staff blogs

distributed.net staff keep (relatively) up-to-date logs of their activities in .plan files. These were traditionally available via finger, but we've put them on the web for easier consumption.

2005-09-23

nugget [23-Sep-2005 @ 21:00]

Filed under: Uncategorized — nugget @ 21:00 +00:00

:: 23-Sep-2005 21:00 GMT (Friday) ::

Thanks to ODD, the remains of oldnodezero.distributed.net arrived this
evening via FedEx. If anyone’s curious, I snapped a few photos at
http://slacker.com/photos/oldnodezero/ — Rockin’ AMD K6-2 power!

In other news, I brought the ledger up to current here on the site
and we’ve gone ahead and ordered a more modern (Opteron) replacement
box which will get prepped and shipped out to visi.com next week or
the week thereafter. We decided to go ahead and spend a bit more than
we might have otherwise done (about three grand, all told) since history
would indicate that we can expect to be using this replacement server
until sometime in 2012. If nothing else, the new box’s keyrate will
be a lot faster than that old K6.

Writing a cheque for three grand is always a bit uncomfortable, so if
you’ve ever wanted to pick up a slick distributed.net t-shirt, today
would be the day. With the RC5 projects getting ridiculously huge, we’re
going to be relying more on member support to keep things running in
the coming years.

http://distributed.net/dnetware/

Moo.

2005-09-14

nugget [14-Sep-2005 @ 16:08]

Filed under: Uncategorized — nugget @ 16:08 +00:00

:: 14-Sep-2005 16:08 GMT (Wednesday) ::

A moment of silence for oldnodezero…

859 days ago (check my .plan) the UPS sitting behind our server
oldnodezero.distributed.net exploded in an exciting boom described even
today as “the great UPS cataclysm” by visi.com staff. The UPS explosion
dashed the spiffy 761 day uptime on the server.

Today the box finally died, setting a new record 859 day uptime. Attempts
to resuscitate the box have not been successful. It died with page fault
warnings on the console and now it won’t even POST. ODD is going to swing
by visi.com tomorrow to pick up the carcass and ship it down here to Austin
for forensics.

It really says a lot about a colo facility when they can provide that kind
of stability though. Visi has been babysitting this box since we put it
into production in 1998. It’s the first piece of hardware that we ever
bought for distributed.net and it’s been in productive use ever since.

It’s an AT case. Pre-ATX. An AMD K6 with a gigantic 8GB IDE hard drive.
Garage-built consumer junk, but it sure did hold up well. We’ll be
replacing it with a more modern 1U rackmount machine soon. In the
meantime though, we’re down to just the single server for dns and web.

Thanks again to visi.com who have consistently provided peerless colo
services. I’m sure if we manage to beat 859 days this time around, the
eventual failure will again be something beyond their control.

2005-09-13

bovine [13-Sep-2005 @ 16:54]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 16:54 +00:00

:: 13-Sep-2005 16:54 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Last week we added a new Aussie keyserver, located in Brisbane.
Clients have already begun to automatically connect to it and it
is performing great so far.

Our secondary webserver (one of two servers that host www.d.net) is
currently offline. Since all of the content it was hosting was
mirrored, this should not have much immediate impact on us. We’ve
adjusted our load-balancing to exclude it, although there may be some
delays until the DNS changes fully propagate. (That machine had been
online for nearly 8 years and would have had an uptime of 858 days at
the time it went offline.)