:: 01-Jul-2001 22:40 (Sunday) ::

I’m pleased to announce the installation and implementation of our brand
new Dell Poweredge 2550 master server. This new server is a dual processor
PIII-1GHz machine with 1GB of ram, 70GB RAID-5 SCSI disk, and redundant
power supplies.

The distributed.net master server is the head project server for OGR and
RC5. It handles the creation of all new work, processing of completed
work, logging, and various other operational tasks.

This new capacity and processing power will allow faster processing of
work, more reliable proxy network functionality, and additional log storage.

Jeff (bovine) and I completed the process of transitioning to the new
server 3am EDT and it has been working flawlessly since then.

Thanks to everyone for their gracious financial support that has allowed
us to continue to expand our network infrastructure.

:: 01-Jul-2001 17:15 (Sunday) ::

For those who have noticed that the proxy info page is down, or that
keyrates aren’t being properly reported it #distributed, there’s a *good*
reason. We’re now running on our new keymaster. I won’t go into the details
as I don’t want to steal dbaker’s thunder… hopefully he’ll post a .plan
when he wakes up this afternoon (he and cow were working on getting the
new master installed until just a few hours ago).

As might be expected, there are a few things that still need to be taken
care of, and stats are one of them. It will probably be sometime tomorrow
before stats are completely up to date.

:: 30-Jun-2001 04:35 (Saturday) ::

For any of you who noticed my 15 minute bout of bug squishing on the
production ogr-24 countries page, sorry for any cowfusion. It’s all fixed
now. }:8)

:: 24-Jun-2001 20:33 (Sunday) ::

Bruce is doing some maintenance on stats, which is causing the statsrun
to run *really* slow. (RC5 is still running from last night). To ensure
that the run completes before midnight UTC, I’m turning off web access
for a while. I should be able to turn it back on in an hour or so.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 21-Jun-2001 18:56 (Thursday) ::

Last night’s stats have been running for a very long time, so we’ve stopped
the stats server to let it catch up. I’m afraid it’s partly my fault…
I was investigating some possible causes for discrepancies in team credit,
and I ran a Very Large Query (VLQ) ™ at a bad time. As soon as stats
finish, I’ll turn the web back on.

The silver lining to this cloud is that I’ve found some work that should
be credited towards certain teams, and soon it will.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

:: 15-Jun-2001 15:02 (Friday) ::

The master backlog has been processed, but one proxy still has 1M blocks
in its outbuffer. It is expected that this will flush today or tomorrow.

After the weekend everyone’s total stats should be correct again.

:: 13-Jun-2001 16:54 (Wednesday) ::

Yesterday, June 12th, we had some minor problems with our keymaster. This
resulted in backlogs on both the proxies and the master. As a result, the
stats for June 12th are not correct.

We hope to process all of the backlog soon, so your missing June-12-blocks
should show up in the next couple of days.

:: 13-Jun-2001 14:58 (Wednesday) ::

A lot of people are missing work from June 12th. We’re honestly not sure
what happened this time, but we’re looking into it. Stay tuned.

:: 10-Jun-2001 21:12 (Sunday) ::

Hello again.

As long as we had tally off-line to expand the database, decibel and I
decided to perform some much needed maintenance. We rebuilt some of the
indexes on the tables we torture the most, and updated statistics on The
Big Table (that’s the detail table for RC5-64). For comparison, this one
table occupies almost 3GB, which is about 80% of the data in the stats
database, and nearly one fourth of the total disk on tally.

We had hoped this wouldn’t be necessary – we had hoped to be moved over
to the new server (blower) by now. Technology and time schedules prevented
us from completing the migration. The 2GB file size limit on Linux is
starting to be a real problem. All the stats folks are getting together
by phone soon to discuss the possibility of switching to Free BSD. This
option would give us more room to grow, but would not (easily) support
some of our current tools. I think we’re leaning that direction, but we
don’t want to backtrack that far just to find it’s not going to work.

Another maintenance task I performed was to purge many of the teams that
had been created but never used. This is mostly our fault – the
team-creation forms on the website make it easy for people to create a
team and then forget how to join it. Over the years, many people have
created a team several times in a row, never succeeding in joining. This
purge had never been performed in the past, to my knowledge, so it was
long overdue.

Rest assured, I have only purged those teams that never had any work
submitted, never had any members, and do not currently have any members.
I also preserved any empty team created in the last several months, just
in case the work is being saved up to submit in the near future. Even as
careful as I was, it turns out over half the teams in the table were
completely inactive. I saved an archive of the removed teams, but being
in a different SQL table, they will have less impact on statsrun. If by
some chance, you had created a team and I have removed it, please e-mail
me directly to have it replaced.

The next time we have occasion to modify the team-creation code, we’ll
add a date-created field to the teams table and establish a policy where
teams will be removed if no work is submitted in a certain time-frame.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. Thanks again for all the cycles.

:: 10-Jun-2001 01:01 (Sunday) ::

Tally is caught up with rc5 and is doing the rc5 run for June 9th. I’ve
turned web access back on, so it’ll be 5-6 hours before that’s done. Once
it is done, OGR will start processing.

Sorry for the delays.