:: 20-Oct-2004 19:15 GMT (Wednesday) ::

There have been some minor website changes recently. In an effort to
consolidate access to statistical information and graphs, the
http://www.distributed.net/statistics/ pages are now available as a
new “Keyrate History” link at the top menu bar of all stats pages:
http://stats.distributed.net/keyrate.php?project_id=8 Some other
relocation of pages has also been done, see:
http://bugs.distributed.net/show_bug.cgi?id=3391

Additionally the automated help@distributed.net responder has been
revised with more readable instructions in the auto-responder, and a
new web-based contact form exists to simplify sending help requests:
http://www.distributed.net/sendmail.php

There have been reports of a new Trojan horse going around named
“Sims2 Crack.exe”, which secretly deploys dnetc on Win32 machines. As
we investigate the matter further and discover more details, they will
be posted at http://www.distributed.net/trojans.php

Additionally, there are a few new pre-release clients available for
testing on http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
including a long-awaited update to the NetWare client. (There will
probably be a movement of many of the current pre-release clients to
the formal release page in the next few days. Another announcement
will be made when that is done.)

:: 20-Sep-2004 17:38 GMT (Monday) ::

Our proxy1.red.wa.us server has been experiencing networking
difficulties for the past 3 days, so it has a small backlog of blocks
that will not be accounted in stats until 22-Sept when its operator
gets back in town. Until then, it has been removed from our DNS
round-robin lists.

Our two proxy*.utrecht.nl servers also experienced an unrelated outage
due to a networking firewall failure. Their connectivity has been
restored and any of their backlogged blocks should be reflected in
today’s stats update.

:: 22-Aug-2004 17:34 GMT (Sunday) ::

I uploaded some new clients to the pre-release page a few days ago and
moved the previous pre-release clients to the formal release page at
the same time. You can see the complete list of formally released
clients here: http://www.distributed.net/download/updates.php

The pre-release clients are available for people who want to help test
clients before they are considered stable enough to be generally
recommended for all new users. There are already a few know x86 CPU
detection and core auto-selection in the current prerelease clients,
so there will likely be another batch up updates to replace them soon.
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

There are also currently some known stats-update problems on
http://stats.distributed.net/, but we hope they should be corrected in
the next day or so. Please be patient until the issue is addressed.

:: 16-Aug-2004 18:35 GMT (Monday) ::

As previously mentioned, the work that Kakace was doing improve the
existing OGR-P2 cores has indeed resulted in further speed
improvements for even non-PPC processors as well:

On a 64-bit AMD Opteron system:
Before = OGR-P2: Benchmark for core #0 (GARSP 5.13)
0.00:00:16.33 [14,123,965 nodes/sec]
After = OGR-P2: Benchmark for core #0 (GARSP 6.0-64)
0.00:00:16.22 [23,151,097 nodes/sec]

And even a slight gain on Intel Pentium III (Tualatin) system:
Before = OGR-P2: Benchmark for core #0 (GARSP 5.13-A)
0.00:00:16.60 [8,192,495 nodes/sec]
After = OGR-P2: Benchmark for core #0 (GARSP 6.0-A)
0.00:00:25.64 [8,709,555 nodes/sec]

There will be a number of new pre-release clients made available in
the next day or so, so eager testers can look forward to playing with
them soon! :)

:: 19-Jul-2004 19:51 GMT (Monday) ::

A number of new release candidates have been added to the pre-release
page at http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php for people
who want to help test new versions prior to formal release.

A new Mac OS X client has been moved from the pre-release page to the
official release page, that incorporates even more PPC speed
improvements for OGR. http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Kakace has been working very hard to bring forward these exciting PPC
speed optimizations. There will be hopefully be more OGR gains for
other architectures in the next few weeks, once some major OGR core
cleanup and improvements are finished.

I’ve also made available version 1.3.0 of my Win32 LogVis add-on. It
is available on http://www.distributed.net/download/addon.php and
source for it is on http://www.distributed.net/source/ Since everyone
likes looking at screen snapshots, here are a couple for you all:
http://www.bovine.net/~jlawson/coding/logvis/logvis-main.png
http://www.bovine.net/~jlawson/coding/logvis/logvis-range.png

:: 01-Jul-2004 06:56 GMT (Thursday) ::

Just a networking status report to say that the IP address of the
statsbox was changed a couple hours ago, to accommodate for an ISP
change at the facility where it is hosted. The DNS entries for it
have already been updated and most people should still be able to
access it at the usual http://stats.distributed.net/ without any
problems, but some people might still have problems for a few more
hours if your DNS servers are not honoring the TTL durations properly.

There is also currently a slight networking glitch that is causing
some backlog of the fullservers reaching the keymaster, but the
buffered nature of our fullserver network should minimize the impact
on any clients. The problem is expected to be resolved within a
couple of hours and the backlog should catch up soon after.

:: 28-Jun-2004 08:48 GMT (Monday) ::

Two new release candidates have been made available on the pre-release
page for v2.9008.492: This includes a Mac OS X client with some
additional PPC OGR performance improvements. There is also the first
native 64-bit Win64 client (you must have an AMD64 or Intel EM64T CPUs
running a beta release of “Windows 2003 for 64-bit extended systems”).

I also thought I’d mention that we are approximately 90% done with the
OGRp2-24 already, including the verification pass. (For the OGRp2-25
we are only a few percent done so far.) We’re still working on
getting some automated reporting of the OGRp2 percentages on the stats
webpages but have no ETA yet…

Also I’d like to remind everyone to consider looking around at any old
machines that you may have installed dnetc on prior to Dec 2002 and
upgrade them to a current client version. That date was when the
RC5-72 project officially started, the v2.9000 clients were released,
and the *.v29.distributed.net DNS created.

Any client that is running a version released before v2.9 should no
longer be able to work on any of the current projects and is now idle
(or working on dummy work if it is a buggy v2.8010 client). We will
be soon shutting down the *.v27.distributed.net DNS entries, since we
are still getting traffic from obsolete clients trying to find work.
All current clients should already be using the *.v29.distributed.net
DNS, so this should not impact clients or proxies that are working.

:: 20-Jun-2004 00:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

Many new clients have been moved from the pre-release page to the
official release page. Many of the PPC based platforms received
performance increases in this new version. There was also an updated
Win32 MSI installer. You can see the list of the updated versions at
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Yesterday, starting at about Jun-19 23:30 UTC there was a short DNS
failure on one of our servers that may have caused occasional
resolution failures. There was a slight amount of backlog, but it was
caught up soon afterwards. You can see the gap where no rate data was
collected in the graphs at http://www1.distributed.net/~pstadt/rc5-72/
Note that although the rates were missing for those times, there was
relatively normal fetching/flushing to the fullservers and the backlog was
primarily just sending to the keymaster. It is not expected that much,
if any, work was lost during that time.

:: 26-May-2004 05:23 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Several more release-candidate clients have been uploaded to the
pre-release download page including clients for FreeBSD/x86,
AIX/Power, AIX/PowerPC, and the four AmigaOS flavors. See the page
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php