:: 13-Nov-1999 17:43 (Saturday) ::

Moo.

I’m back, after an eleven-month hiatus. I’m doing the Image Thing and
you’ll be seeing the product of my efforts in short order, I do believe.

I’m looking for good writers. If you can write, please send a short copy
of something you’ve written to vetere@distributed.net . I’m going to begin
(in a week or so) rewriting the dnet web site and help documentation, in
an effort to make the place a lot more user friendly.

:: 10-Nov-1999 21:05 (Wednesday) ::

Ok i for got to tell everyone one thing. I updated
http://www/distributed.net/beta/ with this information, but here it is
for you:

– You need to disable fallback to the distributed.net keyservers. Inthe
configuration set 2) Buffer and Buffer Update –> 6)
Keyserver<->client connectivity option –> 5) Keyserver is a personal
proxy on a protected LAN? ==> no [<--Make that a yes]

– You could also just edit the .ini and add to the [parameters] section
“nofallback=1”

Sorry for the confusion
Moose!

:: 10-Nov-1999 19:43 (Wednesday) ::

Ok for those of you who haven’t noticed. The following clients have
been added to the list of beta clients

– Solaris 2.x (UltraSparc, mt)
– Solaris 2.x (Sparc, non-ultra, mt)
– Solaris 2.x (Sparc, non-ultra, non-mt)
– Novell Netware

Please visit http://www.distributed.net/beta/ for down loads and full details on the beta.

Happy Beta–
Moose!

:: 09-Nov-1999 16:01 (Tuesday) ::

Hope everyone is having fun, because I know I am! We have announced
our beta test of the OGR/CSC contests. I announced it Monday in
#distributed on efnet to see if we could find any major bugs right
away. Now with the coverage of the beta at http://www.slashdot.org/
we have decided to go ahead and announce it on a larger scale.

So for those of you who don’t know here is the info on the beta:

Beta page is located at: http://www.distributed.net/beta/ Please read
the whole page before jumping in on the beta. If you are going to
tell someone else about the beta please refer to this page and not
directly to the location of the beta clients.

Beta FAQ is at http://www.distributed.net/beta/betafaq.html Please
read this before asking more questions.

You are running the beta client and you followed all the directions on
the beta page and you are having problems, fill out a bug report at
http://www.distributed.net/bugs/

If you are looking for someone to talk to come visit us at
#distributed on efnet. If someone in the know is around we will try
to help you out, but please report all bugs to bugzilla first.

As far as clients available, we have clients for FreeBSD (elf), Linux
(glibc2), Win32, Win16, and DOS. Yes I know you want more clients and
we are working on it and they will be posted to the beta page as soon
as we get them. Please also note that the clients timeout 1 week from
the date they are updated on the web page. You will need to keep on
top of updating clients, so please check back often.

Thanks and Happy Beta!
moose

:: 08-Nov-1999 20:07 (Monday) ::

WHERE ARE THE T-SHIRTS?
Yeah, it’s been years. This is unacceptable. They’re one of my
priorities. I’m going to get these shirts, mugs, posters, and hats
designed, on the web, and out the door.

WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG?
We’re a bunch of computer geeks. We don’t know how to make
t-shirts and sell them.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
We have been working with a company called NerdGear. The problem
is that they’re slow and incompetent. Their shirts are ugly and
they aren’t what we wanted, nor did we approve them before they
started selling them. Additionally, after one wash, they show
severe fading. They suck.

I’ve called twice and tried to fire them with no luck; the guy
is never in. Hopefully I’ll give them the boot in the next day or
two.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
We need to find a competent company that is capable of helping us
design this merchandise. We then need this company to produce and
sell the merchandise. We will be able to give an idea as to how
much demand there will be.

I think we expect to have a variety of t-shirt designs, with each
offered in black and white. The DCTI logo is a high color image
that requires image transferring technology to look right. We have
the cow-head logo in resolution-independent (photoshop and raster)
format, which apparently makes production much easier.

If you work for a company that can do this, or know of one, please
email me (dbaker@distributed.net) any and all information.

