:: 07-Mar-2003 17:15 GMT (Friday) ::

I noticed today that teams were allowed to have duplicate names. This is
obviously bad. I’ve fixed stats so that this is no longer allowed, but in order
to do this, I had to change the name of every team that was a duplicate. All
those teams now have their team ID appended to the name.

We normally don’t support merging teams, but if you are the owner of a
duplicated team and email me (decibel@distributed.net), I’ll merge the
duplicated teams for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 06-Mar-2003 23:06 GMT (Thursday) ::

Sorry for the stats outage; I’m fixing the problem right now.

:: 27-Jan-2003 22:25 GMT (Monday) ::

It’s come to our attention that some wise individual decided that
blower.distributed.net (the stats machine) belongs on an email blacklist,
presumably because they think it generates spam. If you click the ‘mail me my
password’ button on your stats page and don’t get an email with your password
in it, it’s probably because your ISP is using whatever blacklist we’re on.

If anyone finds out what blacklist blower is listed on, please email
help@distributed.net with the information and we’ll see if we can
get the listing removed. Note that there are several blacklists that
have decided to blacklist entire major Network Service Providers.
http://www.five-ten-sg.com/blackhole.php?ip=65.112.245.132&Search=Search is one
example. They’ve blacklisted all of Qwest’s IPs, and since blower’s network
connection is via Qwest, blower is blacklisted as well. Because of the nature
of this list, you should contact your ISP and tell them to either white-list
blower, or not to use that blackhole list. That page even states that that
blacklist isn’t intended for public use:

“If some mail server is rejecting your email based on the above listing, ask
them to either white-list your address or to stop using this list. I don’t know
who is using blackholes.five-ten-sg.com to block email – it is my personal list
used to protect my personal mail servers (and my clients). I make it public so
that anyone who has mail rejected here can find out why it was rejected.”

:: 25-Jan-2003 03:25 GMT (Saturday) ::

Thanks to the worm that’s running around, UD (where blower is located) is
currently off the net. This means no stats until Qwest fixes it’s network.

:: 15-Jan-2003 19:28 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Nerf & co. are running some big, hairy query on postgres on blower, which is
swamping one of the drive arrays. This is slowing stats processing down a huge
amount, so I’m going to turn the statsrun off until whatever they’re running is
done. Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 15-Dec-2002 19:49 GMT (Sunday) ::

Blower is busy catching up on OGR and should be done in a few hours. It’s not
doing RC5 right now because we’re going to rewrite history a bit. :)

Several people have suggested that since very, very few people were able to
submit blocks on Dec. 2 that we should move the Dec. 2 work to make it look
like it happened on Dec. 3. This is exactly what we’ve done, and tomorrow
at around 1600 UTC (10 AM CST) I’ll start re-processing all of RC5-72 from
the beginning. I’m holding off until then so that anyone who wants to watch
themselves climb in the ranks from day 1 can watch stats as the updates happen.

:: 15-Dec-2002 16:39 GMT (Sunday) ::

Good news! Sybase is up and running again. The problem turned out to be a
library issue of some kind… it didn’t like Linux 7.2, but downgrading back to
6.2 solved everything.

I’m taking this opportunity to grab a quick backup; once that’s done I’ll turn
the website back on.

:: 11-Dec-2002 23:48 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Just wanted to keep people updated on stats. In a nutshell, nothing happened
today… bwilson wasn’t around (his wife is due any day, so for all we know
he’s playing with his new baby right now :) ), and Matt and I were busy all
day. Tonight didn’t work out either.

I’m hoping that we can get this taken care of tomorrow evening, but that may
not happen either. Worst case we should be able to get something done this
weekend. (Of course every time we announce a date we usually blow right past it
so I may have just jinx-ed the whole thing…)

:: 10-Dec-2002 22:09 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Well, the master device on Sybase certainly appears to be toast. Both Matt
and I have looked at it and have little hope of salvaging it. I’m hoping the
Bruce can look at it tomorrow. It’s getting late now and Matt and I don’t want
to start messing around with things when we’re tired and primed for making
mistakes, so we’re going to wait until tomorrow before doing anything.

On the bright side, I’m pretty sure that the backup of the master device that
we have will allow us to access the main stats database again. If that’s the
case we might be able to get this resolved without an undue amount of pain.

More info when it’s available.

:: 10-Dec-2002 19:48 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Sybase just went belly-up, so stats are down. No ETA on a fix yet.