To my fellow US citizens (and others as well), hope you had a happy MLK day (or whatever your state officially calls it). Those wondering why no tech news item yesterday, that's why.

I'll start with the negative. Lots of the usual annoying little hiccups over the weekend. Here's a non-chronological digest: One of the servers (bruno) lost its automount again (hasn't happened in a while), having the effect of inflating the validator queue before I noticed and unclogged the pipes. We went through the raw data files on disk faster than expected over the long weekend, so the results-to-send queue dropped down and we're going to be recovering from that for a bit. The web sites were increasingly dragged down by obnoxious activity over the weekend but that finally disappeared after I blocked the offending IP addresses.

Now the positive. Our new 1U dual opteron server "thinman" is now up and running as a public web server. We were going to use new server maul, but thinman is, well, thinner, and it's already in the closet. So that saves us one immediate closet upgrade. As well, we have been redundantly sending out workunits via both vader and bane. This is way overkill and a vestige of a time before we realized our problems were router-related. Since bane is also just 1U and already in the closet, I decommissioned vader as a download server. The bottom line is we only have two machines to get into the closet now (as opposed to 4): bruno and sidious. And we have a single web server which is much smaller and faster than the old servers (kosh and penguin) combined. They will be shut down sooner or later.

In better news, Bill Woodcock (a key player in getting us set up with Hurricane Electric, i.e. our current ISP and donator of our two current HE routers) has donated another cisco router to us to replace to weaker 2811. It a 7600 series, a bit overkill, but will give us tons of headroom to spare. We'll no longer be constrained by the 60Mb/sec cap! I guess we'll find the next set of bottlenecks quickly, including the 100Mb cap (due to our current lab wiring to campus). Of course, we have a lot of configuring to do before this thing is up and running, but at least it's in the rack!

By the way, if you haven't heard of email bankruptcy, please read this article. I'm declaring "thread" bankruptcy, i.e. I am letting go all current questions, open-ended threads, unfinished story lines, etc. If anything is really important it will come up again.

- 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

A very large thanks to Mr. Bill Woodcock for the new router. Very much appreciated by all of us!

Good News eh Matt - Thanks for the Post and Thanks also to Mr. Woodcock for the Router . . . Things are lookin' up again . . .

[EDIT] - Happy MLK Day to You Matt and All others . . .

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Oh my, but that is grand news about the router....please give thanks to Mr. Woodcock from all of us....and please do let us know when it is up and running.
And then I guess it's time to fix the next bottleneck....

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

What? No science news?

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What? No science news?

The forum is titled 'Technical News'.....and Matt's updates are quite welcome, thank you.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

It`s good to know that people like Mr.Bill Woodcock are helping us out.
A very big THANK YOU !

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It`s good to know that people like Mr.Bill Woodcock are helping us out.
A very big THANK YOU !

Really! Talk about helping out when a need has been identified.
Don't know where his resourcefulness comes from but welcome indeed!!

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

.... I'm declaring "thread" bankruptcy, i.e. I am letting go all current questions, open-ended threads, unfinished story lines, etc. If anything is really important it will come up again.

- Matt

It's not important, just a minor niggle. I've being seeing posts in the future again - latest post "in 43 seconds". I think 'thinman' needs time synchronisation.

And another big thank you to Bill Woodcock.

...think 'thinman' needs time synchronisation.

Oops you're right. So did bane. Fixed now.

- 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

To my fellow US citizens (and others as well), hope you had a happy MLK day (or whatever your state officially calls it). Those wondering why no tech news item yesterday, that's why.

I'll start with the negative. Lots of the usual annoying little hiccups over the weekend. Here's a non-chronological digest: One of the servers (bruno) lost its automount again (hasn't happened in a while), having the effect of inflating the validator queue before I noticed and unclogged the pipes. We went through the raw data files on disk faster than expected over the long weekend, so the results-to-send queue dropped down and we're going to be recovering from that for a bit. The web sites were increasingly dragged down by obnoxious activity over the weekend but that finally disappeared after I blocked the offending IP addresses.

Now the positive. Our new 1U dual opteron server "thinman" is now up and running as a public web server. We were going to use new server maul, but thinman is, well, thinner, and it's already in the closet. So that saves us one immediate closet upgrade. As well, we have been redundantly sending out workunits via both vader and bane. This is way overkill and a vestige of a time before we realized our problems were router-related. Since bane is also just 1U and already in the closet, I decommissioned vader as a download server. The bottom line is we only have two machines to get into the closet now (as opposed to 4): bruno and sidious. And we have a single web server which is much smaller and faster than the old servers (kosh and penguin) combined. They will be shut down sooner or later.

In better news, Bill Woodcock (a key player in getting us set up with Hurricane Electric, i.e. our current ISP and donator of our two current HE routers) has donated another cisco router to us to replace to weaker 2811. It a 7600 series, a bit overkill, but will give us tons of headroom to spare. We'll no longer be constrained by the 60Mb/sec cap! I guess we'll find the next set of bottlenecks quickly, including the 100Mb cap (due to our current lab wiring to campus). Of course, we have a lot of configuring to do before this thing is up and running, but at least it's in the rack!

By the way, if you haven't heard of email bankruptcy, please read this article. I'm declaring "thread" bankruptcy, i.e. I am letting go all current questions, open-ended threads, unfinished story lines, etc. If anything is really important it will come up again.

- Matt

@ Matt, Great News on the New Router and the New Servers. Does that mean no more outages for the Seti forum or am I reading something wrong?

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

@ Matt, Great News on the New Router and the New Servers. Does that mean no more outages for the Seti forum or am I reading something wrong?

Yeah.. this is a separate issue. We have lots of public-facing services: scheduling servers (where BOINC clients connect to find out what to do next), upload servers (where results get uploaded), download servers (where new work gets downloaded), and public web servers (the setiathome/boinc web sites). There are several non-public servers (databases mainly) as well.

The router I mentioned will help with the current upload/download issues. The web sites, including the forums, are on totally separate servers/networks than the upload/download servers. The SETI forum outages are due to our mysql database needing weekly "scrubbing" during which it has to be completely quiescent, i.e. no database activity. This won't be fixed any time soon.

- 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