:: 12-Apr-2002 16:00 GMT (Friday) ::

If you’re looking for something to do while idling and waiting for the
keymaster to be relocated to its new location, then you may like to
take the time to wish a happy birthday to both Moonwick
and Daa . Most
significantly, it’s Moonie’s 21st birthday today and there are some
awesome party plans scheduled for him tonight!

:: 12-Apr-2002 00:12 GMT (Friday) ::

Greetings, folks.

The master server will be offline for much of tonight and tomorrow morning
while it is couriered by FedEx Express to one of our new colo facilities.

I appreciate all the colo offers that I have received. I am splitting up our
network a bit and this is just one of our new homes. For those of you that have
offered space and haven’t heard back from me, I apologize for the delay. Moving
the master has been priority one and then I will work on moving the rest of the
equipment. I’m still interested in the offers that I received and plan to make
use of at least one, if not two, of them.

I currently have no plan to bring up a secondary master during the down time .
As a result, the proxy network will back up a bit and stats will be delayed We.
will catch up the network and the stats server within a day or so .

The master will be taken down at approximately 20:00CDT (01:00UTC) to prepare
it for shipment. Unfortunately, in AUS, the last FedEx Express drop-off time is
at 21:00CDT. We expect the equipment to be back online at the new colo facility
by about 15:00EDT (19:00UTC) That ultimately leaves us with about 18 hours of
down time.

This should be the new permanent home of the master server for many years to
come. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to pulling this off.

Cheers.

:: 11-Apr-2002 23:31 GMT (Thursday) ::

As dbaker mentioned in his .plan
(http://n0cgi.distributed.net/cgi/dnet-finger.cgi?user=dbaker), the master will
be down for the next 18 hours or so. Since the log files are on the master,
this also means that we won’t be catching up on the stats backlog while the
master is down.

As for the backlog, I’ve been working on some changes to the stats code
the past few days trying to eliminate situations that could cause stats
inconsistencies. Unfortunately, the new code has introduced some problems of
it’s own, so I’ve been in the process of slowly debugging things. Hopefully
things will be stabilizing over the next few days.

:: 03-Apr-2002 15:42 GMT (Wednesday) ::

In less than an hour, rc5 will be up-to-date in the new stats processing
system. This means we can finally migrate to a single code base for everything,
which paul is working on. It also means improved data integrity for the future,
as the new stats system has extensive auditing to ensure that errors don’t go
un-detected. Unfortunately, in order to move the RC5 info into the new system
without re-processing every log that exists for RC5, we had to make some
assumptions about the data that is in the old system, which does contain some
inconsistencies. Correcting this will require re-processing all existing RC5
logs, which will happen at some point in the future.

Anyway, look for a new set of stats pages in the near future.

Moo!

:: 01-Apr-2002 15:09 GMT (Monday) ::

I think I may have actually figured out a way to do real-time stats,
something that some participants have been foaming at the mouth about for
a very, very long time. The technique will involve utilizing our network
itself for stats computation. The problem is that right now it looks like
it will require about 80% of our network to make it work. We’ll have to see
if that can be improved upon.

BTW, happy April 1st to everyone.

:: 31-Mar-2002 21:24 GMT (Sunday) ::

Hopefully the plan mailing list should again be working, after
rewriting the several hundred lines of Perl that drive the checking
and formation of the mails. Included in the rewrite were some
additional safety checks to eliminate the occasional mishaps that
caused old plan files to sometimes be mistakenly emailed out.

:: 24-Mar-2002 14:34 GMT (Sunday) ::

This appeared on the mailing list earlier. In an effort to get the
message out to as many as possible, I’m reposting it here.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1

Greetings, cows.

It has been a long time since we made an announcement via this list,
and I wish I had a better reason to contact you today.

We have recently learned that our long-standing arrangement with
Texas.Net (formerly Insync) would end at noon, Friday, March 22.
Through an agreement with Insync, we were hosted at no charge for
many years. Though we have tried to make other arrangements with
them or to continue our current service until we can make other
arrangements, in the end we had no choice but to move.

Several of the Austin cows made a road trip Friday morning to
retrieve our equipment from their colocation facility.

We have no reason to complain about Texas.Net or their current
decision. As a business, they chose to donate to us for a long time,
and have now decided that they must stop. In dbaker’s words in a
letter to Texas.Net: “Our experience with Insync has been excellent;
I’ve never been happier with an Internet provider. I’ve recommended
them (and indirectly, Texas.Net) to everyone and even this
[situation] won’t change that.”

Though United Devices has kindly offered to colocate our primary
servers for a short time at no expense, we find ourselves in the
market for a new ISP. If any of our participants work for a major
ISP in Texas (preferably within a few hours of Austin, but we’re not
picky), and would be willing to donate colocation space and
connectivity, we would eagerly like to speak with you. Our typical
bandwidth usage is 3Mb/s, and reliable uptime is of course essential.

Please e-mail dbaker@distributed.net if you think you may be able to
help us in this area.

As always, we thank you for your support of our projects.

__
Bruce Wilson
PGP KeyID: 5430B995

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:: 24-Mar-2002 09:55 GMT (Sunday) ::

RC5 stats didn’t run last night; the process that pushes
logs from the master to blower needs to be tweaked to
deal with the UD NAT. I’ve just started the run for the
23rd manually. Expect RC5 runs to be delayed until one of
the master folks can fix the log push.

Also, not all proxies have been adjusted for the master’s
new location, so expect work to show up as missing until
all the proxies have been able to flush their work.

:: 23-Mar-2002 08:33 GMT (Saturday) ::

The keymaster relocation was completed a couple hours ago and a number
of the public fullservers have already begun catching up. There are
still a few of our keyservers that have not yet been redirected to the
new keymaster, but it is expected that all of them should be updated
within the next dozen hours or so.

Although you should not need to take any direct action for any of your
dnetc clients to eventually recover, you can monitor the progress by
looking at the number of servers not shown in red on this status page:

http://n0cgi.distributed.net/rc5-proxyinfo.html

:: 22-Mar-2002 23:56 GMT (Friday) ::

With the move of the master to a new colo, stats will probably be
delayed for a bit until we can get all the details sorted out. We’ll
have them back online ASAP.