:: 17-Dec-1999 08:38 (Friday) ::

Moo.

I tinkered with stats this evening and setup CPU and OS distribution
statistics for CSC:

http://stats.distributed.net/csc/cpu.html
http://stats.distributed.net/csc/os.html

As soon as I’m completely happy with how it’s working (and get all
the proper icons in place!), I’ll set it up for RC5-64, too. That should
be in the next week or so.

Enjoy.

-dbaker

:: 04-Dec-1999 23:24 (Saturday) ::

Congratulations (and thanks, to those of you that have helped!), we’ve
reached the 20% complete point in the CSC challenge. The odds are
getting better and better that we find the key in the next day.

We’ve reached the point where we’re about to start recycling keyspaces. This
means that we’ve assigned almost all the keys in the CSC keyspace and need
to begin reassigning keys that have yet tobe returned. Optimally, we would
like to reassign keys in the order that we originally assigned them (so that
minimal work is wasted), but due to our “keyspace jumping” method of
assigning keys, this isn’t realistically possible. Regardless, we will be doing
our best to reassign in the rough order that we started with.

This should serve as a significant reminder to most people that it’s not a good
idea to buffer an amount of blocks that your computer(s) couldn’t complete in
four or five days. Accordingly, now is an optimal time to review your
configuration for optimal performance, and to flush any outstanding
CSC blocks.

Keep on cracking. Good luck!

-dbaker

:: 25-Nov-1999 01:56 (Thursday) ::

Moo. I’ve been making some new progress on the new nodezero server (it’s the
master web/dns/ftp server). Those of you that watch my projects list (and
who doesn’t?) have seen that getting a new nodezero into production is a huge
priority and that I’ve slowly and surely been making progress.

Completed tasks:

– Design hardware specs (Brief: PIII-500, 2x9gig UWSCSI, 256mb sdram, etc)
– Order parts
– Build box
– Install OS (FreeBSD!) and setup minimal services

TODO tasks:
– Setup htdocs stuff in CVS on current n0
– Setup CVS sycning on new n0 for htdocs stuff
– Convert services (bind8, “mirror”, proftpd, qmail, etc.)
– Get nugget/cow to dink with apache/mysql_auth kludge
– Convert users

– Arrange for conversion with VISI
– FedEX box
– Final cutover

– Arrange for CVS server move to nugget’s colo site.

I hope to get through the first set of “still to do” tasks over this long
weekend (The 25th is a United States holiday). I’ll post more updates as
I progress.

Have a good Thanksgiving, folks. Burn, CSC, Burn!

-dbaker

:: 16-Nov-1999 00:22 (Tuesday) ::

I’ve released our official announcement about CSC:
http://www.distributed.net/csc/csc-announce-dbaker.html

:: 08-Nov-1999 20:07 (Monday) ::

WHERE ARE THE T-SHIRTS?
Yeah, it’s been years. This is unacceptable. They’re one of my
priorities. I’m going to get these shirts, mugs, posters, and hats
designed, on the web, and out the door.

WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG?
We’re a bunch of computer geeks. We don’t know how to make
t-shirts and sell them.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
We have been working with a company called NerdGear. The problem
is that they’re slow and incompetent. Their shirts are ugly and
they aren’t what we wanted, nor did we approve them before they
started selling them. Additionally, after one wash, they show
severe fading. They suck.

I’ve called twice and tried to fire them with no luck; the guy
is never in. Hopefully I’ll give them the boot in the next day or
two.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
We need to find a competent company that is capable of helping us
design this merchandise. We then need this company to produce and
sell the merchandise. We will be able to give an idea as to how
much demand there will be.

I think we expect to have a variety of t-shirt designs, with each
offered in black and white. The DCTI logo is a high color image
that requires image transferring technology to look right. We have
the cow-head logo in resolution-independent (photoshop and raster)
format, which apparently makes production much easier.

If you work for a company that can do this, or know of one, please
email me (dbaker@distributed.net) any and all information.

WHAT WILL WE BE DOING?
First off, expect a new survey of interest. The results of this
survey will be posted live. You’ll be able to vote on what items
you will be interested in buying, and how many.

I plan to have a “dWear” page on the web site in the next day or two
that will offer all appropriate information and links. I am doing
my best to get the ball rolling.

Hopefully, I’ll get significant response to my “How can you help?”
offer above. Accordingly, I’ll weed through the selections and
find a good company so that all our users can show their cow pride.

:: 08-Nov-1999 15:28 (Monday) ::

I made lots of distributed.net progress over the weekend. Although many of
my accomplishments won’t affect users directly, they offer significant
improvements to the distributed.net network as a whole.

I upgraded the keymaster from FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE to 3.3-STABLE. In the past,
I’ve had a history of letting it go with an old OS for months on end; it
never goes down, so there’s little reason to upgrade. However, if you don’t
“stay on” an upgrade path, it gets much harder as releases progress.

I finally implemented Topanga. Topanga (aka TWOpanga) will serve as
(www2|ns2|ftp2|http2).distributed.net. I already have several of these
services in production. Having another DCTI machine that can serve as
a completely backup for nodezero (which is the master for web/dns/etc) will
not only increase general operating redundancy, but allow us to finally
upgrade the machine. At this point, I’ve been given the budget approval to
buy the new machine, but I was waiting for topanga to be in place to do so. In
the next coming weeks, I’ll be ordering and building the new nodezero. I plan
to see it in production before 2000.

:: 31-Oct-1999 06:29 (Sunday) ::

Due to some minor technical glitches on the keymaster, block processing was delayed
right around 22:00GMT. Accordingly, blocks submitted between 22:00 and 00:00 did not make
it into the day’s stats run. Don’t worry; no blocks were lost. “Missing” blocks were only
delayed by a few hours and will make it into the following day’s stats.

:: 19-Oct-1999 00:45 (Tuesday) ::

This is a “heads up!” that stats will be much slower than usual tonight. If you’ve
read my previous plan entries, you will see that I’ve been re-processing a lot of
blocks from about a month ago. Almost all of those blocks will make it into tonight’s
stats run, and accordingly, it will take more time to process the extra data. The ~30k or
so that weren’t able to make the midnight cut will be in tomorrow’s run.

To top it off, a partition on statsbox filled up right before the statsrun should have
started, so some manual intervention was required in order to launch stats for the
evening. Stats finally launched the daily run at ~00:45 and all is looking well.

Enjoy, and please email me (dbaker@distributed.net) if you have any questions about your
blocks being “recovered”.

:: 18-Oct-1999 12:38 (Monday) ::

Sorry for the delay, folks. “Missing” Blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/199
are now very quickly being processed by the keymaster.

This should explain the very high RC5-64 rate that is being displayed on
proxyinfo now.

Your stats will not reflect that these blocks were done in the past; they will show
up in today’s (or tomorrow’s) stats as if they were just submitted recently. Because
of this, your “daily rate” will surge if you were missing blocks.

I expect this process to be complete within the next 48 hours. I will post here when
I have a better estimate.

Enjoy!

:: 13-Oct-1999 22:58 (Wednesday) ::

I have good news! After a long process of recovering and preprocessing the “missing”
blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/1999, I have begun to feed them back
into the keymaster for re-processing. I just began the actual re-processing a few
minutes ago, so I don’t have any idea how long the whole process will take. I’m sure
that the keymaster isn’t fast enough to finish before 00:00GMT (statsbox daily run
time), but it is possible that it will be completely finished by time for tomorrow’s
run.

Your stats will not reflect that these blocks were done in the past; they will show
up in today’s (or tomorrow’s) stats as if they were just submitted recently. Because
of this, your “daily rate” will surge if you were missing blocks.

I’ll post more information about how long it will take to complete this process at
a later time.

Enjoy!