:: 13-Oct-1999 22:58 (Wednesday) ::

I have good news! After a long process of recovering and preprocessing the “missing”
blocks from 09/01/1999, 09/10/1999, and 09/11/1999, I have begun to feed them back
into the keymaster for re-processing. I just began the actual re-processing a few
minutes ago, so I don’t have any idea how long the whole process will take. I’m sure
that the keymaster isn’t fast enough to finish before 00:00GMT (statsbox daily run
time), but it is possible that it will be completely finished by time for tomorrow’s
run.

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’ll post more information about how long it will take to complete this process at
a later time.

Enjoy!

:: 12-Oct-1999 12:24 (Tuesday) ::

distributed.net spent US$2,600 yesterday in order to upgrade our main
server (nodezero) and bring a second web server online. For an
organization that effectively has no income, this is always a scary
thing. Our cash reserves are down to just over US$10,000 which is
about as low as I’d want to see it get. Our ability to properly
maintain the server network and stats server are directly affected by
our ability to buy the hardware we need.

The most important way you can help distributed.net is to continue to
run the client and encourage your friends to do so as well. However,
if you’re inclined to help in a more direct manner, there are a number
of ways you can do so. First, we are a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation
and donations are tax-deductible for you .us folks.

There’s also a way to donate money to distributed.net that’s free —
www.iGive.com

iGive has basically funded our group, having donated more than US$19,000
since they were founded in 1998. Basically you earn money for yourself
and/or distributed.net by viewing advertisements and purchasing things
through iGive vendors.

Our experiences with iGive have been quite rewarding. These guys are
building a very interesting business model and doing everything right.
These guys don’t spam, or send out annoying adverts. There’s no silly
banner bar you have to find space for on your desktop. You just visit
their site each day, at your convenience, and get paid to look at ads.
If you buy a product from one of their listed merchants, distributed.net
gets a percentage of the sale price at no cost to you. I’ve been able
to raise about $60 for distributed.net just by buying all my audio CDs
and software through cdnow.com and beyond.com, which are two of the
vendors.

Right now iGive is running a promotion where distributed.net gets US$10
for every person who joins by November 15th and makes an online purchase
by November 30th. If ten people sign up with iGive and buy a cheap CD
from cdnow.com, that’s $100 to distributed.net.

To join, just follow this url…
http://www.iGive.com/html/ssi.cfm?cid=1098&mid=3311

To keep an eye on distributed.net, you can see where our money has gone:
http://www.distributed.net/legal/ledger.html

As always, thanks for your continued support and enthusiasm.

:: 10-Oct-1999 07:48 (Sunday) ::

Just a quick update. As you might notice, I just updated the ‘Project’
portion of this plan, so now you all know most of what I’m working on.

Thanks to dbaker’s work, rc5@lists.distributed.net is working once
again, so feel free to start sending messages again. It’s quite dead
right now (not that I’m complaining }:8P ).

Stats-box is definitely looking happy again. Stats-run is down to just
over 3 hours. We’re working on getting a few more drives in the box,
which will allow us to spread the database over several different
drives. This should make a substantial performance improvement, since
the box is very I/O bound. More info as the situation unfolds…

:: 07-Oct-1999 20:58 (Thursday) ::

I fixed (okay, I rewrote most of it, too) the distributed.net rc5-list
web moderation tool, so rc5-list users should start receiving the normal
flow of posts again.

I’ve been working on recovering the lost blocks from the September incidents.
If all goes well, users should expect to see those blocks in the next day
or two.

I’ll post more information when it becomes available. I’ll also have some
more information about new ftp and www redundancy too in the next week. I’m
just a nifty guy, eh?

Daniel

:: 07-Oct-1999 15:37 (Thursday) ::

OK, It looks like x-empt was right… There’s definitely a problem in
stats that’s preventing new participants from being properly added to the
database. You’ve probably noticed that the past several days have shown
“(and 0 of them are brand-new)” on the main rc5-64 stats page.

The strange aspect to this is that not only has the code in question not
changed, but when I run the sql manually I’m unable to reproduce the
problem.

I just ran the sql code by hand on the 6-Oct daytables and it added
the new 6-Oct participants in without a hitch. Yet for some reason when
that exact same code ran last night during the update, it didn’t work.
Very odd.

So far, all I’ve done is just add a bunch of logging to the suspect code
to see if I can isolate the exact spot where it’s falling down. It
just doesn’t make any sense.

I’m going to kick off a re-ranking, which is necessary for the affected
emails to be searchable and appear in on the stats web site. One
side-effect of a re-ranking is that the ranking offsets (the green and red
numbers showing your change from the day before) will all be affected by
this.

I’ll post more information as I figure out what’s going on. There’s no
reason to assume that the code will start working tonight, I’m just hoping
to get a few clues on why it’s failing.

:: 06-Oct-1999 22:06 (Wednesday) ::

The newest installer for the Win32 CLI client, that Bovine
mentioned in his recent .plan, has a few new additions to
help those of you that are use to the Win32 GUI.

