:: 30-Jun-2001 04:35 (Saturday) ::

For any of you who noticed my 15 minute bout of bug squishing on the
production ogr-24 countries page, sorry for any cowfusion. It’s all fixed
now. }:8)

:: 24-Jun-2001 20:33 (Sunday) ::

Bruce is doing some maintenance on stats, which is causing the statsrun
to run *really* slow. (RC5 is still running from last night). To ensure
that the run completes before midnight UTC, I’m turning off web access
for a while. I should be able to turn it back on in an hour or so.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 21-Jun-2001 18:56 (Thursday) ::

Last night’s stats have been running for a very long time, so we’ve stopped
the stats server to let it catch up. I’m afraid it’s partly my fault…
I was investigating some possible causes for discrepancies in team credit,
and I ran a Very Large Query (VLQ) ™ at a bad time. As soon as stats
finish, I’ll turn the web back on.

The silver lining to this cloud is that I’ve found some work that should
be credited towards certain teams, and soon it will.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 15-Jun-2001 15:02 (Friday) ::

The master backlog has been processed, but one proxy still has 1M blocks
in its outbuffer. It is expected that this will flush today or tomorrow.

After the weekend everyone’s total stats should be correct again.

:: 13-Jun-2001 16:54 (Wednesday) ::

Yesterday, June 12th, we had some minor problems with our keymaster. This
resulted in backlogs on both the proxies and the master. As a result, the
stats for June 12th are not correct.

We hope to process all of the backlog soon, so your missing June-12-blocks
should show up in the next couple of days.

:: 13-Jun-2001 14:58 (Wednesday) ::

A lot of people are missing work from June 12th. We’re honestly not sure
what happened this time, but we’re looking into it. Stay tuned.

:: 10-Jun-2001 21:12 (Sunday) ::

Hello again.

As long as we had tally off-line to expand the database, decibel and I
decided to perform some much needed maintenance. We rebuilt some of the
indexes on the tables we torture the most, and updated statistics on The
Big Table (that’s the detail table for RC5-64). For comparison, this one
table occupies almost 3GB, which is about 80% of the data in the stats
database, and nearly one fourth of the total disk on tally.

We had hoped this wouldn’t be necessary – we had hoped to be moved over
to the new server (blower) by now. Technology and time schedules prevented
us from completing the migration. The 2GB file size limit on Linux is
starting to be a real problem. All the stats folks are getting together
by phone soon to discuss the possibility of switching to Free BSD. This
option would give us more room to grow, but would not (easily) support
some of our current tools. I think we’re leaning that direction, but we
don’t want to backtrack that far just to find it’s not going to work.

Another maintenance task I performed was to purge many of the teams that
had been created but never used. This is mostly our fault – the
team-creation forms on the website make it easy for people to create a
team and then forget how to join it. Over the years, many people have
created a team several times in a row, never succeeding in joining. This
purge had never been performed in the past, to my knowledge, so it was
long overdue.

Rest assured, I have only purged those teams that never had any work
submitted, never had any members, and do not currently have any members.
I also preserved any empty team created in the last several months, just
in case the work is being saved up to submit in the near future. Even as
careful as I was, it turns out over half the teams in the table were
completely inactive. I saved an archive of the removed teams, but being
in a different SQL table, they will have less impact on statsrun. If by
some chance, you had created a team and I have removed it, please e-mail
me directly to have it replaced.

The next time we have occasion to modify the team-creation code, we’ll
add a date-created field to the teams table and establish a policy where
teams will be removed if no work is submitted in a certain time-frame.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. Thanks again for all the cycles.

:: 10-Jun-2001 01:01 (Sunday) ::

Tally is caught up with rc5 and is doing the rc5 run for June 9th. I’ve
turned web access back on, so it’ll be 5-6 hours before that’s done. Once
it is done, OGR will start processing.

Sorry for the delays.

:: 09-Jun-2001 23:01 (Saturday) ::

Earlier this week, our statistics graphs were migrated to our new webserver.
Accesses to http://www.distributed.net/statistics/ will now be served from
there. During the next few days, a few of the graphs may be broken while
we work to adjust all of the automation for the new machine. We are
simultaneously migrating as many of the images as possible from GIF to
PNG format.

Our bugzilla bug tracking database has also just been migrated onto the
new server. For both cases, redirects should be in place to ensure that
anyone accessing any of the temporary “oldcgi” URLs that we were issuing
in the transition period will automatically be sent to the proper location.

The next major phase in the migration will be to move all user accounts,
plan files, and user web pages to the new server, which will be attempted
sometime within the next couple of weeks.

:: 09-Jun-2001 18:06 (Saturday) ::

The stats database is back in operation, and much happier now that it has
some room. Between the machine being down (there was a SCSI bus error that
required a reboot), and the space problems, there hasn’t been a stats run
since the 6th. RC5 stats are running right now, but in order to expedite
things, I’m going to leave web access turned off, at least until the rc5
run is done. Things should be back to normal late tonight.