staff blogs

distributed.net staff keep (relatively) up-to-date logs of their activities in .plan files. These were traditionally available via finger, but we've put them on the web for easier consumption.

2012-07-18

[resolved] Webserver outage

Filed under: Uncategorized @ 05:07 +00:00

If you have tried accessing www.distributed.net recently, you might have noticed that it was offline for nearly a full week. We unfortunately suffered from multiple hard disk failures just a couple of days apart on the RAID10 array of the machine that serves as our primary webserver, DNS server, and mail server. Ultimately, the disk array was unrecoverable and it will need to be recreated with new hard drives that we’ve just purchased. Fortunately, we have pretty recent backups of everything important so we’ve begun bringing the website and blogs back online using alternate hosting.

There are still a few minor things offline (bugzilla, email fetch/flush, email support, speeds database, project graphs) but we hope to have those all back online soon. We’re also taking this opportunity to improve our server infrastructure to minimize problems in the future. Of course during the website outage, the keymaster, keyserver network, and stats server continued to function and process blocks without interruption, so we expect that most of our participants were not noticeably impacted. Keep on crunching! ]:8)

2012-06-07

World IPv6 day again!

Filed under: clients,keyservers @ 01:51 +00:00

As you might remember, one year ago we participated in World IPv6 day by permanently turning on IPv6 access for our main website (www.distributed.net).  Today, we made the next step towards embracing IPv6 by adding AAAA records to our proxy keyserver DNS addresses and by releasing our first set of IPv6-capable dnetc clients on our pre-release download page, as version v2.9111.520.  There should be no additional client configuration changes needed for the client to utilize IPv6 once your OS has been properly configured.

At the moment, we only have one of our keyservers currently configured to handle IPv6 connections and our pre-release page only has IPv6 clients for Solaris/SunOS, however we will be adding more over the next few days.  Updated personal proxies that support IPv6 will also be made available in the coming weeks.  We welcome bug reports on bugs.distributed.net if you encounter any connectivity problems with our new releases.

Happy IPv6  ]:8)

2012-05-04

Finishing up RC5-72 recycling

Filed under: project status — Tags: @ 15:23 +00:00

Although Earth Day was a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been diligently “recycling” RC5-72 blocks (ie: re-distributing previously issued but unreturned work assignments) since last November.  We realize that distributing these old blocks has been inconvenient for some of our users because the fragments are much smaller, causing more network and slightly lower keyrates, and we have appreciated everyone’s patience and understanding.  Fortunately, we are very close to resuming work on fresh RC5-72 subspaces and will be able to send out larger, unfragmented blocks within the next day or so!

Keep on crunching! ]:8)

2012-04-07

OGR-27 50% completion

Filed under: project status @ 23:09 +00:00

Dear friends,

After three years of effort, we have passed the half-way stage of this ground-breaking project. We thank you for your continued participation.

Moo!

2012-01-27

New v2.9110.519 clients released

Filed under: clients @ 07:19 +00:00

The following clients have been promoted to the list of officially released clients:

  • Solaris/SunOS [x86]     v2.9110.519
  • OpenBSD [x86/ELF]     v2.9110.519
  • OpenBSD [AMD64/ELF]     v2.9110.519
  • FreeBSD [8.x/x86]     v2.9110.519
  • FreeBSD [7.x/x86/ELF]     v2.9110.519
  • FreeBSD [6.x/x86/ELF]     v2.9110.519
  • Linux [AMD64/Stream]     v2.9110.519
  • Linux [CellBE]     v2.9110.519
  • Linux [ARM/eabi]     v2.9110.519
  • Linux [x86/ELF/uclibc]     v2.9110.519
  • Linux [AMD64/ELF]     v2.9110.519b
  • Windows 64bit [AMD64]     v2.9110.519b
  • Windows 32bit [x86/Zipped]     v2.9110.519b
  • Windows 32bit [x86/CUDA-3.1]     v2.9110.519b

They can be downloaded from http://www.distributed.net/Download_clients

The list of functional changes is at http://http.distributed.net/pub/dcti/current-client/CHANGES.txt

2012-01-26

[resolved] statsbox maintenance

Filed under: stats @ 04:30 +00:00

We’ve taken statsbox temporarily offline for some minor system updates.  It should be back online before the next statsrun.  As usual, there will be no impact to stats or our proxy network during this downtime.

UPDATE: It is back online now and no problems were encountered during the maintenance.

2012-01-25

[resolved] Unplanned webserver outage

Filed under: Uncategorized @ 02:45 +00:00

We have just recovered from some unplanned outage of our main webserver that hosts www.distributed.net, blogs.distributed.net, bugs.distributed.net, and some of our other web interfaces. During this time our stats server and our keyserver network remained available and uninterrupted. We’re still investigating the cause, but we hope to minimize the impact of such problems in the future.

2011-12-09

[resolved] stats offline

Filed under: stats @ 00:16 +00:00

edit: stats now back up, thanks for your patience!

Stats is currently down due to technical difficulties – engineers are working to bring the system back online as soon as possible.

As always, no work will be lost while the site is down – all submitted blocks will be credited as normal.

Moo!

2011-11-27

Project status for November 2011

Filed under: project status — Tags: @ 18:26 +00:00

This past week we passed two nice milestones for our current projects:
On November 21, 2011 we passed 2% completion of RC5-72. We also recently passed 1000 days of OGR-27 since starting it in February 24, 2009.

Long time participant Andrew Hime posted a nice summary of the milestone statistics to our mailing list, so I’ll avoid repeating further details and just link to his post:
http://lists.distributed.net/pipermail/rc5/2011-November/042080.html

Today we also started recycling some of the old RC5-72 subspaces. This means that we’ll be sending out blocks that had initially been distributed as long ago as 2002 but had never been fully completed by any client. Since these subspaces are already mostly complete (generally about 85% to 95% finished), we’ll be able to move through these subspaces pretty quickly. Once we finish this pass of the uncompleted blocks, we’ll resume distribution of blocks from fresh subspaces again.

As always, thanks for your participation and support! ]:8)

2011-10-17

[resolved] Stats website down temporarily

Filed under: stats @ 04:16 +00:00

The statsbox is offline at the moment.  We’re hoping to get it back online tomorrow.  As always, no credit will be lost while it is inaccessible.  We’ll update this post with more details later.  Thanks! ]:8)

UPDATE: stats is back online and caught up.  Thanks for your patience!

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