Wow. No real major crises today. Time was, about 10 years ago, when it was just me and Jeff and Dan crammed in a tiny office working on SERENDIP, dealing with server problems occupied about 5% of my time. The last 8 years it has been more like 99%.

So I got to catch up on some nagging tasks today. Worked on ravamping my stripchart code (which takesvarious system readings and alerts us when things are amiss) to ease the process of incorpating new servers. Cleaned up the lab in 329 - we have literal piles of retired/dead machines now. When Sun recently donated that new thumper server they also gave us a "parts" machine to upgrade jocelyn so I finally started looking into that. Worked a bit on a script to automate the new multibeam splitter process (whenever we're ready to start that up). Patched isaac's RAID firmware on the off chance that might fix its recent penchant for crashing - it didn't help, but running in a non-xen kernel seems to be a functional workaround. Fixed some broken web pages (donation page, the connecting client types page..). Discussed the next step in server closet upgrades with Jeff - he reminded me there's going to be a lab-wide power outage on Saturday, June 9th lasting all night. How convenient.

Oh.. I see the UOTD updates stopped working, too. Stuff breaks unexpectedly when you hastily retire servers like we've been doing recently...

- 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

Who is going to draw the short straw to close down gracefully on the Saturday and then boot up on the Sunday.

Wow, looks like somebody had one very productive day :)

Btw, WinterKnight, nothing persnal, but I think can go over a weekend w/o WU and let the guys at UCB to have the weekend. Whats two days when we just braved almost 2 weeks of outage? ;)
I agree that recovering is always a bit messy, but c'mon, give these guys a break :)

Regards,
Wander

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I agree that recovering is always a bit messy, but c'mon, give these guys a break :)

I think you misunderstood the intent of the question...

Shutting down "gracefully" as Andy mentioned is much better than just having the power go out in the midst of who knows how many disk/nfs operations... Of course there should be battery backups that handle shutdowns gracefully, but anyway... :)

I move that they shut down gracefully at COB on Friday and restart on Monday; taking the weekend to drink excessively.

Do I hear a second?

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I move that they shut down gracefully at COB on Friday and restart on Monday; taking the weekend to drink excessively.

Do I hear a second?

A second?

TICK TOCK TICK (there's 3 seconds!) jk

Give everything a rest over the weekend. It'll do you all good.

~BoB

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I move that they shut down gracefully at COB on Friday and restart on Monday; taking the weekend to drink excessively.

Do I hear a second?

A second?

TICK TOCK TICK (there's 3 seconds!) jk

Give everything a rest over the weekend. It'll do you all good.

~BoB

and a third

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While the staff do deserve a break,

turning the servers off for 3 days will bring on another lengthy period of catch-up like the one that we just got over. So that may bring even more work in the future.

We could live without the servers for a few days - but could they live with us afterwards? ;o)

Regards,
Simon.

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well, they wont be getting a hard time from me. Seeing the effort of the last few weeks.... errrrr months..... errr years... I think they deserve the rest and let them have the weekend.

As BOINC will be off line then on monday morning, I do advise them to do their backup and compression thing on monday morning before brining the project back up in stead of on monday evening. This saves one more recovery period....

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Bas van Zuilen

Thank You Matt . . .

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

While the staff do deserve a break,

turning the servers off for 3 days will bring on another lengthy period of catch-up like the one that we just got over. So that may bring even more work in the future.

We could live without the servers for a few days - but could they live with us afterwards? ;o)

Regards,
Simon.

... and possibly overload something else, causing it to break?!

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Thanks for the update again Matt. It is very much appriciated.

Jeremy

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I agree that recovering is always a bit messy, but c'mon, give these guys a break :)

I think you misunderstood the intent of the question...

Shutting down "gracefully" as Andy mentioned is much better than just having the power go out in the midst of who knows how many disk/nfs operations... Of course there should be battery backups that handle shutdowns gracefully, but anyway... :)

Hi Brian,

I'm sorry, but I think I didn't expressed myself correctly. I was just suggesting that we shouldn't ask them to work over the weekend just to keep the servers up. As other people here also suggested, they could shutdown on Friday EOD and come back up on Monday. I also pointed out that recovering from any outage always put some strain when thousands of machines try to get some work.

What about a compromise? Shutdown on Friday, but come in on Sunday to put the system back up after the power outage. Just a suggestion.

Again sorry for the misunderstanding :)

Regards,
Wander

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Seti scientists actually getting work done.

Wonders will never cease ;)

Glad you had a day to actually get things done, rather than fix serious problems.

Here's to more days like it.

Yes, the staff needs a well-deserved break. It's been working awfully hard. I've increased the size of my cache to four days so that should bridge a three-day break.

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