:: 07-Oct-2002 20:52 GMT (Monday) ::

http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=205

}:8)

:: 04-Oct-2002 16:43 GMT (Friday) ::

This hasn’t been a fun week in stats-land, as many of you can probably tell.

I started copying the rc5 data. At first, I did all of 1997 with no problem. I
tried doing 1998 the same way, but the database transaction log filled up, so I
went to copying each day instead. Somewhere around January of 1999 it started
getting rather slow. It was taking nearly 10 minutes to copy a single day by
the time it hit Sept. 9, 1999, so I pulled the plug on that and decided to bcp
the data instead.

Things went downhill from there. First there were some problems with the BCP,
which I didn’t notice until it was loaded into the main table, so I had to
delete everything I just added. That finished last night (as well as finishing
a wayward OGR run). This morning, after grabbing a second backup of the most
critical tables, I started bcping the data that I had checked to make sure it
was valid into the main table again.

A while later (after the BCP had run it’s course), Bruce noticed that what I
had just imported was an exact duplicate of the existing RC5 data… including
the wrong project ID.

So, I’m now in the process of blowing away all the bad data from the main
table. After that’s done, I’ll have to import two copies of it.

The good news is that should be done sometime tomorrow, barring further
screw-ups. The bad news is that there won’t be any OGR updates until this is
taken care of.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 27-Sep-2002 19:20 GMT (Friday) ::

Quick update: turns out doing this data copy with the website turned on is
making Sybase pretty mad, so I’ve turn the web off for now. I’ll try turning it
back on with the p-history stuff removed (which I think is the main cause of
the problem), but that might not work.

This might delay getting the second set of RC5 stats up.

:: 27-Sep-2002 18:59 GMT (Friday) ::

Well, I haven’t read RC5@ yet, but I know that a number of people are very
unhappy with the decision to remove all the stats from after the winning key
was found. This was done because it’s what we’ve always done in the past, and
is arguable the most correct thing to do, since there is definite value in
knowing the exact amount of effort that was required to find the winning key.

On the other hand, we certainly understand why many of you would like to see
stats for all the work that was done, including work after the key was found.
In order to try and make everyone happy, we’re going to post both sets of
stats. One set will stop at the time the key was found, the other set will go
to the end of the logs.

Blower is working on copying the data right now. It’s slowing the box down
quite a bit, so that’s why stats are slow right now. Since I deleted the raw
data from stats, it will have to re-process the logs from after the key was
found. I estimate that effort will take about 10 days, baring any problems.

:: 27-Sep-2002 02:32 GMT (Friday) ::

Moo again!

Thanks to jvonholdt@satx.rr.com I’ve been able to track down a “bad” version of
the client.

We found the version v2.8010-463-CTR-00071214 for Win32 to have a problem when
RC5 is disabled. What happens is it gets the data from the proxy, finds out it
is closed and shuts down, but if you have OGR disabled it will load back up and
start connecting again. When I was testing the client would re-connect about
every 2 seconds to the proxies, or as long as it takes for the client to shut
down and start back up again.

As you can well imagine, this is putting some strain on our proxy network which
is run on donated bandwidth, and we do not really want to make these donors
angry :) Also, several people have reported added strain on personal proxies.
In addition some people have experienced difficulties reaching certain proxies
with OGR work, if this is the case for you, please just continue trying.

We are currently working on a solution right now that would work at the proxy
level, but What I’d ask you all to do is take a moment and please check if
you’ve disabled OGR by typing a line something along the lines of:

[misc] project-priority=DES,CSC,OGR=0,RC5

into your client’s dnetc.ini, regardless of version as RC5-64 is closed, and
RC5-72 is going to need a new client. Should you not wish to work on OGR at
this time, we reccomend that you un-install the client. You can see a sample
log of exactly what happens at http://www.coffeeman.ca/dlog.log

If you have another version of the client (i.e. pre 462 or a non-windows 462)
can I get a copy of the client from you, as well as your settings still?

Thank you again everyone for donating your cycles over the years, and visit us
on slashnet this weekend!

:: 27-Sep-2002 02:22 GMT (Friday) ::

Stats are back on, and I’m going to run 7/14 now. Everything should be back to
normal in a few hours.

:: 27-Sep-2002 00:02 GMT (Friday) ::

Moo!

We have seen some version 463 clients repeatedly connecting to the network,
if you have one of these clients could you please send me a copy of your
.ini, binary, and any logs or scripts that you have running the client to
coffeeman@coffeeman.ca or coffee@distributed.net

Thank you

:: 26-Sep-2002 21:55 GMT (Thursday) ::

Now that it’s safe to do so without tipping the whole world off to RC5 being
completed (you DO know it’s completed, right?), I’ve started removing all
the work since July 14th from stats. Things will look a bit odd until this
process is complete, which will be some time tonight. I’m going to leave the
stats up at least for a while, since everyone is busy looking at what we’ve
accomplished. Expect final stats sometime in the morning.

Moo!

:: 26-Sep-2002 21:25 GMT (Thursday) ::

Congratulations!

Getting back to business here, we are seeing a few known bugs surface with some
existing clients older than build 465, which was released in early 2001.

As many of you have noticed, we have shut down the rc564 contest on the key
servers, so clients are unable to fetch/flush blocks to them. As a result, this
bug may cause them to not shut down properly when there is no more work to do
in the available contests. We would like to request that everyone check on all
possible clients and either upgrade them to builds >= 465, or uninstall them.
Additionally, clients that are configured to use rc5 only should either be
enabled to also run ogr, or uninstalled.

In the coming weeks, distributed.net will be releasing some new clients
and exciting new projects, so look forward to that and keep watching
www.distributed.net for more news and software downloads.

Thanks again for your support, everyone. RC5-64 was an incredible effort.

Cheers.

:: 26-Sep-2002 16:08 GMT (Thursday) ::

Yup it’s true, RC5-64 is done. And here’s some Perl code in case
you’d like to verify the solution yourself on your own machine. This
requires Perl 5.6 or higher.

http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/solution64.pl
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/RC5.pm

(I’m temporarily providing a modified version of RC5.pm from the CPAN
module Crypt::RC5 until the author is able to make the next release of
it available with these modifications.)