:: 07-Feb-2001 16:59 (Wednesday) ::

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill today, take a look at an interesting
exercise in steganography. http://www.spammimic.com/ can hide a short
message by making it look like SPAM.

:: 15-Jan-2001 22:48 (Monday) ::

[Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Automatic processor detection found 4 processors.
[Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loading crunchers with work… [Jan 15 22:49:07
UTC] Loaded OGR stub 25/12-11-2-8-18-19 (35.50% done) [Jan 15 22:49:07
UTC] Loaded OGR stub 25/12-11-2-8-19-5 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loaded OGR
stub 25/12-11-2-8-19-1 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] Loaded OGR stub
25/12-11-2-15-16-10 [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 10 OGR packets (10 work units)
remain in buff-in.ogr [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 10 OGR packets (10 work units)
are in buff-out.ogr [Jan 15 22:49:07 UTC] 4 crunchers (‘a’-‘d’) have been
started.

Even though we don’t have bandwidth yet, the new statsbox is being
productive.

:: 01-Jan-2001 20:53 (Monday) ::

Happy New (Year|Millennium) from all the cows at distributed.net!

I realize that things have been a bit quiet on the d.net front lately.
Between the holidays and a bunch of us in the middle of moving to Austin,
it’s been difficult to stay on top of everything. Thankfully, it looks
like everything’s starting to settle down again and we’re in good shape
as we start the new year.

On the statsbox front (in case you haven’t heard) we’ve got a nice Dell
PowerEdge server that has been provided by United Devices which we expect
to put into production in the first half of January. We’re waiting for
more bandwidth at UD’s data center before we turn everyone loose on the
machine. It’s also only got one of the four processors we want.

After we add the other three processors, it’ll be a quad Xeon 500 with a
gig of ram and a boat-load of scsi drives.

Thanks for your patience through the holidays. And a special thank you
to all the members of the Japan Windows NT Users Group (
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tmsummary.php3?team=8024 ) for sending
the *really* cool 2001 cow calenders and case emblems. They’ve been a
big hit with everyone here.

:: 04-Nov-2000 12:45 (Saturday) ::

Today I turn 30, so I guess it’s no longer safe to trust me.

Since the “stats are down” page points here, I thought it would be prudent
to redirect folks to decibel’s plan.

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/cgi/dnet-finger.cgi?user=decibel

Due to a variety of real-life demands being made on my time, I’ve been
less involved in stats development over the past few months. The present
crisis, at least, is in decibel’s capable hands.

:: 23-Jul-2000 02:59 (Sunday) ::

Thanks to Wim ten Have and the dedicated, industrious folks at Sybase,
we’re getting closer to being able to deploy statsbox as a FreeBSD machine.
Earlier this week, Sybase re-released their Sybase ASE for Linux with a
relaxed license that allows it to be run on a FreeBSD machine using Linux
ABI compatibility. Plus — the really big deal — native libs for FreeBSD
which allows us to compile php and all that stuff.

I’ve spent much of today setting up a scrub installation on a box at my
house and so far it looks quite promising. A few hiccups with sqsh and
I still don’t have php talking, but it’s close.

There’s no other full-featured sql server around that’s free for both
development and deployment. It’s a hell of a deal.

http://www.sybase.com/linux/ase/

(and, since some of those links are broken)

http://www.sybase.com/detail/1,3151,1009264,00.html

(Just to be clear, I’m really enthused about this recent development.
We certainly don’t get anything for endorsing Sybase. )

:: 15-Jul-2000 17:07 (Saturday) ::

Sorry about having stats offline for the past hour or so. It seems that
due to a screwup last night, the 14-Jul stats were duplicated for both
13-Jul and 14-Jul. I re-ran everything and the new numbers seem to be
accurate.

We are working with completely new code for ogr processing, which is why
we’re having these little glitches. The new code is much cleaner than
the old stuff, though, so in the long run the move will be extremely
worthwhile.

