:: 01-Jul-2004 06:56 GMT (Thursday) ::

Just a networking status report to say that the IP address of the
statsbox was changed a couple hours ago, to accommodate for an ISP
change at the facility where it is hosted. The DNS entries for it
have already been updated and most people should still be able to
access it at the usual http://stats.distributed.net/ without any
problems, but some people might still have problems for a few more
hours if your DNS servers are not honoring the TTL durations properly.

There is also currently a slight networking glitch that is causing
some backlog of the fullservers reaching the keymaster, but the
buffered nature of our fullserver network should minimize the impact
on any clients. The problem is expected to be resolved within a
couple of hours and the backlog should catch up soon after.

:: 28-Jun-2004 08:48 GMT (Monday) ::

Two new release candidates have been made available on the pre-release
page for v2.9008.492: This includes a Mac OS X client with some
additional PPC OGR performance improvements. There is also the first
native 64-bit Win64 client (you must have an AMD64 or Intel EM64T CPUs
running a beta release of “Windows 2003 for 64-bit extended systems”).

I also thought I’d mention that we are approximately 90% done with the
OGRp2-24 already, including the verification pass. (For the OGRp2-25
we are only a few percent done so far.) We’re still working on
getting some automated reporting of the OGRp2 percentages on the stats
webpages but have no ETA yet…

Also I’d like to remind everyone to consider looking around at any old
machines that you may have installed dnetc on prior to Dec 2002 and
upgrade them to a current client version. That date was when the
RC5-72 project officially started, the v2.9000 clients were released,
and the *.v29.distributed.net DNS created.

Any client that is running a version released before v2.9 should no
longer be able to work on any of the current projects and is now idle
(or working on dummy work if it is a buggy v2.8010 client). We will
be soon shutting down the *.v27.distributed.net DNS entries, since we
are still getting traffic from obsolete clients trying to find work.
All current clients should already be using the *.v29.distributed.net
DNS, so this should not impact clients or proxies that are working.

:: 20-Jun-2004 00:16 GMT (Sunday) ::

Many new clients have been moved from the pre-release page to the
official release page. Many of the PPC based platforms received
performance increases in this new version. There was also an updated
Win32 MSI installer. You can see the list of the updated versions at
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Yesterday, starting at about Jun-19 23:30 UTC there was a short DNS
failure on one of our servers that may have caused occasional
resolution failures. There was a slight amount of backlog, but it was
caught up soon afterwards. You can see the gap where no rate data was
collected in the graphs at http://www1.distributed.net/~pstadt/rc5-72/
Note that although the rates were missing for those times, there was
relatively normal fetching/flushing to the fullservers and the backlog was
primarily just sending to the keymaster. It is not expected that much,
if any, work was lost during that time.

:: 26-May-2004 05:23 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Several more release-candidate clients have been uploaded to the
pre-release download page including clients for FreeBSD/x86,
AIX/Power, AIX/PowerPC, and the four AmigaOS flavors. See the page
http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

:: 24-May-2004 16:48 GMT (Monday) ::

I’m re-running OGR stats starting with 5/09 to combine both P1 and P2 results.
You might see some odd behavior while I’m setting up to do this.

:: 24-May-2004 03:37 GMT (Monday) ::

Several new clients have been promoted to released clients page:
NeXT/OS [m68k], NeXT/OS [x86], SGI IRIX [6.5/MIPS/64],
SGI IRIX [6.5/MIPS/n32], Linux [PPC], OS/2 [x86]
You can find complete list of released clients ordered by date at:
http://www1.distributed.net/download/updates.php

Updated pre-release clients have been made available for MorphOS and
MacOS X on http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.php

The banner pages at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/banners/ have been
finally updated to the new website template. Some of the older
banners that were specific to older projects have also been removed.

:: 22-May-2004 15:38 GMT (Saturday) ::

iGive seems to be back with a frenzy. If you’ll recall, distributed.net
was able to raise a lot of money through iGive shopping in the earlier
years of the organization. It looks like iGive is back after a period of
inactivity and they’re offering their $5 per new referral bonus again.

If you want a free way to help us recover from the statsbox purchase, click
over to http://www.iGive.com/DistributedComputing and sign up (or refresh
your old membership). Basically how it works is that if you are an iGive
member and you make an online purchase with one of the partner merchants,
distributed.net gets a tax-free percentage of the purchase price at no cost
to you.

Merchants include Dell, Barnes and Noble, and OfficeMax.

In any event, enjoy the weekend and get your clients upgraded to the OGRp2
builds!

:: 16-May-2004 01:45 GMT (Sunday) ::

OGR Phase 1 has been completed for both OGR-24 and OGR-25! From now on, OGR-P1
work will no longer be accepted and counted. Participants who have already done
OGR-P2 work will see their work done in the past few days credited soon.

Many thanks to all of you who have donated their CPU power to get us this far.
-but- The search isn’t over!

New clients have been put online a few days ago that enable searching stubs
with leading marks of >= 70 which was not possible due to technical reasons
before. These clients are now available at http://www.distributed.net/download
To be able to participate in the second phase of OGR (OGR-P2) for both OGR-24
and OGR-25 it is required to install this new client.

Participants making use of personal proxies should also upgrade their proxies
(see download location mentioned above) to be able to provide their clients
with OGR-P2. Note that these proxies will not be able to connect to proxy
versions <341, even if it is for RC5.

Please help us in the continued search and install the new client today! For
more information about OGR in general, visit http://www.distributed.net/ogr

:: 15-May-2004 21:38 GMT (Saturday) ::

I have started moving some of the more mature v2.9008.490
release-candidate clients to the official release page.
http://www1.distributed.net/download/clients.php
These new clients support OGRp2 and RC5-72 processing.

As decibel mentioned in his plan yesterday, the “OGR classic”
project will be closed and work will no longer be accepted for
it as of May 16 00:00:00 UTC 2004.

:: 14-May-2004 10:17 GMT (Friday) ::

Sometime today we will be closing the OGR-P1 contest. Once that is done work
will no longer be accepted. Additionally, clients will stop working on OGR
after they connect and are told that -P1 is closed.