:: 11-May-2004 22:31 GMT (Tuesday) ::

There were some back-logged RC5-72 blocks that had been slowly
accumulating on some of our fullservers. Those blocks have been
pushed through and should be represented on today’s stats. The
flushing of the backlog has also created a noticeable surge in our
RC5-72 rate for today, so do not be alarmed. You can see this in the
graphs at http://www1.distributed.net/~pstadt/rc5-72/

We are now slowing down (and soon halting) distribution of
“OGR classic” stubs, in order to allow the outstanding workunits
to have an opportunity to be completed, returned, and counted.

We will probably halt “OGR classic” entirely and discontinue
acceptance of its results in a couple of days, so it is not
recommended that these remaining stubs be kept too long before
flushing (or you may not get credit for them).

As Decibel has mentioned, the OGRp2 stats will be combined with the
existing OGR project stats so you will not have to worry about losing
your current ranking placements.

:: 11-May-2004 18:05 GMT (Tuesday) ::

For those wondering about what to do with existing clients since the client
version required for OGR-P2 is still in beta:

You can do nothing. Once we verify that OGR-P1 is complete we’ll turn OGR off.
Clients will stop attempting to do OGR-P1 work when they connect. If RC5 is
enabled, the client will run RC5; if RC5 is disabled, the client will go idle.

You can download the beta client. Many people are already running it and so far
no bugs have been reported.

You can disable OGR in old clients. After today or tomorrow we will stop
accepting work from them anyway.

:: 11-May-2004 11:46 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Actually, I take back part of my last .plan. }:8)

I’ve figured out a way to give credit for OGR-P2 work that’s been done so far.
It’s a manual process though, so it will be a day or two before I can do it.

OGR-P1 work will no longer be credited after today though, since we should
be 100% finished with OGR-P1 by now (we’ll know for certain after tonight’s
OGR-verify run).

:: 11-May-2004 11:35 GMT (Tuesday) ::

As bovine mentioned in his .plan, we’re ready to cut over to the second phase
of OGR. Starting at 00:00 GMT, stats credit will be given for OGR-P2 work and
not OGR-P1 work. Unfortunately we can’t give credit for both at the same time,
so OGR-P2 work submitted today will not show up in stats.

:: 09-May-2004 14:10 GMT (Sunday) ::

As some people may have noticed, the percentage complete for phase 1
of OGR25 will soon be approaching 100%. Within the next week or so,
we will be halting “OGR classic” (for both OGR24 and OGR25) and
launching OGRp2 (phase 2 of both OGR24 and OGR25).

The second phase of the project will continue searching of the
left-over stubs that were intentionally excluded from the original
“OGR classic” search-space, due to original concerns about having
enough network capacity to efficiently handle the large numbers
extremely small stubs. OGRp2 addresses this issue by instructing each
client to search the many “micro”-stubs that exist within a large
stub-range and return the combined search as a single result. It is
expected that OGRp2 should take less time to complete than “OGR
classic” did for phase 1.

Due to the nature of this new search logic, new clients and proxies
will be needed in order to participate in OGRp2. Once “OGR classic”
is shut off, any old clients will only participate in RC5-72 if that
project has been left enabled on your client, otherwise your old
clients will shutdown and go idle.

Client version 2.9008-490 is the minimum version that will support
OGRp2. Personal Proxy build 341 is the minimum that will support the
OGRp2 project. Updated client and proxy binaries will become
available on the pre-release page for experienced users who wish to
help by becoming early testers of OGRp2. Please report any issues you
discover with the client and proxy in our bugzilla database.
Depending on the severity of any possible problems discovered in the
pre-release binaries, it may be necessary to discard these early OGRp2
results however we are not expecting that to occur.

Formal project announcement, stats availability, general release of
clients/proxies will occur after a few days of pre-release testing on
these new binaries has elapsed and we are satisfied that there are no
blocking issues.

:: 21-Apr-2004 15:27 GMT (Wednesday) ::

A word or two on the status of ogr-verification. As you know, We’re
having to restore from backups as of February. Unfortunately, when that
backup was taken, there was a problem and the ogr-ver data was not up to
date. The end result is that we have several months of logs to go
though to catch up.

I haven’t been able to do many test runs without something else running
on the box, but it looks like it’s going to be quite a bit faster than
the old box. It’s taking around 2-2.5 hours to process a day now, which
is already an improvement and stats are still catching up, so we’re
competing for I/O.

:: 18-Apr-2004 22:28 GMT (Sunday) ::

The restore is done and fritz is now churning through log files. I’m about to
turn apache back on. Something to keep in mind is that many user changes take
effect on the log date that the change was made. So if you retired an account
or joined a team on March 3rd, you won’t see the change take effect until the
daily stats run for March 3rd.

:: 18-Apr-2004 15:40 GMT (Sunday) ::

Ooops. Looks like we forgot to restore an incremental backup from just before
the crash. In order to restore that backup and have it take effect, all changes
participants have made since fritz went online well unfortunately be lost. We
will also have to re-run all stats for the past two months or so, which will
take a few days.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 17-Apr-2004 00:03 GMT (Saturday) ::

Stats are back up, but fritz (the new statsbox) is currently having some issues
with sending mail. Because of this, the mail me your password button won’t be
of much use.

:: 16-Apr-2004 23:30 GMT (Friday) ::

Ok, the new statsbox should now be online and accessible at the usual
http://stats.distributed.net/ after the DNS changes finish
circulating. Although it is believed that everything is caught up and
working, there may be some minor issues still remaining so be patient.