Another nice benefit of the new code is that we’ve managed to isolate
configuration data from process data, which means that it’s now safe for
us to make the stats code publically available. Prior versions (rc5) had
sensitive data like sql passwords and the location of the log server
embedded making its release impossible.

http://cvs.distributed.net/ is a browsable public cvs site using Bill
Fenner and Henner Zeller’s excellent cvsweb.cgi script. You can find the
stats code (both html and processing) as well as few other minor bits of
code.

The code is ugly, but I figure if CmdrTaco is brave enough to release his
slashdot code, then the least we can do is make this stuff public. :)

:: 14-Jul-2000 03:17 (Friday) ::

Just tossing this inconsequential plan update in the middle of all the
more relevant news regarding ogr… I finally got the filter set up to
strip out all the gazillions of blocks done by the trojan client that used
my email address. It was a fun ride while it lasted, but I’m back down
to my natural keyrate now. (and pretty much entirely converted to ogr,
too)

Oh, and congratulations to jenson@medisg.stanford.edu whose PPC Mac turned
in the first ogr block at 22:54:57 13-July-2000.

:: 24-May-2000 20:43 (Wednesday) ::

Another quick update, and a reiteration…

We’re still not entirely sure which piece of hardware is causing the
problems on statsbox. Today we’re experimenting with the cpus and simms
to try to determine if one of them is faulty. Onboard scsi adapter on
the asus p2b-ds is also a suspect at this point.

Also, just to clarify: the keyserver network is _completely_ unaffected
by statsbox being down. We’re still processing keys and we’re still able
to detect the winning key if a client finds it. When statsbox is brought
back online, we’ll have no trouble “catching up” with the logs that are
being generated by the keymaster right now.

More details as we know more. Again, sorry for the delays. I’m pretty
certain that this misadventure is going to drive us into buying a name-brand
server to house the data with a support contract. It’s just too awkward
trying to diagnose hardware problems when we’ve only got one person (a
very busy person) who is local to the machine.

:: 23-May-2000 03:07 (Tuesday) ::

First off, thanks for all your patience with statsbox’s instability the
past few days. It looks like we’re losing the 9gb drive that’s in the
machine. getting scsi bus errors, timeouts, and system panics. (panics
are, we think, because that drive housed some swap space in addition to
database data).

We’re in the process of doing a backup of all the data to a few off-site
machines and then we’re going to do some more detailed diagnostics to
determine the source of the problem. The symptoms are still a bit sketchy
at this point and we don’t have a solid theory. Data integrity first,
then we’ll worry about replacing the faulty hardware.

It’s unlikely that we’ll bring stats up tonight, most likely it’ll be
tomorrow at the earliest.

Look for further updates from myself, decibel, or peter as we hone in on
the problem.

:: 18-Apr-2000 14:37 (Tuesday) ::

Two issues: one cool, one trivial…

Apparently, it’s just not very simple to send money from France to the
US. It’s also clear that the Euro as a monetary unit hasn’t yet gained
full acceptance. Regardless, we can now officially close the books on
the CSC project. This morning I picked up a cheque from CS Communications
for 65595,70 B.P.F’s. (No, I’m not altogether sure either, but I’m trusting
that our bank will be able to turn that into USD :)

I’d like to thank CS Communications again for sponsoring the CSC contest,
which turned out to be a fun and exciting project for us.

On a more trivial note, it seems that one or more of the crackers that
we’ve recently had to pull from stats for using the “C Share” worm client
have decided to retaliate in a rather unique way. The most recent variant
of the worm client distribution is spreading clients with *my* email
address in them. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for the impressive
keyrate on nugget@slacker.com — it’s mostly compromised machines running
the client without the user’s knowledge.

I can’t just yank my own email from stats, obviously, so I need to arrange
a way to strip out the illicit blocks from my stats prior to running each
daily update. Won’t be tough to do; I’ve been delayed from having been
in Atlanta for the past several days.