:: 29-Dec-2002 10:43 GMT (Sunday) ::

A few more clients are now available on the pre-release page:

* dnetc478-netbsd-sparc
* dnetc478-aix-powerandppc
* dnetc478b-ps2linux-mipsel
* dnetc478-aix4.3-power
* dnetc478-linux-s390x
* dnetc478-linux-s390
* dnetc478-linux-s390-z
* dnetc478-solaris-sparc

And a new build of the personal proxy for a few platforms are also
available on the pre-release page (hopefully this will be the last
build number increment before general availability of the proxy):

* proxyper333-win32-x86
* proxyper333-linux-x86
* proxyper333-linux-x86-glibc21
* proxyper333-freebsd-x86

Remember that the files available in the pre-release directory are
intended for limited use by people who are willing to help us test
them before they are announced for general availability. People who
test them must be willing to watch their machines carefully after
installing them (to notice/report anomalous behavior).

:: 17-Dec-2002 09:36 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Several additional clients have graduated from release-candidate
status to formal release availability on the download page:

* dnetc478-riscos-arm
* dnetc478-irix6.5-mips
* dnetc478-netbsd-arm32
* dnetc478-linux-sparc
* dnetc478a-linux-arm-elf

A few new release candidates have been added to the pre-release page:

* dnetc478-dos-x86
* dnetc478-linux-x86-elf-glibc20
* dnetc478-nto2-arm
* dnetc478-nto2-x86
* dnetc478-ps2linux-mipsel
* dnetc478-qnx4-x86
* dnetc478-win16-x86

Also the proxyinfo monitoring pages have been updated to support a
more modern backend infrastructure, but we have tried to keep the
presentation approximately the same. You can see the new RC5-72
proxyinfo (updated at 5 minute intervals) page at:

* http://n0cgi.distributed.net/rc5-proxyinfo.html
* http://n0cgi.distributed.net/ogr-proxyinfo.html

The random, useless factoids at the top of the proxyinfo page are
indeed outdated and need to be replaced with more interesting quotes
(I’ve merely translated the old 1998 quotes/scripts into modern XSL).
If you have cute ideas for *positive*, general interest quotes, I’m
willing to accept suggestions at bovine@distributed.net. (Preferably
try to keep them project neutral so that they’ll work for RC5-72 keys
or OGR nodes.) For the curious, saved copies of the two input files
that generate the above proxyinfo page are:

* http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/proxyinfo2.xsl
* http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/proxyinfo.xml (stale input data)

:: 12-Dec-2002 21:19 GMT (Thursday) ::

Just wanted to let people know that we’re indeed having some traffic
capacity issues to the keyservers, so it may take your client several
connection attempts to successfully fetch or flush buffers. Just let
the client retry by itself (don’t manually keep retrying) and it
should eventually connect.

Additionally, we’d like to again request that everyone go around and
check all of their machines on which previous versions of the dnetc
client had been installed and consider upgrading them. In particular,
if you are still running a v2.8010 client, uninstall it or upgrade!!

That version has a known bug that will cause it to rapidly reconnect
to our keyservers if the projects are closed and it is unable to get
work. This is causing a fair amount of donated bandwidth to be wasted
and is causing quite a bit of concern. We’re in the process of
collecting the IP addresses of the most significant offenders and
contacting them individually when possible, but this is a tedious and
partially manual process.

:: 10-Dec-2002 00:46 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Several new pre-release clients and proxies have been made available
on http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html :

* dnetc478-irix6.5-mips-64
* dnetc478-irix6.5-mips-n32
* dnetc478-linux-sparc
* dnetc478-netbsd-arm32
* dnetc478-riscos-arm
* dnetc478a-linux-arm-elf
* proxyper332-linux-x86-glibc-rc2
* proxyper332-solaris26-sparc

We have been getting a number of good bug reports on the personal
proxies, so there will probably be a few revised release-candidates
for some of the already-available platforms in the coming days.

:: 03-Dec-2002 19:19 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There are some updated release-candidate personal proxies available on
http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html

:: 03-Dec-2002 11:34 GMT (Tuesday) ::

I know a lot of you have been eagerly awaiting this… The official
client download page has been updated with the v2.9 clients, which
includes RC5-72 support! These clients have been undergoing
pre-release testing for several weeks now, so we feel pretty happy
with their quality.

The keyserver network is actively handing out and accepting results
for RC5-72, so all participants are encouraged to upgrade their
clients at this time. The majority of our keyservers have already
upgraded to server versions that are RC5-72 enabled.

Updates to various portions of our website will be continuing
throughout the coming days. Stats for RC5-72 are not yet available,
but all RC5-72 results submitted with v2.9001.477 or above will be
reflected once they do come online.

Please be sure to also check out our FAQ section on RC5-72 at
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/faq/index.cgi?file=270

:: 01-Dec-2002 20:52 GMT (Sunday) ::

There were some mail delivery/routing issues with the plans mailing
list (probably for the last couple of months) but I think I’ve just
identified and resolved that problem now.

:: 30-Nov-2002 23:49 GMT (Saturday) ::

I’ve just put some additional release candidate clients on the
pre-release page http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html

* dnetc478-bsdos2-x86-aout.tar.gz
* dnetc478-bsdos4-x86-elf.tar.gz
* dnetc478-linux-arm-elf.tar.gz
* dnetc478-linux-x86-elf-pthreads.tar.gz
* dnetc478-netbsd-mipsel.tar.gz
* dnetc478-openbsd-sparc-aout.tar.gz
* dnetc478c-os2-x86.zip

Note that we are providing the linux-x86-elf-pthreads client as an
alternate to the traditional linux-x86-elf client (which uses forking
and shared-memory as its execution model). The pthreads client should
still be considered for use specifically on systems that have problems
with shared-memory usage (such as clusters that utilize MOSIX for
process migration), since our forked-model client still has greater
code maturity.

It’s been pointed out by a number of people that some of the clients
on the pre-release page have been available there for more than 4
days. That threshold is intended to merely be a guidance for the
approximate amount of time, and not a hard-set time period. Formal
release of those clients and the formal start of RC5-72 is soon
forthcoming but is awaiting coordination with a number of staff to
ensure everything begins smoothly.

Additionally, OGR stats processing will probably not occur tonight
since Decibel is out of town and I need him to manually re-process a
couple of today’s logfiles before resuming the automation.

:: 29-Nov-2002 03:07 GMT (Friday) ::

The machine that was hosting the pre-release v29 client network has
been brought back online and should be accepting traffic again.
Although the outtage was not planned, it served as a good test of the
resiliency of the clients in periods of non-connectivity.

:: 26-Sep-2002 16:08 GMT (Thursday) ::

Yup it’s true, RC5-64 is done. And here’s some Perl code in case
you’d like to verify the solution yourself on your own machine. This
requires Perl 5.6 or higher.

http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/solution64.pl
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/RC5.pm

(I’m temporarily providing a modified version of RC5.pm from the CPAN
module Crypt::RC5 until the author is able to make the next release of
it available with these modifications.)