Another mild day in server land. Lots of minor apache issues. There was an annoying web scrape yesterday afternoon that gummed up the works for a moment. This morning I found a bug in the web log rotation script that prevented our public web server from restarting - so it's been running for weeks non-stop during which the httpd processes bloated in size (apparently there are small/tolerable memory leaks in php/apache/boinc code somewhere). Then later our scheduling server was suddenly unable to run the scheduler cgi. We were dropping connections so I got alerts right away about this. I had to stop/restart apache twice, though, to get it working again. Not sure why the first restart didn't take.

Jeff's adding more star catalog data to our database. Bob worked on another alert script to better check our current database storage allocations (and prevent another minor mishap like earlier this week). Eric and I swapped drives between his hydrogen server "ewen" and ptolemy (for when the latter becomes a storage server) - ewen freaked out a little bit unexpectedly - we umounted the filesystems before pulling the drives, but an xfs daemon woke up and thought that particular partition should still be around, etc. No big deal - just a lot of alert e-mails that were scary at first.

- 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

. . . putting iT mildly - YOU guys ROCK! - keep up the superb work there @ Berkeley - iT is Sincerely Appreciated

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Let's hope all is settled down for the week end, and the servers keep to themselves and leave the time for your own use.

Thanks Matt.

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

Let's hope all is settled down for the week end, and the servers keep to themselves and leave the time for your own use.

Thanks Matt.

AMEN to that!

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

It looks like the servers have decided to take a nap!
I'm getting 'bad gateway' and 'http service unavailable' errors.

Anyone else seeing this?

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Yep, same here. No communication for reporting tasks. I can upload completed work, though. Cricket graphs indicate minimal traffic.

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As of 11:13 EDT I am getting this from the Bonic client...

6/7/2008 11:11:50|SETI@home|Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 0 seconds of work, reporting 8 completed tasks
6/7/2008 11:13:27||Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
6/7/2008 11:13:29||Access to reference site succeeded - project servers may be temporarily down.
6/7/2008 11:13:31|SETI@home|Scheduler request failed: Server returned nothing (no headers, no data)

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As of 11:13 EDT I am getting this from the Bonic client...

6/7/2008 11:11:50|SETI@home|Sending scheduler request: Requested by user. Requesting 0 seconds of work, reporting 8 completed tasks
6/7/2008 11:13:27||Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
6/7/2008 11:13:29||Access to reference site succeeded - project servers may be temporarily down.
6/7/2008 11:13:31|SETI@home|Scheduler request failed: Server returned nothing (no headers, no data)

.... and since the BOINC client is designed to handle this (and retry later) it isn't a reason for alarm.

Someone from the project will wander by a computer at home, check SETI, see a problem, and try to fix it. If they can't fix it remotely, then someone will go into the lab.

... and in the meantime, we're all crunching along, and we'll report work (and download more) once it is fixed.

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Let's hope all is settled down for the week end, and the servers keep to themselves and leave the time for your own use.

Thanks Matt.

you jinxed the servers and the admins:P

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Someone from the project will wander by a computer at home, check SETI, see a problem, and try to fix it. If they can't fix it remotely, then someone will go into the lab.

Which is exactly what happened. Same scheduler problem that happened earlier in the week. I gave it a kick remotely - should be catching up on requests pretty soon. Not sure the *exact* problem (it's suddenly sensitive to log file sizes whereas nothing changed on the server in months) but I think the fix/workaround will be employed sooner than later.

- 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

. . . Thanks Matt (as usual - doin' a great job @ keepin' up to par ;)

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .