:: 24-Mar-2004 20:37 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Thanks in part to user donations (including one VERY generous donation)
we’re close to being able to order a new stats server. After some
internal debate on the best approach, the current plan is to pick up a
dual opteron box and load it with memory and drives. Traditionally,
statsbox has been i/o bound on disk and memory but not very demanding of
CPU. An Opteron solution sounds like a good target platform for what we
need.

I spent a lot of today borrowing a surrogate opteron box from Bovine to
validate that postgresql and freebsd 5.x are a viable platform. I’ve also
confirmed with Doug White and Vinod Kashyap that 3Ware support
in FreeBSD 5.x is stable and reliable.

We’re also eager to move to a smaller sized case — blower was in a
gigantic Dell 6400 series case which limited our options for alternative
colos if we ever decided to move servers around. I think we can stuff
everything we need into a 3U chassis.

I’ve got a price quote that seems agreeable and I hope to place the order
tomorrow. It’s unlikely this will get us back online before next week,
though.

I’ll post more as the ordering+building+deployment progresses…

Thanks again everyone for your patience and understanding.

:: 21-May-2003 09:51 GMT (Wednesday) ::

After an amazing 761 days of trouble-free uptime it looks like the server
oldnodezero.distributed.net spontaneously rebooted. This machine was the first
dedicated distributed.net server and hosted our website, dns, mail, and a
variety of other critical services for much of the past five years.

Thanks to all the cows who have contributed to this machine’s stability over
the years and especially to visi.com for such a remarkably stable data center
and colo. I think the last reboot was to physically relocate the machine to
their new (at the time) data center.

:: 31-Oct-2002 11:21 GMT (Thursday) ::

Spent some time on blower this morning doing corrective maintenance from
dB’s upgrade of the base OS. It looks as if decibel did a portupgrade
on the linux_base port which does all sorts of terrible things. The
portupgrade process first removes the old port, including the contents
of /usr/compat/linux/usr/lib/ library files. Accordingly, a bunch of
linux binaries on the system stopped working because they were linked
against older versions of the libraries in linux_base.

I also made some revisions to the prize money pages on statsbox, both
to carve the rc5-64 numbers in stone and also to begin work on extending
the prize money page mechanism to more easily support multiple projects.

You can see the final rc5-64 numbers at:
http://stats.distributed.net/misc/money.php?project_id=5

As near as I can tell, the code is ready to go with RC5-72 numbers just
as soon as there’s data in the stats database with which the code can
tally up nonprofit votes.

If you’re feeling really bored, try with project_id=3 to see the RC5-56
numbers. :)

:: 26-Sep-2002 14:16 GMT (Thursday) ::

Anyone in or near Austin, TX might want to consider crashing our informal
rc5 celebration and nuclear taco festival this evening. Email for details.

Moo

:: 19-Sep-2002 17:18 GMT (Thursday) ::

http://www.slashnet.org/

The fine folks over at SlashNET will be hosting us unsavory distributed.net
geeks for an online forum on 28-Sep-2002 to discuss distributed.net, future
directions, and whatever else anyone is interested in knowing. Please
consider showing up for the fun!

:: 05-Aug-2002 17:17 GMT (Monday) ::

Today will be upgrade day out here in distributed.net-land. Expect
brief outages on both the main d.net website as well as on stats box
as I make world and reboot. We’re also planning on migrating statsbox
to apache2 (and by “we” I mean “paul”, naturally).

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

:: 27-Feb-2002 19:40 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Some network restructuring requires that stats.distributed.net be re-ip’d.
Please be patient if you experience any connectivity issues as things
propagate through DNS and settle down on this end.

Thanks.

:: 24-Feb-2002 06:00 GMT (Sunday) ::

Testing.

:: 15-Jan-2002 00:41 (Tuesday) ::

It’s Bovine’s birthday today! (15-Jan)

:: 13-Dec-2001 16:54 (Thursday) ::

Uptime on the stats box is a curious 13 hours which is a likely explanation
for why last night’s stats run failed to complete. We’ll kick off the
run cleaning up from any potential inconsistencies resulting from the
interrupted stats run. Thanks for your patience.