been maintaining existing
services and continuing to handle day-to-day issues.

Yesterday evening marked the completion of a long outstanding project and
one of the first steps in replacing the ancient nodezero server. I
completed setting up a second web server and changed “www.distributed.net”
to be a round-robin between two of our servers. There are still a couple
minor kinks that we’re working out, but it will be flawless in no time.

I plan to finish up the new nodezero next week and make significant progress
towards replacing the old one shortly. I also need to catch up on the
keymaster log archiving. My work is cut out nicely for me. _]:8)

I’ll keep busy. Expect more news shortly.

-dbaker

:: 26-May-2000 02:38 (Friday) ::

Well, there’s good news and bad news. }:8)

Statsbox once again seems to be stable running on one CPU. The bad thing
is that it’s pretty damn slow with only one CPU… statsrun is taking 6-8
hours.

The other bad news is that the CPU with the screwy heat sink is apparently
fried… the box won’t even POST with it in.

So, stats will probably be a bit slow for awhile until we can take care
of the CPU situation. But they should be UP at least. }:8)

Thanks to everyone for their understanding.

Moo!

:: 25-May-2000 06:08 (Thursday) ::

Well, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but we **MAY** have found
the problem with statsbox. Seems one of the CPUs had a loose fan. We’ve
got that CPU out of the box right now, and I’m doing a statsrun. We’ll
see how well the box holds up. Don’t hold your breath though, there’s
still plenty of other things that could be wrong.

:: 25-May-2000 01:31 (Thursday) ::

Wednesday 24 May between 18:30 and 23:30 UTC mail sent to
help@distributed.net was bounced back to the sender by mx.hartbrothers.com
reporting it could not be delivered to an @hartbrothers.com address used
internally by our help@ software, Mustang Message Center. If you received
a reply with a long tracking number in the subject, your mail was delivered
and will be read by help@ staff. If you received a nastygram from
mx.hartbrothers.com, please resend your mail.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

Dave Hart

:: 24-May-2000 20:43 (Wednesday) ::

Another quick update, and a reiteration…

We’re still not entirely sure which piece of hardware is causing the
problems on statsbox. Today we’re experimenting with the cpus and simms
to try to determine if one of them is faulty. Onboard scsi adapter on
the asus p2b-ds is also a suspect at this point.

Also, just to clarify: the keyserver network is _completely_ unaffected
by statsbox being down. We’re still processing keys and we’re still able
to detect the winning key if a client finds it. When statsbox is brought
back online, we’ll have no trouble “catching up” with the logs that are
being generated by the keymaster right now.

More details as we know more. Again, sorry for the delays. I’m pretty
certain that this misadventure is going to drive us into buying a name-brand
server to house the data with a support contract. It’s just too awkward
trying to diagnose hardware problems when we’ve only got one person (a
very busy person) who is local to the machine.