:: 09-Jun-2001 23:01 (Saturday) ::

Earlier this week, our statistics graphs were migrated to our new webserver.
Accesses to http://www.distributed.net/statistics/ will now be served from
there. During the next few days, a few of the graphs may be broken while
we work to adjust all of the automation for the new machine. We are
simultaneously migrating as many of the images as possible from GIF to
PNG format.

Our bugzilla bug tracking database has also just been migrated onto the
new server. For both cases, redirects should be in place to ensure that
anyone accessing any of the temporary “oldcgi” URLs that we were issuing
in the transition period will automatically be sent to the proper location.

The next major phase in the migration will be to move all user accounts,
plan files, and user web pages to the new server, which will be attempted
sometime within the next couple of weeks.

:: 14-May-2001 08:04 (Monday) ::

Just to let everyone know and clarify the facts, we are now in the middle
of preventative replacements to three of our primary servers: nodezero,
keymaster, and statsbox. The new keymaster hardware has only recently
been ordered, so it will still be a couple of weeks before the transition
to the new hardware will be made–Nugget’s 10-may-2001 plan entry describes
the keymaster’s new specs. The configuration of the new statsbox (“blower”)
is still progressing slowly, but most of the blockers have been resolved
and so its preparation has now been resumed.

The replacement of nodezero, our primary webserver, cgi, and shell machine,
has been a long-awaited event and its migration was quietly initiated a
couple of weeks ago when it was introduced into the round-robin DNS pool
for the general static www.d.net content. Tonight I am initiating migration
of the primary CGI facilities to the new machine, with selective CGI
content remaining on the old machine temporarily. Specifically the plans,
user webpages, bugzilla, and stats graphs will temporarily remain on
“oldcgi” instead of “n0cgi” (which now points to the new server). I have
taken measures to ensure that automatic redirects between the servers are
in place during this transition period and do not expect any significant
inability to access our web content, nor do I expect any manual intervention
to be required by anyone accessing our site.

:: 03-Mar-2001 09:05 (Saturday) ::

After many delays we are now proud to announce the availability of the
official line of distributed.net-branded clothing and merchandise,
affectionately known as “dnet-ware”. We are currently offering two styles
of t-shirts, one style of sweatshirt, coffee mugs, and mouse pads. Feel
free to cheeck out the available items on our “dnet-ware” web page at
http://www.distributed.net/dnetware/

Additionally, over the last few days we have been undergoing a fair amount
of workunit submission growth, which has been causing a backlog of workunits
to accumulate at our keymaster. In order to improve responsiveness, much
of this backlog has been transferred offline for gradual processing over
the next few days. Some new optimizations to the keymaster build 324
codebase have also been made to greatly improve sustainable workunit
processing rates by several fold under most circumstances. We will continue
to be processing the backlog over this weekend and stats should hopefully
be caught up and up to date within the next couple of days.

:: 20-Jan-2001 07:51 (Saturday) ::

I’ve released an updated version of my log visualizer for win32. Version
1.2.1 corrects a log parsing issue that caused it to ignore block entries
produced by older “rc5des” clients (between about versions v2.7100.417
and v2.8000). Additionally, it adds a menu item to quickly “zoom full”
and show the entire log file, in case you have used the zoom selection to
restrict it to a specific date period. Finally, when you have the “idle
period emphasis” enabled, the lower bound of the y-axis (keyrate) is now
forced to 0, allowing the idle periods to be accentuated at their actual
level of non-productivity. As always, source can be found at
http://www.distributed.net/source/ or binaries at
http://www.distributed.net/download/addon.html
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/win32vis.png is a nice snapshot of
the display, in case any of you have not seen it before.

I encourage any motivated participants that have C++ and Win32 API
experience and a bit of free time to consider looking at the TODO file
included with the source code and possibly working on any of the outstanding
tasks. Contact me directly if you’re thinking on working on anything (or
have additional suggestions for other TODO items) so that I can coordinate
who is working on what.

:: 16-Jan-2001 03:23 (Tuesday) ::

Just thought I’d share a picture of the present that my fellow cow-orkers
from distributed.net and United Devices got me!
http://www.bovine.net/~jlawson/webcam/archive/burfday-hay.jpg

:: 15-Jan-2001 10:28 (Monday) ::

Well, here is a new plan update since many people have been nagging me
for an update (and one johnla in particular).

I have just made available new versions of the Win32 Log Visualizer and
Java Log Visualizer utilities. For both of them, I added support for the
new log file format used by the recently released v2.8012.465 client
builds. Additionally, in the Win32 version I have added support for
selecting which project data to look at, instead of viewing all projects
mixed together (the Java version has separated the projects by painting
each with a different color since the last version or two). The Win32
version also adds the ability to turn off the artificial “emphasis” of
idle periods when the dnetc client was not running, because the emphasis
would frequently become distracting on large log files. You can retrieve
precompiled binaries or source from
http://www.distributed.net/download/addons.html or
http://www.distributed.net/source/

Also noteworthy is that distributed.net has recently migrated its primary
IRC channel from the EFNET irc network to a new private IRC network.
Although http://www.distributed.net/discussion/irc.html has not yet been
updated to reflect this fact, you can now find us on irc.distributed.net
(port 6667) in the #distributed or #ud channels. To help maintain a
partial presence on EFNET and ease with the migration to the new IRC
network, I have also written a two-way Perl IRC relaybot that sits on both
networks and relays conversations across the gap. Nugget has put together
a page summarizing scripts for several popular IRC clients that makes this
relaying a little bit more transparent:
http://www1.distributed.net/~nugget/dctirelay.html

For those of you interested in news from the United Devices front, as of
this weekend the entire UD staff has moved to a new 16800 sq ft office
building. There will undoubtedly be a significant amount of unpacking
and equipment/network set-up during this coming week, so there may be
intermittent reachability to http://cvs.distributed.net/ More importantly,
the increased amount of bandwidth to the UD office (that we have been
promising for awhile) is expected to be arriving very soon after this
office move settles down. The limited bandwidth to the United Devices
office has been the factor that has been preventing us from bringing the
new, replacement stats server online. Once the bandwidth issue is resolved,
the database contents will merely need to be transferred over and then
the new server will be able to take over right in its place. However I
can’t be any more specific on the timeframe for the full conversion, since
Nugget and Decibel would be the ones in charge of that entire process.

Well, that’s all for now. I wonder how many more birthday emails I’ll
end up getting today…

:: 20-Nov-2000 11:30 (Monday) ::

As it turns out, OGR25 is also approaching the time where we need to
manually reissue the remaining unreturned stubs necessary to complete both
of its first and second passes. We’ve decided not to begin issuing OGR26
merely so that we can focus more intently on getting the existing OGR24
and OGR25 stub spaces fully finished off. Because of this, we’ll be
reducing the release rate of new OGR stubs (OGR24 and OGR25) into the
system so that we can give those outstanding stubs as much time as possible
to be handed in by themselves. Since the outgoing availability of OGR
stubs will now be much less, you may find that your client may return to
working on the RC5 project.

As always, since our statistics pages segregates your work totals by the
actual project type being completed, you may need to visit the RC5 project
stats page in order to see your updated totals being reflected.

Our stats grapher, Daa, is working hard on recrunching the numbers needed
to generate the pretty stubspace completion graphs for both OGR24 and
OGR25 that have been historically located at:
http://n0cgi.distributed.net/statistics/ogr/

Since Daa loves receiving encouragement email about the hard work that he
puts into the graphs, I recommend that you all send a personal message to
his account at daa@distributed.net and tell him that you are anxious to
see the updated stubspace percentage plots.

:: 11-Nov-2000 00:51 (Saturday) ::

We’ve finished reissuing the OGR24 stubs needed for pass 2 and have already
begin receiving a significant number of them back. We’ll continue to wait
a couple of weeks at least before reissuing the stubs that haven’t been
returned.

Tonight we’ll be allowing OGR distribution to “run dry”, not only to ensure
that all of the recycled OGR24 stubs get fully flushed out to the network,
but also to test the network performance of having a project open but no
work units available to it. We’ll resume normal distribution of OGR25 at
Nov 11 06:00:0 GMT or possibly earlier.

:: 08-Nov-2000 09:04 (Wednesday) ::

Over the next week or two, we’ll be resuming mixed distribution of the
secondary pass of OGR-24 data along with OGR-25 data. So when checking
your statistics on our statsbox, take that fact into consideration and be
aware that some of the work that your client(s) may have done may be listed
under the OGR-24 or OGR-25 pages.

:: 28-Oct-2000 12:00 (Saturday) ::

I’ve made some significant text updates to our trojans page so that it
can hopefully be used as a more definitive reference point for people
needing to find out information about these worms, instead of having to
assemble details revealed over the multiple updates to my plan pages. I
also include links to the anti-virus vendors that describe each of these
worms. http://www.distributed.net/trojans.html