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.

2007-05-21

bovine [21-May-2007 @ 04:34]

Filed under: project status @ 04:34 +00:00

:: 21-May-2007 04:34 GMT (Monday) ::

Dear friends,

It is with great sadness that we must announce that RSA Labs has
decided to terminate the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, which impacts the
RC5-72 project and all of the remaining RC5 challenges. This means
that RSA Labs will not confirm any solutions or award any additional
prizes, should a correct solution be found. Furthermore, we have
received a statement indicating that they will not be disclosing the
solutions to the unsolved challenges. More details can be found on
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2100 (Note that the page should
state that the RC5-32/12/8 solution was recovered on 14 July 2002, not
28 January 1997.)

Although RSA Labs is halting their official sponsorship, there is
still the option open to us to continue the project without their
prize or validation. We would like to solicit your feedback regarding
this option. Discussion is welcome on our rc5 mailing list (see
http://lists.distributed.net/mailman/listinfo/rc5 if you are not
already a member). In the coming days, we will provide a facility to
allow official votes to be made.

If the choice to discontinue the RC5-72 project is made, the official
transition plan will be as follows: In one week’s time from the
announced decision, the distributed.net keyservers will begin
indicating that the RC5-72 project is closed to all connecting dnetc
clients. All results received after that time will be discarded. A
couple of days before then, we will begin slowing down RC5 work unit
generation to allow the network to drain. If we receive sufficient
feedback indicating that you would like us to continue operating the
RC5-72 project, we will continue to generate work units and the
project will remain open.

We intend to continue operating the OGRp2 project, and are currently
in the development stages of additional types of projects. More
details regarding these future projects will be announced at a later
date. In the mean time, we encourage everyone to continue
participating in both the RC5-72 and OGRp2 projects.

Moo! ]:8)

2007-04-25

bovine [25-Apr-2007 @ 06:42]

Filed under: project status @ 06:42 +00:00

:: 25-Apr-2007 06:42 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Dear friends,

We would like to announce that we have just recently completed
OGRp2-25.1 (ie: OGR-25 phase 2 sub-phase 1). For a full technical
summary of the current progress and phases of OGR, please see
http://faq.distributed.net/?file=230

We are continuing to make progress on OGRp2-25 (sub-phases 2, 3, 4,
and 5) at this time. Due to the arrangement of the stubs within the
sub-phases, there is less work (fewer total stubs) left for the later
sub-phases. Our current estimated percentage complete for all of the
OGRp2-25 work is ~51.13%, as of 2007-04-25. You can see the current
percentage at http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=25

Of course RC5-72 is also actively running, so you can choose to
participate in one or both of our projects.

It is also exciting to be able to announce that this month marks the
10-year anniversary of the start of distributed.net! We thank everyone
that has participated in our projects to date and look forward to
continued success.

Moo! ]:8)

2006-12-17

bovine [17-Dec-2006 @ 05:16]

Filed under: keyservers @ 05:16 +00:00

:: 17-Dec-2006 05:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

There was a planned power outage today that required us to temporarily
shut down our primary webserver (www.distributed.net) and our
keymaster. Power has been restored and things should be catching up
now. All backlogged work that was buffered during the outage should
be getting processed now.

Since we didn’t get much early warning about this outage, we couldn’t
get an announcement out beforehand. Thanks for your patience. Moo!

2006-12-13

bovine [13-Dec-2006 @ 06:57]

Filed under: stats @ 06:57 +00:00

:: 13-Dec-2006 06:57 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Today 4 new hard drives were installed into Fritz and the RAID array
has been successfully rebuilt. The new drives reportedly have TLER so
hopefully the problems of drives dropping out of the RAID should not
occur anymore. Additionally, we are hoping that the newer FreeBSD
kernel will not freeze whenever the RAID controller resets itself.

Stats should now be online and accessible, though it is currently
re-processing the backlog of data since the time it went offline.
Hopefully it should be fully caught up in a few hours.

Thanks for your patience! Keep crunching!

2006-12-04

bovine [04-Dec-2006 @ 23:49]

Filed under: stats @ 23:49 +00:00

:: 04-Dec-2006 23:49 GMT (Monday) ::

Our stats server, Fritz, is currently offline due to its ongoing RAID
issues. Although the machine is actually back online right now, we
have the webpages turned off until we finish making some more tweaks.

For the technically interested, the problem appears to one of the
following problems:

1) Four of the WDC hard drives (SATA model WD2000JB) we have are
suspected to possibly be affected by a timeout issue related to
thermal calibration, or a lack of TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery).

Western Digital claims the problem only affects certain older ATA
drives (but ours are SATA) http://lnk.nu/wdc.custhelp.com/c6c.php
And 3Ware confirms that the ATA version of our model number (but
not necessarily SATA). http://lnk.nu/3ware.com/c6d.aspx

There is a drive firmware update, but only available for ATA
drives. We have already opened support tickets 3Ware and WDC more
than a week ago and are still waiting for responses.

2) Physical drive failure. We’ve already had all of the drives RMA’ed
at least once when we first started having these problems, so we
don’t believe there is a physical failure in the normal sense. The
drives report no errors after a reboot.

