:: 28-Aug-2003 21:41 GMT (Thursday) ::

The problems with stats are more serious than I thought. The table that stores
how much work each email address did on each day no longer matches the other
tables. I know that sounds rather serious, but that information can always
be re-created from the log files if it comes to that. I’m in the process of
loading in a backup copy of that table; hopefully it will allow me to fix this
with a minimum of downtime.

More info when available…

:: 28-Aug-2003 20:00 GMT (Thursday) ::

The RC5-72 statsrun bombed; I’m going to have to re-load today’s data, so
expect stats to be a bit late.

:: 26-Aug-2003 19:20 GMT (Tuesday) ::

As indicated on the stats page, we have now searched every OGR-24 stub that
we distributed to the network. There is still more work to be done before we
can declare OGR-24 finished, however.

(If you’re unfamiliar with how OGR searches work, you might want to visit
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/faq/cache/281.html)

The issue is that the stub generation for both OGR-24 and -25 has been
constrained very tightly; the 70 mark constraint that is in use is more
appropriate for OGR-21. In all likelihood if a shorter ruler exists it
would exist in the space we’ve already searched. However, we are not
confident that the present search space is sufficiently exhaustive for
scientific purposes. We’ve completed the pragmatic search but still have to
fill in the “brute” part of “brute force”.

One of the challenges inherent in OGR is that it’s not possible to predict
beforehand how long any given stub will take to test. Accordingly, the
total burden of a particular ruler’s search is not predictable. While
counting the number of remaining stubs is easy it is not a measure of the
amount of work which remains, especially since the remaining stubs are
smaller than the stubs that have been searched to-date. It is safe to say
that we’re well past 50%, and we’re most likely past 80 or 90%.

Obviously, finding out we’re still not done with OGR-24 is a disappointment
to all of us. It’s important to realize that the work that’s been done thus
far is valid and had to be done. Likewise, while the 77% shown for OGR-25
right now is also far too optimistic, the OGR-25 work being done is
perfectly valid.

We still have a considerable number of small stubs (length >70 at the 6th
mark) which we have not distributed to the network. This is because most of
these stubs would take only minutes or even seconds to complete. Once we’ve
determined how much work is left to do we will be able to decide how to
complete it. An early estimate indicates that the distributed.net staff
could check the remaining stubs. If this is not the case we would distribute
the work to the network, but we can’t do this until we can ‘combine stubs’
so that many stubs that would take minutes to complete could be grouped
together. This is the only way the network at large could reasonably process
these minute-long stubs.

We are currently working on an improved OGR algorithm. Because of the work
verification process we use, we can not mix the results of the new algorithm
with the results from the current algorithm. We will use the improved
algorithm to finish OGR-24. Once we have checked all OGR-25 stubs with an
initial length <=70, we will also use the new algorithm on OGR-25.

:: 23-Aug-2003 14:00 GMT (Saturday) ::

Bovine made a change to the log format for the master logs. This has the
unfortunate side-effect of breaking stats, specifically some C code that I’m
not clever enough to figure out. Greg’s done some work on fixing it, but it’s
not done yet. He’s AFK for the rest of the day, so there won’t be an RC5-72
statsrun tonight.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 16-Aug-2003 17:43 GMT (Saturday) ::

No, it’s not done yet!

OGR-24 stats are indeed showing 100%, but that’s due to rounding. As of last .
night, 24 stubs had 0 valid results, and 350 stubs had only 1 valid result .
Since each stub requires 2 valid results to be considered done, we’re not .
quite there yet. Hopefully tonight.. .

:: 16-Aug-2003 09:17 GMT (Saturday) ::

OGR-24 is almost over. Rounding error shows 100% on the stats page, but
there’s still a few dozen stubs to be done. After some final checking
we will let you know when it’s all done.

:: 13-Aug-2003 17:34 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Everybody wish a happy 21st birthday to dbaker@distributed.net, our
favorite scapegoat!

There are a couple of new release candidate clients for NeXT and
Digital Unix on the pre-release page. One of the earlier release
candidate clients for Digital Unix was also moved onto the formal
download page.

An updated round of personal proxies will probably begin to be made
available in the next week or so.

You may notice some more OGR24 stubs circulating out every now and
then. There’s only a few percent of the stubspace remaining, so we
hope to be able to get it finished up soon.

We’re also very close to finishing distribution of the second RC5-72
subspace (out of 4096). The block return rates have been 80.50% and
67.52% so far for the two.

We’d also like to ask everyone to check their machines with older
clients and be sure a version higher than v2.8014 is being run
(v2.8015 was released around May 2001). Although OGR results from
these older clients are currently still being accepted, they have
diminished mathematical value to us. Additionally, a large majority
of traffic that we are continuing to get from those old versions
represent unauthorized worm deployments of our client. Because of
these reasons, in the next couple of weeks we may begin blocking
traffic from these older versions and instructing them to shut down.
If you still have machines running one of these older clients when
this is done, it may cease running and contributing to your stats.