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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.
:: 12-Jan-2006 04:37 GMT (Thursday) ::
There will be a planned stats outage starting around Jan 12 23:00 UTC,
as we relocate the server to a new hosting facility. We hope to bring
stats back online within a couple of hours. There will be a followup
plan announcement once service has been restored.
:: 01-Nov-2005 23:14 GMT (Tuesday) ::
Although the stats website is still accessible, they are currently not
being updated because we are currently investigating some possible
hardware issues that were noticed after a recent power failure.
Hopefully once we are confident about the status of the box, we will
resume stats updates again. Don’t worry, since no data loss is
expected. :)
:: 13-Sep-2005 16:54 GMT (Tuesday) ::
Last week we added a new Aussie keyserver, located in Brisbane.
Clients have already begun to automatically connect to it and it
is performing great so far.
Our secondary webserver (one of two servers that host www.d.net) is
currently offline. Since all of the content it was hosting was
mirrored, this should not have much immediate impact on us. We’ve
adjusted our load-balancing to exclude it, although there may be some
delays until the DNS changes fully propagate. (That machine had been
online for nearly 8 years and would have had an uptime of 858 days at
the time it went offline.)
:: 30-Jun-2005 06:41 GMT (Thursday) ::
New clients have been released and can be downloaded from
http://www.distributed.net/download/ Users running any previous x86
client versions are encouraged to update.
Included with client version 2.9010.495 and higher are some exciting
speed improvements. Three new RC5-72 cores have been added, including
a new 64-bit core for AMD64 and two existing x86 RC5-72 cores have
been sped up. In addition a new OGR core has been added that provides
an approximate 30% improvement. We are eternally grateful for our
contributors’ ingenuity.
OGR25-P2 is progressing well. We have now checked over 47.66% of all
work in the first of nine sub-phases. Overall we have completed 7.66%
of OGR25-P2. For more information about the sub-phases look here:
http://faq.distributed.net/cache/230.html Note that due to an
oversight the last time we updated OGR completion on stats, it has
been showing the percent completion of the first sub-phase. We will be
going back to displaying overall completion, since this is what most
users are interested in.
A few minor issues with the clients have been corrected as well. The
‘dg3’, ‘sgp3’, and ‘snjl’ cores present in versions prior to
2.9010.495 miscalculate a small number of predictable keys in every
block, rendering some blocks containing those keys discarded for
stats. These cores were used as the default choice for 32-bit clients
running on Cyrix Cx486, AMD K5, Via C3 Nehemiah, Pentium 4, Pentium M
and 64-bit clients running on the AMD64/Intel EM64T processors.
Note that at most only 2% of the calculated keys within each block
processed by those cores are affected. This won’t affect the normal
running of the project in any way as we’ll re-process these keys if
needed.
All current x86 clients need to be upgraded to prevent the amount of
work that would need to be recalculated from growing. This also means
that all RC5-72 work from x86 clients v2.9001.474 up to v2.9009.494
(all clients released to date) will stopped being credited at a future
date.
In the past few months, a growing minority of participants have chosen
to try to cheat their way to higher stats rankings by making binary
alterations to our clients. Fortunately, great progress has been made
on both removing the largest users of these hacked clients and
implementing automatic filtering techniques to block future tainted
work.
Cheaters are removed from stats manually after intensive study of
their flushing patterns, to prevent users that tested such clients and
accidentally submitted a few blocks from being removed. Due to the
amount of manual work involved with this, a few smaller accounts may
still face removal in the near future.
We thank you for all of your contributions and hope that you will
stick with us into the future as we continue to make history. :)
:: 15-Jun-2005 17:15 GMT (Wednesday) ::
The previous v2.9010-495 release candidates (on x86 platforms only)
have been withdrawn and not officially released, due to some minor
performance and some inaccurate auto core-selection. (Thanks to those
who participated in the testing and identification of those problems.)
A few new v2.9011-496 release candidates have already been added to
the pre-release page. Eager users interested in helping provide test
coverage and report any issues for these new sets of clients can
download them from: http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
If no additional blocking problems are discovered, we hope to
officially release these clients for general consumption within the
next week or so.
:: 18-May-2005 16:35 GMT (Wednesday) ::
I have just uploaded revised v2.9010.495b release candidates for Win32
to fix an unexpected core selection problem on AMD Athlon 64 FX or
newer processors. If you had already downloaded the previous Win32
prerelease client already, it is recommended that you download the
updated one.
Pre-release Linux clients for x86 and AMD64 have also now available.
As before, we’d like to recommend that only users who are willing to
perform early testing and open bug reports download these clients now.
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
:: 17-May-2005 02:40 GMT (Tuesday) ::
There was some unexpected server hardware downtime today, which has
led to some backlog accumulating and a delay in the start of today’s
daily stats processing. We’re currently processing the backlog right
now and hope to catch up within the next few hours. It is not
expected that any significant amount of work was lost, due to the
buffering nature of our network.
However please be aware that the statsrun for May 16 (once it has
finished processing) may be a little low, since most of the backlog
will be counted in tomorrow’s stats.
:: 17-May-2005 02:28 GMT (Tuesday) ::
I’ve just put a few release candidate clients for v2.9010.495 on the
pre-release page. At this point, we’d like to recommend that only
users who are willing to perform early testing and open bug reports
download these clients now. We hope to formally release these clients
later this week.
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php
:: 15-Mar-2005 21:13 GMT (Tuesday) ::
This is just a notice that two of our volunteer servers in the
Netherlands, proxy1.utrecht.nl.proxy.distributed.net and
proxy2.utrecht.nl…, will soon be going offline due to necessary
hardware reclamation. They have already been removed from our DNS
zones, so our clients will no longer automatically select them.
However, if you have manually specified the IP address or hostnames of
them in your configuration files, there will need to be some manual
changes. Although we have no immediate plans for a replacement, we
will continue to monitor user feedback and the redistributed traffic
patterns to evaluate whether we need to reconsider that.
There has also recently been a periodic update of our public source
code at http://www.distributed.net/source/ which includes the assembly
source code for our current AMD64 (x86-64) RC5-72 core. We welcome
the assembly language expertise of others that already have their own
Opteron/Athlon64/EMT64 hardware in achieving further optimizations.
:: 02-Jan-2005 07:47 GMT (Sunday) ::
Happy new year!
Due to increasing instability with our old email support tool, we have
finally had to replace it with a new system. If you have sent us a
message to our “help@distributed.net” or “abuse@distributed.net” email
addresses (in Dec 2004) and have not received closure on your issue,
you may want to re-send your message.
You may either re-send it to the above email addresses, or visit
http://www.distributed.net/sendmail.php for a web-based contact form.