WHAT WILL WE BE DOING?
First off, expect a new survey of interest. The results of this
survey will be posted live. You’ll be able to vote on what items
you will be interested in buying, and how many.

I plan to have a “dWear” page on the web site in the next day or two
that will offer all appropriate information and links. I am doing
my best to get the ball rolling.

Hopefully, I’ll get significant response to my “How can you help?”
offer above. Accordingly, I’ll weed through the selections and
find a good company so that all our users can show their cow pride.

:: 08-Nov-1999 15:28 (Monday) ::

I made lots of distributed.net progress over the weekend. Although many of
my accomplishments won’t affect users directly, they offer significant
improvements to the distributed.net network as a whole.

I upgraded the keymaster from FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE to 3.3-STABLE. In the past,
I’ve had a history of letting it go with an old OS for months on end; it
never goes down, so there’s little reason to upgrade. However, if you don’t
“stay on” an upgrade path, it gets much harder as releases progress.

I finally implemented Topanga. Topanga (aka TWOpanga) will serve as
(www2|ns2|ftp2|http2).distributed.net. I already have several of these
services in production. Having another DCTI machine that can serve as
a completely backup for nodezero (which is the master for web/dns/etc) will
not only increase general operating redundancy, but allow us to finally
upgrade the machine. At this point, I’ve been given the budget approval to
buy the new machine, but I was waiting for topanga to be in place to do so. In
the next coming weeks, I’ll be ordering and building the new nodezero. I plan
to see it in production before 2000.

:: 31-Oct-1999 18:28 (Sunday) ::

One of the benefits of insomnia is that from time to time you can get a
lot done in the middle of the night when you cannot sleep.

I closed out a lot of the tiny bugs in stats last night, and added a new
feature which I think will be quite popular. Major issues, in no
particular order…

o Your participant listmode is now honored much more reliably. Most
of the places on stats that didn’t previously honor a request to
“list me using my real name” now correctly do so.

o the “neighbor” list on the bottom of each psummary page now also shows
current rate as well as overall rate.

o Each participant can now select up to five other participants as
“friends” and those other participants will be listed/linked on the
participant’s summary page. You can see an example on my summary page at
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/psummary.php3?id=1
You can edit your own list from your pedit participant editing page.
The interface is extremely crude at this stage, it’s just five boxes
which allow you to enter other people’s participant IDs. You’ll have
to look up your friends’ ID numbers manually for now.

:: 31-Oct-1999 06:29 (Sunday) ::

Due to some minor technical glitches on the keymaster, block processing was delayed
right around 22:00GMT. Accordingly, blocks submitted between 22:00 and 00:00 did not make
it into the day’s stats run. Don’t worry; no blocks were lost. “Missing” blocks were only
delayed by a few hours and will make it into the following day’s stats.

:: 19-Oct-1999 00:45 (Tuesday) ::

This is a “heads up!” that stats will be much slower than usual tonight. If you’ve
read my previous plan entries, you will see that I’ve been re-processing a lot of
blocks from about a month ago. Almost all of those blocks will make it into tonight’s
stats run, and accordingly, it will take more time to process the extra data. The ~30k or
so that weren’t able to make the midnight cut will be in tomorrow’s run.

To top it off, a partition on statsbox filled up right before the statsrun should have
started, so some manual intervention was required in order to launch stats for the
evening. Stats finally launched the daily run at ~00:45 and all is looking well.

Enjoy, and please email me (dbaker@distributed.net) if you have any questions about your
blocks being “recovered”.

:: 18-Oct-1999 12:38 (Monday) ::

Sorry for the delay, folks. “Missing” Blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/199
are now very quickly being processed by the keymaster.

This should explain the very high RC5-64 rate that is being displayed on
proxyinfo now.

Your stats will not reflect that these blocks were done in the past; they will show
up in today’s (or tomorrow’s) stats as if they were just submitted recently. Because
of this, your “daily rate” will surge if you were missing blocks.

I expect this process to be complete within the next 48 hours. I will post here when
I have a better estimate.

Enjoy!