We have opened the 22/x stub space on OGR-28 this weekend. In a little over 3 years, we have completed more than 29% of the work necessary to prove the Optimal Golomb Ruler with 28 marks. We have also just passed the ‘300 million stubs completed’ milestone. Over 47,700 of us working together have helped to make this happen.

One of our newest contributors on the coding side, Sunset, has helped us make a native PPC64 client for systems running Linux. She has some experience writing for VMX (which you may know as Altivec) and is hoping to update our existing cores for 64 bit systems. If you have a Power9 system in action, we would love to hear from you.

Moo!

TL;DR — Join us in #distributed on irc.freenode.net

29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 topic is Has anyone seen my keys? -- http://rc5.distributed.net/
29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 topic set by BovineOne on Fri Aug 29 18:38:59
29-Aug-1997 18:00 #rc5 created on Fri Apr 04 11:02:59

In early 1997 distributed.net became an actual thing entirely within the context of an Internet Relay Chat channel, #rc5 on the EFnet IRC network. Aside from the occasional “beerfest” meetup, the vast majority of this project’s coordination, victory celebrations, and commiserations have been shared on IRC. IRC has been the foundation for everything we’ve accomplished as a community.

<_GNU_> Lets set up a irc.distributed.net and put the channel there! :P

Some time around 2000 we split from EFnet and created our own public IRC network, mainly so that we could start encrypting the IRC traffic — a wort hwhile goal for a security and encryption focused group of geeks. Encrypted IRC was brand-new and barely supported at the time. Our IRC network has continued to serve us well for the past fifteen years, but looking around the landscape has changed significantly. Encryption is supported everywhere and proper channel and nick services bots are ubiquitous. It’s become more difficult to justify the effort and reliance on generosity from our hosting partners to run our own network.

It makes sense to re-join a “proper” IRC network and benefit from that scale and attention to operations. So… Effectively immediately the official support and community channel for distributed.net can now be found on the freenode irc network and irc.distributed.net will be shutting down very soon.

We’ll be forever grateful to Paul Followell at LightBound and FlightAware for their server space and network time. Many thanks to the developers of UnrealIRCd for a decade of secure and reliable server code. And also thanks to everyone at freenode for welcoming us to our new home.

PING
PONG
/CTCP SOUND moo.wav

If you have tried accessing www.distributed.net recently, you might have noticed that it was offline for nearly a full week. We unfortunately suffered from multiple hard disk failures just a couple of days apart on the RAID10 array of the machine that serves as our primary webserver, DNS server, and mail server. Ultimately, the disk array was unrecoverable and it will need to be recreated with new hard drives that we’ve just purchased. Fortunately, we have pretty recent backups of everything important so we’ve begun bringing the website and blogs back online using alternate hosting.

There are still a few minor things offline (bugzilla, email fetch/flush, email support, speeds database, project graphs) but we hope to have those all back online soon. We’re also taking this opportunity to improve our server infrastructure to minimize problems in the future. Of course during the website outage, the keymaster, keyserver network, and stats server continued to function and process blocks without interruption, so we expect that most of our participants were not noticeably impacted. Keep on crunching!

We have just recovered from some unplanned outage of our main webserver that hosts www.distributed.net, blogs.distributed.net, bugs.distributed.net, and some of our other web interfaces. During this time our stats server and our keyserver network remained available and uninterrupted. We’re still investigating the cause, but we hope to minimize the impact of such problems in the future.

distributed.net is one of the many websites participating in the International IPv6 day. On June 8 2011 starting at 00:00 UTC, we will have AAAA records listed in our DNS for www.distributed.net. Stats and our keyservers will not be affected during this event. For most people you should have no problems continuing to access our website. For further details, check out http://www.worldipv6day.org/

The mediawiki backend on www.distributed.net has been upgraded to the latest version. Let us know if you see any breakage.

We just put our new website infrastructure online a few minutes ago, so you should be able to see it at http://www.distributed.net/ (or possibly once your DNS cache refreshes).

Just like our new blogging system announced last month, the goal of this upgrade was to clean up some of our back-end infrastructure and simplify content updating for us.  We’re also preparing to decommission the old server hardware used by our old website, so this was a good opportunity to do it.

This has been a pretty complex migration due to the mix of technologies, pages variations, and supported language translations but almost all of our old URLs should continue to load without disruption.  We’re now running MediaWiki with a custom skin and a custom language extension so that we can provide the same experience as the old website. In fact, unless you look carefully you may not even notice any differences!

There will be some more website updates over the next few weeks, so look forward for more announcements soon.

Moo!

This posting is mostly just a test, but it does have some mild informational value…

We’ve just finished replacing our old home-grown “.plan” file system with a more modern blogging system running on new server hardware.  Technically, we stopped serving “finger” requests several years ago, so this isn’t that big of a change.  All of the previous posts from our old “.plan” system have been imported and all old URLs should be automatically redirected to their new locations here at http://blogs.distributed.net/

If you subscribe to our RSS feed, then your reader might have re-displayed some older posts when it followed the redirect to its new location.  Prior RSS posts are being published with the same “PermaLink guid” so you might not see that issue at all, depending on your reader.

Users that are subscribed to our “plans” mailing list will continue to be able to read new staff blog posts, despite the obsolete name of the list.  However, the readability of some new  posts there may be impacted by the conversion of HTML to plaintext for that mailing list.

IRC users in our #distributed channel on irc.cuckoo.com should now also be receiving notification of new blog entries instead of plan posts.

Although this blogging system does support user comments, we’ re not going to enable them here quite yet since we are working on some other exciting improvements that would complicate things later.

Hopefully this revamped backend should make it easier for us to make more regular posts to our users.  Keep crunchin’! 

:: 01-Jan-2010 21:43 GMT (Friday) ::

On behalf of everyone at distributed.net, welcome to 2010.

Happy Moo Year