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.

2016-08-24

Time for a new IRC home

Filed under: Uncategorized @ 01:50 +00:00

TL;DR — Join us in #distributed on irc.freenode.net

29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 topic is Has anyone seen my keys? -- http://rc5.distributed.net/
29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 topic set by BovineOne on Fri Aug 29 18:38:59
29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 created on Fri Apr 04 11:02:59

In early 1997 distributed.net became an actual thing entirely within the context of an Internet Relay Chat channel, #rc5 on the EFnet IRC network. Aside from the occasional “beerfest” meetup, the vast majority of this project’s coordination, victory celebrations, and commiserations have been shared on IRC. IRC has been the foundation for everything we’ve accomplished as a community.

<_GNU_> Lets set up a irc.distributed.net and put the channel there! :P

Some time around 2000 we split from EFnet and created our own public IRC network, mainly so that we could start encrypting the IRC traffic — a wort hwhile goal for a security and encryption focused group of geeks. Encrypted IRC was brand-new and barely supported at the time. Our IRC network has continued to serve us well for the past fifteen years, but looking around the landscape has changed significantly. Encryption is supported everywhere and proper channel and nick services bots are ubiquitous. It’s become more difficult to justify the effort and reliance on generosity from our hosting partners to run our own network.

It makes sense to re-join a “proper” IRC network and benefit from that scale and attention to operations. So… Effectively immediately the official support and community channel for distributed.net can now be found on the freenode irc network and irc.distributed.net will be shutting down very soon.

We’ll be forever grateful to Paul Followell at LightBound and FlightAware for their server space and network time. Many thanks to the developers of UnrealIRCd for a decade of secure and reliable server code. And also thanks to everyone at freenode for welcoming us to our new home.

PING
PONG
/CTCP SOUND moo.wav

2016-08-10

Quick update – 10 August 2016

Filed under: clients,project status,stats @ 02:18 +00:00

Apologies, it has been a while since I published a blog update. The front page of our web site still has a problem, but we are making progress on our projects. A look at OGR-28: 42,000 participants. 900 days. 31 BILLION (I know!) Gnodes checked. 20% completed. We can still complete it by New Year if each of us gets a few friends to join in!

RC5-72 has been in progress for 5,000 days as I write. There is still a long way to go, with only just over 4% of the work completed. To have the help of 120,000 participants is amazing. Thank you for all of your contributions.

Have you downloaded new dnetc client software lately? There are a raft of improvements in the last couple of versions, including speed-ups on some platforms (the latest came out of pre-release two months ago). Moo!