3) Motherboard compatibility with our RAID controller. We have a Tyan
S2882 motherboard, but 3Ware’s compatibility page for the
9550SX-8LP says only Tyan S2880 and S2885 are “officially”
supported. http://lnk.nu/3ware.com/c6e.pdf We don’t think this is
too probable of a cause though.

4) FreeBSD updates. We’re currently on FreeBSD 6.0 stable, but 6.1
stable has some additional 3Ware driver updates, so tonight we will
be upgrading to that. http://lnk.nu/freebsd.org/c6f.html

5) 3Ware RAID firmware updates. We’ve already updated to the latest
firmware a couple weeks ago prior to this most recent outage, so
the firmware alone is not a fix.

6) 3Ware RAID controller. Several months ago we tried replacing the
RAID controller with a slightly different 3Ware model to see if
that would affect things, but the problem persisted.

We’ve also just recently purchased a KVM-over-IP solution to allow us
to remotely manage the machine if it becomes inaccessible over the
network. Unfortunately, this most recent failure wedged the OS
preventing even a keyboard-initiated reboot from working.

If we don’t get any further responses from WDC or 3Ware, our next
possible option is to go out and buy 4 new 200GB+ SATA drives from
another manufacturer and see if that improves things.

We might also try moving some of the drives (containing the OS and
swap) to the onboard RAID controller and see if that can avoid
preventing the OS from going down when the data volume goes down.

Thanks for your patience!

2006-12-02

bovine [02-Dec-2006 @ 21:04]

Filed under: keyservers @ 21:04 +00:00

:: 02-Dec-2006 21:04 GMT (Saturday) ::

Our fullserver in Australia, proxy1.bris.qld.au.proxy.distributed.net,
has changed IP addresses and the server that was running at the old
address will be shut down in a few days. If you have not hard-coded
IP addresses into your config files, then you should be fine and
unaffected by this address change.

Also worth noting: earlier this week on Thursday, our keymaster server
was relocated to a new physical location. This planned move took only
a couple hours and was completed successfully without impacting
operations, due to the fully buffered nature of our proxy network.
The only effect was a brief gap in our keyrate graphing during the
time, and a surge once the keymaster was restarted.
http://stats.distributed.net/keyrate.php?project_id=25

2006-11-26

bovine [26-Nov-2006 @ 21:18]

Filed under: clients @ 21:18 +00:00

:: 26-Nov-2006 21:18 GMT (Sunday) ::

Several new client versions have been moved from the pre-release page
to the official release page. This new release features a new
optimized OGR core that offers improved performance on AMD processors:

*Windows 32bit [x86/Zipped] v2.9013.498
*Windows 32bit [x86/Installer] v2.9013.498
*Linux [x86/ELF] v2.9013.498
*PC-DOS, MS-DOS [x86] v2.9013.498
*NetBSD [MIPSEL/ELF] v2.9013.498
*FreeBSD [4.x/x86/ELF] v2.9013.498
*FreeBSD [5.x/x86/ELF] v2.9013.498
*FreeBSD [6.x/x86/ELF] v2.9013.498
*Solaris/SunOS [x86] v2.9013.498

Download links for all supported platforms can be found at
http://www1.distributed.net/download/clients.php

2006-05-28

bovine [28-May-2006 @ 02:27]

Filed under: Uncategorized @ 02:27 +00:00

:: 28-May-2006 02:27 GMT (Sunday) ::

Mailing lists operational again. We’ve been experiencing some
problems with our mailing lists server over the past few weeks, but
hopefully it should be operational now!

2006-04-18

bovine [18-Apr-2006 @ 06:05]

Filed under: clients @ 06:05 +00:00

:: 18-Apr-2006 06:05 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Several new v2.9011 and v2.9012 clients have been moved from to the
official release page. This includes clients for these platforms:

– Solaris/SunOS [x86] v2.9012.497
– OpenBSD [AMD64/ELF] v2.9011.496
– OpenBSD [x86/ELF] v2.9011.496
– FreeBSD [AMD64/ELF] v2.9011.496
– FreeBSD [ELF/x86] v2.9012.497
– Linux [x86/ELF] v2.9012.497
– OS/2 [x86] v2.9012.497
– Mac OS X/Darwin [x86] v2.9012.497
– Mac OS X/Darwin [PPC/OS X] v2.9012.497
– PC-DOS, MS-DOS [x86] v2.9012.497
– Windows 32bit [x86/Zipped] v2.9012.497
– Windows 32bit [x86/Installer] v2.9012.497

Links are on http://www1.distributed.net/download/clients.php and
http://www.distributed.net/download/updates.php summarizes the list of
platforms that have been updated.

2006-03-09

bovine [09-Mar-2006 @ 23:47]

Filed under: keyservers @ 23:47 +00:00

:: 09-Mar-2006 23:47 GMT (Thursday) ::

We have had to take the proxy1.madsn.wi.us.proxy.distributed.net proxy
offline and out of the round-robin DNS for awhile. If you have
hard-coded its name or IP address into your configuration files, then
you will want to make an update to your INI files.

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »