Manic Tuesday (Feb 20 2007)

We aborted the isaac upgrade midstream - we need to order new bigger drives after all. So that'll be put on hold again, probably until next week. In brighter news, it's looking more and more like the recent database tuning has vastly helped "grease the wheels" in our server backend. Bob should write up his observations at some point.

We're still on for the big network cutover tomorrow. I put a warning on the home page about a potential short outage. Sometimes I wonder if these warnings are helpful. Most people don't notice when we are offline, so are we just inciting confusion and panic? Others are angry if we don't acknowledge our down time and see this as insulting indifference to our users. None of us here at the lab claim to be experts at public relations and social engineering, so what you're left with is whatever we happen to feel is appropriate at that time (if we have the time).

Ooo! Eric just popped in with donated hardware (memory, motherboard, CPUs) so we'll try to sync up tomorrow and do simultaneous upgrades of ewen and sidious.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

I agree. It is always nice to get a heads up on potential problems, even if they do not impact us users.

Can you give any info oo what was donated (at least to this point) that is going to be implimented soon?

We're still on for the big network cutover tomorrow. I put a warning on the home page about a potential short outage. Sometimes I wonder if these warnings are helpful. Most people don't notice when we are offline, so are we just inciting confusion and panic? - Matt

Matt,

The post about the potential outage tomorrow is most definately appreciated. I don't think posting it will incite confusion or panic, but it would most definately cause panic if you didn't post the warning on the home page. This way, if anyone doesn't see it and panics, crunchers who have seen it will be able to post replies back to those panic stricken about what is going on.

Again, thanks for the heads-up.

-Torrey

Thanks for the update's Matt, it is greatly appriciated. Having this part of the forum here gives a 1 stop place to look for updates. I know many of us used to post the Tech News and Front Page news in the Number Crunching forums, and now with having here to come to, sure makes it a lot easier to find. Good luck tomorrow with the upgrade, I hope it runs smooth.

Jeremy
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Okay. All valid points about posting information warnings on the front page. I don't disagree, but sometimes we don't bother with these messages for various reasons. Like we're just unplugging the network cable for two minutes during an impromptu test. Or to explain what exactly is going on would take longer than fixing the problem. Or we simply just forget. For example, right now I'm running on about 4 hours' sleep and coasting to the end of a 9 hour day that was a bit chaotic as my original plans were shot to hell early on. So sometimes amidst a day like this full of random context-switching posting coherent messages on the web site falls over the edge of my process queue. At least with the influx of time I learned a little more about router configuration and did some extra preparation ahead of tomorrow's big switchover, among other things.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

...ahead of tomorrow's big switchover, among other things.

...

Ooo! Eric just popped in with donated hardware (memory, motherboard, CPUs) so we'll try to sync up tomorrow and do simultaneous upgrades of ewen and sidious.

- Matt