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.

2009-02-24

bovine [24-Feb-2009 @ 17:26]

Filed under: clients,project status — bovine @ 17:26 +00:00

:: 24-Feb-2009 17:26 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Howdy all,

We’ve just confirmed receipt of the last OGR-26 stub, thus marking
that project officially complete! We will try to publish who
submitted the most optimal and last stubs, once we confirm that they
don’t mind their identities being revealed.

You should already notice that fresh OGR-27 stubs are already
available on our proxy network. To work on this project, you will
need to be using the v2.9103 client for your architecture. If you run
a personal proxy, you should upgrade to build 347. As usual, you can
find them http://www.distributed.net/download/

If your platform doesn’t appear to have released clients available
yet, that may be because some are still on the pre-release page–we
hope to officially release them in the next couple of days. We
appreciate your patience.

Due to variations in complexity, we expect that OGR-27 will take us
significantly longer than OGR-26 did. It is difficult to provide a
precise estimate but one extremely rough guess is about 7 years,
assuming no increase in computing power and that our size estimation
sampling reflects the entire stubspace.

There is one thing that is different with OGR-27 than with our
previous OGR projects: we are confident that we will discover a better
ruler for OGR-27 than the one we know to be optimal currently.

So get your clients cracking! Thanks again for your participation!

Moo

2009-02-19

bovine [19-Feb-2009 @ 05:51]

Filed under: stats — bovine @ 05:51 +00:00

:: 19-Feb-2009 05:51 GMT (Thursday) ::

Stats were not updated today, due to some work to physically relocate
part of our backend network infrastructure. No stats credit will be
lost–all results are being queued and will be credited as soon as
we can. Thanks for your patience!

2009-02-16

bovine [16-Feb-2009 @ 07:39]

Filed under: project status — bovine @ 07:39 +00:00

:: 16-Feb-2009 07:39 GMT (Monday) ::

Howdy all,

We are now at 97% complete for OGR-26 and have fewer than 600 thousand
stubs left to go. This will likely take us less than a week, unless
you can round up some more folks to run dnetc on their computers!

As we approach the final days of this project, there will be periods
of time where no OGR-26 work is available from the network. These
occasional periods of unavailability occur because we want to avoid
re-issuing the remaining stubs too many times. This is not a cause for
concern, but if you don’t want your client to go idle, you should
verify that RC5-72 is enabled in your configuration files. (It is by
default.)

Once we have fully completed OGR-26, we will be able to officially
launch our next project, OGR-27. Since the new project relies on the
proven results of the previous project, we don’t want to launch OGR-27
while its predecessor is still in progress.

While we are all waiting for the new project to start, we invite you
to begin preparing your computers to participate in the new project.
To work on OGR-27, you will need to be using the v2.9103 client for
your architecture. If you run a personal proxy, you should upgrade to
build 347. You can find these new versions on our official download
page at http://www.distributed.net/download/

We thank you for your continuing support and enthusiasm as we look
forward to this exciting new project.

Moo!