This new installer gives you the option to install links
to the more common command line options; -config, -help,
and -shutdown on the Start Menu. For those of you that
install the client hidden, you can opt to not install
*anything* to the Start Menu.

It also puts these links, actually short-cuts with the
options built into the shortcut, into the directory that
you install the client to.

This new installer also gives you the option to put the
client in the Startup Group along with the option to have
the client start from the runservices line, hidden.
The Startup Group addition lets you start the client
minimized to the systray, not unlike the old GUI.

I hope these additions to the CLI installer helps those of
you that are having a hard time adjusting from the Win32
GUI to the Win32 CLI.

Scott Ludwig

:: 05-Oct-1999 19:49 (Tuesday) ::

It’s been a few days since the initial release of our new
self-installer packaging of the Win32 CLI client and we’ve received a
significant amount of good feedback. We’ve taken your responses into
account and have since released an updated version 2.7112.444c of the
CLI self-installer. The actual client is identical to the last one
(and that of the 2.7112.444b zipped version), however some aspects of
the installer have been improved.

Among the things that you may have noticed with our self-installer
Win32 CLI versions is the inclusion of my new “Log Visualizer”
utility. This is actually a separate application that implements all
of the log graphing functionality that was in the original Win32 GUI
client. In addition to improving a number of bugs in the Win32 GUI’s
grapher, since it is a separate application, you can even use it to
view your log files from other rc5des clients on other machines or
platforms. Making the grapher separate also allows you to conserve
memory by not requiring you to have all of the graphing code and log
data loaded while you have the client running all the time.

One of the other exciting aspects about the Log Visualizer is that
full Win32 C++ source code is available for it on our source code
webpage at http://www.distributed.net/source/ This allows experienced
coders to help out by making their own improvements to this valuable
utility and contribute their changes back to the entire
distributed.net community. I encourage interested participants and
Win32 developers and who have spare time to consider helping to
improve it. Inside of its source code distribution zip file is an
initial TODO file listing some possible areas of work. You can email
your modifications back to me and I’ll occasionally update that zip
file with all of the cumulative changes.

We also have a Java Log Visualizer currently in development and will
similarly release source code for it once it has minimal
functionality. We welcome efforts to develop similar utilities for
other platforms! Keep watching for more exciting developments!

:: 04-Oct-1999 13:31 (Monday) ::

It looks as if statsbox decided to be a bit mischievous this weekend
while dbaker and I were both out of town. Certainly nothing critical,
but it was a bit annoying. A strange set of circumstances deep within
a “shouldn’t happen” loop in the stats and logcopying code resulted in
last night’s stats run only incorporating 23 of the 24 logfiles from
the keymaster. Any blocks flushed from 3-Oct-1999 23:00 to 23:59 will
not be reflected in today’s stats.

These blocks will be processed as part of tonight’s run (but still as
3-Oct blocks, not 4-Oct). Sorry for the inconvenience. dbaker and I
are going to spend some time today hardening the log processing code
to ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

:: 03-Oct-1999 16:32 (Sunday) ::

Hi all,

As you may know, we have a glibc problem with x86 Linux clients. If
the client is statically linked with glibc 2.0, it can’t resolve
host names under glibc 2.1. And vice-versa.
Previously, we had ‘solved’ the problem by providing two clients, one
for glibc 2.0 and another for glibc 2.1. This is confusing for most
people.

I want you to beta-test another client. This v444 client was build
and linked against glibc 2.1.1 on a SuSE 6.2 system, but this time is
was dynamically linked. I think this should solve the problem, but I
need people to test this client to be sure.
I’m particularly interested in beta-testers on glibc *2.0*
systems. Tell me if it works on your machine or if it doesn’t, but
please include as much details as you can in either case.

Here’s the url :
http://nodezero.distributed.net/~remi/rc5des444-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
and the GnuPG signature :
http://nodezero.distributed.net/~remi/rc5des444-linux-x86-elf-mt-glibc2.tar.gz.asc

Note to i386 & i486 users : You will see a slight drop in performance
because we can’t link the 386/486 self-modifying core in a dynamic
client. If you want the best performance, you should stick with the
443 client.
We will continue to include this 386/486 self-modifying core in future
a.out and libc5 clients.

:: 02-Oct-1999 05:45 (Saturday) ::

Two quickies (I sound like CmdrTaco (http://CmdrTaco.net) from Slashdot
(http://slashdot.org) now):

First, the stats are currently set to start the stats-run at 1:45GMT
instead of the normal 0:30GMT or so. I’m guessing that this is just a
mistake, but I don’t want to screw with it while Nugget’s out of town,
so it’ll stay this way until at least Sunday night.

Second, I changed the countries page so that it now uses height and width
tags on all the little flag images. This means that the page will display
before all the images are loaded. It’s pretty neat to watch all the flags
pop onto your screen in a random order… of course, if you have a fast
link you won’t see the effect very well, but I guess that’s the trade-off
you’ll have to live with. :)

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the code changed before the stats-run was over,
so the main countries page will be lacking the new tags until tomorrow
night. If you just can’t wait that long, you can see what I’m talking about
at http://stats-decibel.distributed.net/rc5-64/countries.html .