:: 24-May-2004 03:37 GMT (Monday) ::

Several new clients have been promoted to released clients page:
NeXT/OS [m68k], NeXT/OS [x86], SGI IRIX [6.5/MIPS/64],
SGI IRIX [6.5/MIPS/n32], Linux [PPC], OS/2 [x86]
You can find complete list of released clients ordered by date at:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Updated pre-release clients have been made available for MorphOS and
MacOS X on http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

The banner pages at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/banners/ have been
finally updated to the new website template. Some of the older
banners that were specific to older projects have also been removed.

:: 15-May-2004 21:38 GMT (Saturday) ::

I have started moving some of the more mature v2.9008.490
release-candidate clients to the official release page.
http://www1.distributed.net/download/clients.php
These new clients support OGRp2 and RC5-72 processing.

As decibel mentioned in his plan yesterday, the “OGR classic”
project will be closed and work will no longer be accepted for
it as of May 16 00:00:00 UTC 2004.

:: 11-May-2004 22:31 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There were some back-logged RC5-72 blocks that had been slowly
accumulating on some of our fullservers. Those blocks have been
pushed through and should be represented on today’s stats. The
flushing of the backlog has also created a noticeable surge in our
RC5-72 rate for today, so do not be alarmed. You can see this in the
graphs at http://www1.distributed.net/~pstadt/rc5-72/

We are now slowing down (and soon halting) distribution of
“OGR classic” stubs, in order to allow the outstanding workunits
to have an opportunity to be completed, returned, and counted.

We will probably halt “OGR classic” entirely and discontinue
acceptance of its results in a couple of days, so it is not
recommended that these remaining stubs be kept too long before
flushing (or you may not get credit for them).

As Decibel has mentioned, the OGRp2 stats will be combined with the
existing OGR project stats so you will not have to worry about losing
your current ranking placements.

:: 09-May-2004 14:10 GMT (Sunday) ::

As some people may have noticed, the percentage complete for phase 1
of OGR25 will soon be approaching 100%. Within the next week or so,
we will be halting “OGR classic” (for both OGR24 and OGR25) and
launching OGRp2 (phase 2 of both OGR24 and OGR25).

The second phase of the project will continue searching of the
left-over stubs that were intentionally excluded from the original
“OGR classic” search-space, due to original concerns about having
enough network capacity to efficiently handle the large numbers
extremely small stubs. OGRp2 addresses this issue by instructing each
client to search the many “micro”-stubs that exist within a large
stub-range and return the combined search as a single result. It is
expected that OGRp2 should take less time to complete than “OGR
classic” did for phase 1.

Due to the nature of this new search logic, new clients and proxies
will be needed in order to participate in OGRp2. Once “OGR classic”
is shut off, any old clients will only participate in RC5-72 if that
project has been left enabled on your client, otherwise your old
clients will shutdown and go idle.

Client version 2.9008-490 is the minimum version that will support
OGRp2. Personal Proxy build 341 is the minimum that will support the
OGRp2 project. Updated client and proxy binaries will become
available on the pre-release page for experienced users who wish to
help by becoming early testers of OGRp2. Please report any issues you
discover with the client and proxy in our bugzilla database.
Depending on the severity of any possible problems discovered in the
pre-release binaries, it may be necessary to discard these early OGRp2
results however we are not expecting that to occur.

Formal project announcement, stats availability, general release of
clients/proxies will occur after a few days of pre-release testing on
these new binaries has elapsed and we are satisfied that there are no
blocking issues.

:: 16-Apr-2004 23:30 GMT (Friday) ::

Ok, the new statsbox should now be online and accessible at the usual
http://stats.distributed.net/ after the DNS changes finish
circulating. Although it is believed that everything is caught up and
working, there may be some minor issues still remaining so be patient.

:: 31-Mar-2004 23:53 GMT (Wednesday) ::

There was an unplanned power outage at the facility hosting the
keymaster, but fortunately most of our fullservers had large enough
buffers to last for the entire duration and avoid any interruptions.

:: 06-Dec-2003 22:49 GMT (Saturday) ::

Many new clients that were previously on the pre-release page are now
available on the official download page. Please see the update page
to see the list of updated platforms:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Also some personal proxies that were previously on the pre-release
page are now available on the official proxy release page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/proxies.php

:: 18-Nov-2003 13:58 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There are a few new clients on the pre-release page since my last plan
entry including: Mac OS X, OpenBSD/x86, VMS/Alpha, and the first two
clients for AMD’s x86_64 architecture (Linux/x86_64 and FreeBSD/x86_64).
As always, please give reports of any problems in our Bugzilla.

:: 21-Oct-2003 04:30 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There’s a new release-candidate client for OpenVMS/Alpha available on
the pre-release page. This is the first update in awhile for that
platform, so early feedback from anyone on that platform is
appreciated. http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

We’re close to having an optimized AMD64 (x86_64) client with a
hand-optimized natively 64-bit RC5-72 core in it. If you’re
interested in the progress of this, you can follow this bug for
status. http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3387
Currently we’re trying to tweak a few more cycles out of this core
before releasing something.

Two weeks ago we upgraded the translated language selection
functionality on our website to use a cookie-based technique instead
of purely Apache’s mod_negotiation. This results in a more consistent
user-experience if you explicitly pick another language translation
and then navigate around the website. For technical details see
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3380

If you think you’d like to help out with translation or updating of
some of the localized versions of our webpages, feel free to send an
email to mikereed@distributed.net indicating what language(s) you’re
able to accommodate.

The proxyinfo status pages should also be functioning again, after a
few days of not being available. A bug in one of our stylesheets was
preventing them from being regenerated.

Also if you think you have a reasonable amount of experience with PHP
and PostgreSQL and would like to help out with the implementation of
some exciting new features on our stats pages, join #distributed on
irc.distributed.net or e-mail decibel@distributed.net

:: 01-Oct-2003 05:00 GMT (Wednesday) ::

A number of new clients and proxies have been made available on the
pre-release page over the last few days, for those of you who want to
assist with testing new early release (Win32, Linux/x86, AIX, Solaris,
NetBSD/x86). http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

Notably there is a new Win32 MSI Windows Installer version of the
client now available on that page. Since that represents an entirely
new installer code-base, it would be good to get as much coverage as
possible on it before we put it on the formal download page.

As always, please report any issues in our Bugzilla database.