:: 29-Nov-2002 03:07 GMT (Friday) ::

The machine that was hosting the pre-release v29 client network has
been brought back online and should be accepting traffic again.
Although the outtage was not planned, it served as a good test of the
resiliency of the clients in periods of non-connectivity.

:: 25-Nov-2002 01:29 GMT (Monday) ::

OGR verification code being worked on. Send more OGR blocks!

:: 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. :)

:: 29-Oct-2002 11:12 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Stats are back up.

:: 29-Oct-2002 10:37 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Stats will be down for a few minutes while I upgrade blower to FreeBSD 4.7

:: 24-Oct-2002 23:34 GMT (Thursday) ::

Don’t send me mail at paulf@distributed.net – all I get there is SPAM. If
you need me, you know my address. :)

:: 07-Oct-2002 20:52 GMT (Monday) ::

http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=205

}:8)

:: 04-Oct-2002 16:43 GMT (Friday) ::

This hasn’t been a fun week in stats-land, as many of you can probably tell.

I started copying the rc5 data. At first, I did all of 1997 with no problem. I
tried doing 1998 the same way, but the database transaction log filled up, so I
went to copying each day instead. Somewhere around January of 1999 it started
getting rather slow. It was taking nearly 10 minutes to copy a single day by
the time it hit Sept. 9, 1999, so I pulled the plug on that and decided to bcp
the data instead.

Things went downhill from there. First there were some problems with the BCP,
which I didn’t notice until it was loaded into the main table, so I had to
delete everything I just added. That finished last night (as well as finishing
a wayward OGR run). This morning, after grabbing a second backup of the most
critical tables, I started bcping the data that I had checked to make sure it
was valid into the main table again.

A while later (after the BCP had run it’s course), Bruce noticed that what I
had just imported was an exact duplicate of the existing RC5 data… including
the wrong project ID.

So, I’m now in the process of blowing away all the bad data from the main
table. After that’s done, I’ll have to import two copies of it.

The good news is that should be done sometime tomorrow, barring further
screw-ups. The bad news is that there won’t be any OGR updates until this is
taken care of.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 27-Sep-2002 19:20 GMT (Friday) ::

Quick update: turns out doing this data copy with the website turned on is
making Sybase pretty mad, so I’ve turn the web off for now. I’ll try turning it
back on with the p-history stuff removed (which I think is the main cause of
the problem), but that might not work.

This might delay getting the second set of RC5 stats up.

:: 27-Sep-2002 18:59 GMT (Friday) ::

Well, I haven’t read RC5@ yet, but I know that a number of people are very
unhappy with the decision to remove all the stats from after the winning key
was found. This was done because it’s what we’ve always done in the past, and
is arguable the most correct thing to do, since there is definite value in
knowing the exact amount of effort that was required to find the winning key.

On the other hand, we certainly understand why many of you would like to see
stats for all the work that was done, including work after the key was found.
In order to try and make everyone happy, we’re going to post both sets of
stats. One set will stop at the time the key was found, the other set will go
to the end of the logs.

Blower is working on copying the data right now. It’s slowing the box down
quite a bit, so that’s why stats are slow right now. Since I deleted the raw
data from stats, it will have to re-process the logs from after the key was
found. I estimate that effort will take about 10 days, baring any problems.