:: 15-Dec-2002 19:49 GMT (Sunday) ::

Blower is busy catching up on OGR and should be done in a few hours. It’s not
doing RC5 right now because we’re going to rewrite history a bit. :)

Several people have suggested that since very, very few people were able to
submit blocks on Dec. 2 that we should move the Dec. 2 work to make it look
like it happened on Dec. 3. This is exactly what we’ve done, and tomorrow
at around 1600 UTC (10 AM CST) I’ll start re-processing all of RC5-72 from
the beginning. I’m holding off until then so that anyone who wants to watch
themselves climb in the ranks from day 1 can watch stats as the updates happen.

:: 15-Dec-2002 16:39 GMT (Sunday) ::

Good news! Sybase is up and running again. The problem turned out to be a
library issue of some kind… it didn’t like Linux 7.2, but downgrading back to
6.2 solved everything.

I’m taking this opportunity to grab a quick backup; once that’s done I’ll turn
the website back on.

:: 12-Dec-2002 21:19 GMT (Thursday) ::

Just wanted to let people know that we’re indeed having some traffic
capacity issues to the keyservers, so it may take your client several
connection attempts to successfully fetch or flush buffers. Just let
the client retry by itself (don’t manually keep retrying) and it
should eventually connect.

Additionally, we’d like to again request that everyone go around and
check all of their machines on which previous versions of the dnetc
client had been installed and consider upgrading them. In particular,
if you are still running a v2.8010 client, uninstall it or upgrade!!

That version has a known bug that will cause it to rapidly reconnect
to our keyservers if the projects are closed and it is unable to get
work. This is causing a fair amount of donated bandwidth to be wasted
and is causing quite a bit of concern. We’re in the process of
collecting the IP addresses of the most significant offenders and
contacting them individually when possible, but this is a tedious and
partially manual process.

:: 11-Dec-2002 23:48 GMT (Wednesday) ::

Just wanted to keep people updated on stats. In a nutshell, nothing happened
today… bwilson wasn’t around (his wife is due any day, so for all we know
he’s playing with his new baby right now :) ), and Matt and I were busy all
day. Tonight didn’t work out either.

I’m hoping that we can get this taken care of tomorrow evening, but that may
not happen either. Worst case we should be able to get something done this
weekend. (Of course every time we announce a date we usually blow right past it
so I may have just jinx-ed the whole thing…)

:: 10-Dec-2002 22:09 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Well, the master device on Sybase certainly appears to be toast. Both Matt
and I have looked at it and have little hope of salvaging it. I’m hoping the
Bruce can look at it tomorrow. It’s getting late now and Matt and I don’t want
to start messing around with things when we’re tired and primed for making
mistakes, so we’re going to wait until tomorrow before doing anything.

On the bright side, I’m pretty sure that the backup of the master device that
we have will allow us to access the main stats database again. If that’s the
case we might be able to get this resolved without an undue amount of pain.

More info when it’s available.

:: 10-Dec-2002 19:48 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Sybase just went belly-up, so stats are down. No ETA on a fix yet.

:: 10-Dec-2002 16:55 GMT (Tuesday) ::

The team summary page is now working for RC5-72, thanks to the efforts Chris
Bolt, one of our participants.

There are still bugs to go around, as I mentioned in my previous .plan.
Also, it turns out that most people don’t have access to re-assign bugs to
themselves, so instead of re-assigning it as I mentioned in my .plan, just post
a comment and add yourself to the CC list so that people can see the bug is
being worked on and no one wastes time. :)

:: 10-Dec-2002 00:46 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Several new pre-release clients and proxies have been made available
on http://www1.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html :

* dnetc478-irix6.5-mips-64
* dnetc478-irix6.5-mips-n32
* dnetc478-linux-sparc
* dnetc478-netbsd-arm32
* dnetc478-riscos-arm
* dnetc478a-linux-arm-elf
* proxyper332-linux-x86-glibc-rc2
* proxyper332-solaris26-sparc

We have been getting a number of good bug reports on the personal
proxies, so there will probably be a few revised release-candidates
for some of the already-available platforms in the coming days.

:: 08-Dec-2002 23:20 GMT (Sunday) ::

A small amount of progress has been made on RC5-72 stats this weekend. The main
summary page and the participant summary page have been modified to display the
correct data.

http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8
http://stats.distributed.net/participant/psummary.php?project_id=8&id=39622

There are still many pages left to modify, though, and this is where YOU can
help!

I’ve opened a meta-bug that has dependencies on pages that still have to be
modified. You can see this bug at

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2980

and the dependency tree is at

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/bugs/showdependencytree.cgi?id=2980

All of the bugs that bug 2980 depend on are pages that require the changes
outlined in bug 2980. If you have some PHP knowledge and would like to help,
here’s what you need to do:

1) Re-assign the bug for the page you want to work on to yourself (you’ll need
an account in bugzilla to do this) 2) Make the changes 3) Attach the new page,
or a patch, to the bug and re-assign it back to stats-bugs so that one of us
can commit the fixes

There are about 6 pages that need to be changed that I haven’t opened bugs on
yet; I want to clean them up a bit before setting others loose on them. If you
want to help and all the existing pages have been ‘taken’ by someone already,
just catch me on IRC (DeciBull on irc.distributed.net) and I’ll set you up. IRC
is also the best way to get questions answered, though you can also email me.

Moo!

:: 05-Dec-2002 16:56 GMT (Thursday) ::

Quick update on RC5-72 stats…

First, there was some mis-communication internally about intended launch dates.
This is why we ended up launching before stats were ready. The changes required
to get RC5-72 stats aren’t really major, but we wanted to take this opportunity
to make the stats system easier to maintain.

A year or two ago, we made a major effort to revamp stats so that there
was a single code-base for all the projects. This has helped tremendously
with ongoing maintenance, but there were still a few bits of code that were
hard-coded specifically for RC5-64, namely the code that reports how many
keys were done. Right now it’s not only hard-coded, but it’s also hard-coded
assuming that what’s stored in the database is 2^28 blocks.

Rather than compound the problem by hacking hard-coded support for RC5-72 and
it’s 2^32 blocks into the PHP, we are now in the process of changing things so
that the PHP can find out from the database exactly how to present information
on the web pages, in terms of what units are stored in the database and what
multiplication/division needs to be done to make what’s in the database a bit
more presentable.

We also decided that for constancy, it would be best if we stored the number .
of keys done in the database, instead of blocks, because we store nodes for .
OGR and not stubs The database code has already been modified to reflect this,.
and the data stored in the database for RC5-72 is now in keys. Since the PHP .
code is still expecting 2^28 blocks though, this obviously means you can’t .
trust any numbers the pages are showing .

What remains to be done at this point is to go through all the PHP code and
remove the hard-coded RC5 stuff and replace it with code that pulls the
required information dynamically from the database. Paul is working on that
right now, but I don’t have any ETA. As he commits this code you will start
seeing OGR pages that have both Gnodes and full node counts, to roughly match
keys and blocks in RC5.

Thanks as always for your patience.