staff blogs

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.

2009-03-12

bovine [12-Mar-2009 @ 22:12]

Filed under: keyservers,stats — bovine @ 22:12 +00:00

:: 12-Mar-2009 22:12 GMT (Thursday) ::

There was an unplanned network outage earlier today that caused the
unavailability of our website and DNS services. No work should have
been lost, due to the buffering nature of our network. We will be
working on improving the redundancy of our DNS over the next couple of
days to avoid that part of the problem in the future.

Additionally, we are aware that the historical stats for OGR-26 are
currently not displaying accurate data. During the enablement of
OGR-27 stats, some data archive tables were inadvertently truncated.
We will be working on re-loading those historical OGR-26 stats from
archive logs over the next week.

In other news, if you happen to be attending the South By Southwest
festival in Austin, Texas next week you should feel free to stop by
the Nuclear Taco Night event on Monday March 16 from 6-9 PM. A few of
the distributed.net staff will be working behind the skillets to serve
these extremely spicy tacos to anyone masochistic enough for them:
http://community.livejournal.com/nucleartacos/43420.html

Moo

2009-01-27

bovine [27-Jan-2009 @ 05:22]

Filed under: clients,keyservers — bovine @ 05:22 +00:00

:: 27-Jan-2009 05:22 GMT (Tuesday) ::

We’ve started upgrading our keyservers to build 347 of our proxy
software so that we can now offer large-sized blocks for rc5-72. This
will allow our clients to waste less time during network transfers and
block transitions. The need for this feature has become increasingly
apparent as our clients have become increasingly faster, particularly
on CellBE, CUDA, and ATI Stream hardware.

The first clients to support this will be version 2.9103-509, which
are just beginning to appear on the pre-release page for testing by
early adopters. The client has a new configuration option to allow
the preferred blocksize to be specified (a larger default blocksize is
automatically used for those three hardware platforms). While version
2.9103-509 is the first to officially allow configuration of the
blocksize, we are able to silently offer slightly larger blocks (size
16) to previously released clients on those three platforms as long
as the client is communicating with a proxy of build 347 or higher.

When the client connects to a keyserver or a personal proxy of build
347 or higher, the server will make a “best-effort” attempt to give
the client blocks of that size. If the server only has larger blocks,
then the server will try to automatically split a block to match the
request. The server cannot combine smaller blocks into larger ones.

Although the new clients and proxies are still only available on the
prerelease page for testing by early-adopters, we appreciate the
patience of those who would prefer to wait until the testing of these
clients are completed and they are moved to the official release page.

Thanks for your attention and participation!
Moo

2009-01-11

snikkel [11-Jan-2009 @ 20:16]

Filed under: keyservers — snikkel @ 20:16 +00:00

:: 11-Jan-2009 20:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

We experienced a temporary misconfiguration on one of the full proxy servers
in the network yesterday. This had the undesirable affect of notifying clients
and personal proxies that the OGR-NG contest was closed. This is not the
case. Clients and proxy servers that connected to this server may need to be
restarted in order to continue working on the OGR-NG contest. We apologize for
any inconvenience this may cause.

2007-08-06

bovine [06-Aug-2007 @ 18:39]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 18:39 +00:00

:: 06-Aug-2007 18:39 GMT (Monday) ::

Network service to our keymaster has been restored and the backlog is
being processed right now. Thanks for your patience.

bovine [06-Aug-2007 @ 06:06]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 06:06 +00:00

:: 06-Aug-2007 06:06 GMT (Monday) ::

We are currently experiencing some network communication issues
between our keymaster and our keyservers. We expect the issue will be
resolved sometime today. All results that have already been
transmitted have been stored until the connectivity issues are
resolved. There will be at least a one or two day delay in stats
reflecting the latest results. Thanks for your patience!

2006-12-17

bovine [17-Dec-2006 @ 05:16]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 05:16 +00:00

:: 17-Dec-2006 05:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

There was a planned power outage today that required us to temporarily
shut down our primary webserver (www.distributed.net) and our
keymaster. Power has been restored and things should be catching up
now. All backlogged work that was buffered during the outage should
be getting processed now.

Since we didn’t get much early warning about this outage, we couldn’t
get an announcement out beforehand. Thanks for your patience. Moo!

2006-12-02

bovine [02-Dec-2006 @ 21:04]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 21:04 +00:00

:: 02-Dec-2006 21:04 GMT (Saturday) ::

Our fullserver in Australia, proxy1.bris.qld.au.proxy.distributed.net,
has changed IP addresses and the server that was running at the old
address will be shut down in a few days. If you have not hard-coded
IP addresses into your config files, then you should be fine and
unaffected by this address change.

Also worth noting: earlier this week on Thursday, our keymaster server
was relocated to a new physical location. This planned move took only
a couple hours and was completed successfully without impacting
operations, due to the fully buffered nature of our proxy network.
The only effect was a brief gap in our keyrate graphing during the
time, and a surge once the keymaster was restarted.
http://stats.distributed.net/keyrate.php?project_id=25

2006-03-09

bovine [09-Mar-2006 @ 23:47]

Filed under: keyservers — bovine @ 23:47 +00:00

:: 09-Mar-2006 23:47 GMT (Thursday) ::

We have had to take the proxy1.madsn.wi.us.proxy.distributed.net proxy
offline and out of the round-robin DNS for awhile. If you have
hard-coded its name or IP address into your configuration files, then
you will want to make an update to your INI files.

2006-01-31

chrisj [31-Jan-2006 @ 11:35]

Filed under: keyservers — chrisj @ 11:35 +00:00

:: 31-Jan-2006 11:35 GMT (Tuesday) ::

We’ve fixed the keymaster issues with RC5-72, and all of our proxies have
filled their buffers again.

Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

2006-01-29

chrisj [29-Jan-2006 @ 18:10]

Filed under: keyservers — chrisj @ 18:10 +00:00

:: 29-Jan-2006 18:10 GMT (Sunday) ::

We’re experiencing some problems with the keymaster at the moment. This means
that some of our proxies have run out of work for RC5-72.

As a result, some of you may not be able to fetch new workunits from the
proxies.

THIS IS ONLY AFFECTING RC5-72. Clients running OGR will continue to function
normally, and clients in their default configuration will gracefully fallback
to doing OGR until RC5-72 work is available again.

We’ll let you know more as more information comes to hand. Sorry for any
inconvenience this has caused. We’re working as hard as we can to get the
system back up and running properly.

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