:: 01-Apr-2004 12:32 GMT (Thursday) ::

Hi everyone.

I’d like to introduce myself to everyone. My name is Thorsten Wolf and I’m new
to the d.net team.

Since we’re all waiting for the new statsbox, I’d like to make a public call to
everyone out there willing to help creating a new design for the stats pages.

We want to have it look similar to the d.net standard design, but new ideas
will be appreciated.

So send me your suggestions (please make a screenshot of your HTML instead of
sending me plain HTML).

Send them to: href=”mailto:t_wolf@distributed.net”>t_wolf@distributed.net

:: 01-Apr-2004 09:51 GMT (Thursday) ::

Since the delivery timeline on the Dual Opteron box we ordered keeps
slipping and we realize that it’s crucially important that we gets stats
back up and running in a reasonable timeframe, I’ve just cancelled the
order on the Opteron box. We all decided it would make more sense to buy a
machine locally so we wouldn’t have to wait for shipping delays.

This morning I headed over to CompUSA and picked up a nice eMachines
Minitower. Since we’d lose the 90 days of telephone support if we
installed FreeBSD on the box, we’re just going to stick with Windows ME
which was preinstalled on the machine.

As soon as I’ve had a chance to get Access installed we should be ready to
start serving up stats again. Thanks again, everyone, for your patience
through this unexpected downtime. I’m excited about getting something up
and running now instead of just waiting for that other box!

(By the way, does anyone know the proper modem initialization string for
the eMachines winmodem? I need to get the box online asap)

:: 31-Mar-2004 23:53 GMT (Wednesday) ::

There was an unplanned power outage at the facility hosting the
keymaster, but fortunately most of our fullservers had large enough
buffers to last for the entire duration and avoid any interruptions.

:: 25-Mar-2004 23:06 GMT (Thursday) ::

Just to answer some questions… Apologies for the acronym overload…

The old statsbox (aka “blower” or “statsbox3”) was a quad xeon 450mhz
with 2GB RAM and Dell Perc RAID. It had five SCSI disks configured in a
2xRAID1 3xRAID5 configuration.

The new statsbox has been ordered (as yet unnamed). It will be:

Dual Opteron 1.8GHz
4GB RAM
8X200GB SATA (Hotswap) on 3Ware 8506 RAID Controller
3U Case
No keyboard :)

The current plan is to split the 8 drives as:
2xRAID1 + Hot Spare
4xRAID10 + Hot Spare

We’ll of course be staying with PostgreSQL and FreeBSD, although bumping
to FreeBSD 5.x for amd64 support.

I expect to get an ETA for delivery tomorrow (Friday 26-March UTC-6)

:: 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.

:: 19-Mar-2004 18:51 GMT (Friday) ::

Blower suffered a drive failure today. The bad news is that it’s refusing to
rebuild the raid array. The worse news is that a non-critical table in the
database has been corrupted.

We’re in the process of ordering a replacement for blower. We don’t have an ETA
for it yet.

For right now, I have web access turned off completely. If possible I’ll be
turning web access back on, but disabling updates to data (ie: changing teams,
etc), because there’s no way to know when that data might go poof.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get replacement hardware soon. On the bright side,
we’re looking at a dual Opteron machine with RAID10 for the database and RAID1
for the database logs, so the new box should really scream.

:: 07-Jan-2004 16:14 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Sorry, having some stats issues. They’ll be back up soon.

:: 28-Dec-2003 12:44 GMT (Sunday) ::

OK, I’ve gotten as tired of waiting for retires to be tested as everyone else
has, so I’m just going to enable it. I highly doubt there will be any problems,
but I do have a backup of all the important tables as of a few minutes ago,
just in case.

You might want to avoid editing anything for the next day or two, just in case
we uncover any issues and have to revert to the backup.

:: 15-Dec-2003 21:15 GMT (Monday) ::

Just an update on the status of the problems we’ve had with AV vendors lately.

McAfee has clarified the wording during detection and the entry on their site
to clearly state that distributed.net client is simply a piece of software
that has in the past been installed on computers through use of trojans. They
explain how to identify if the software was legitimately installed. They also
mention that the option to detect “possibly unwanted” applications is not on by
default.

Norton has also removed the signatures that were identifying dnetc.com as a
trojan.

:: 06-Dec-2003 22:49 GMT (Saturday) ::

Many new clients that were previously on the pre-release page are now
available on the official download page. Please see the update page
to see the list of updated platforms:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Also some personal proxies that were previously on the pre-release
page are now available on the official proxy release page:
http://www.distributed.net/download/proxies.php