what is going on? no new tasks from seti? thats after it was down for four days which no-one has seemed to have mentioned.

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It is only 6:41 AM PDT in California...the boys get to the lab, IIRC, at 9AM PDT...they will fix it when they get there...

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Clk2HlpSetiCty:::PayIt4ward

what is going on? no new tasks from seti? thats after it was down for four days which no-one has seemed to have mentioned.

Four days? Yesterday was the weekly outage and the 3 days before that were fine, I had no problems.

Currently no splitters are running which will hopefully be fixed soon.

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You know what really gets me?

Matt said this on April 16:

"We're also finding that we don't have the processing power we'd like. It seems like we lost a lot of active users over the past few months. I blame the recession."

And today I'm trying to get work and all it says is "Project has no jobs available."

You can't have it both ways, guys. You have plenty of people who'd be happy to crunch as much as you can throw at them. If it's not an outage, it's lack of work. C'mon already.

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You know what really gets me?

Matt said this on April 16:

"We're also finding that we don't have the processing power we'd like. It seems like we lost a lot of active users over the past few months. I blame the recession."

And today I'm trying to get work and all it says is "Project has no jobs available."

You can't have it both ways, guys. You have plenty of people who'd be happy to crunch as much as you can throw at them. If it's not an outage, it's lack of work. C'mon already.

Oohhh, you're gonna get hammered for pointing THAT one out.

I'm with ya.

You know what really gets me?

Matt said this on April 16:

"We're also finding that we don't have the processing power we'd like. It seems like we lost a lot of active users over the past few months. I blame the recession."

And today I'm trying to get work and all it says is "Project has no jobs available."

You can't have it both ways, guys. You have plenty of people who'd be happy to crunch as much as you can throw at them. If it's not an outage, it's lack of work. C'mon already.

So you know what is causing the current problem?? And it is their fault. Please remember this project is run on a shoestring and it is 8:30 am there. Give them a break.

Bernie

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I'm a sysadmin too. My job doesn't end at 5 pm and start at 9 am. It's 24/7.

If I said to my boss, "Yeah, it's broken, but I don't get to work until 9 am," I'd expect to be out of a job pretty quick.

I appreciate your sentiment, but the fact is SETI@home is, in my opinion, incredibly unreliable.

I'm not looking to place blame, I'm just saying it's amazing how frequently problems occur.

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And if your boss told you to do the work for obscenely cheap or free you'd walk. The seti staff make beans. So Id cut em a little slack.

Its ok to be a sysadmin. Do it for no money and bitchy people. You'd disappear like a ghost much faster than the seti staff ever will. So please try to be patient.

Sincerely,
Daysteppr

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So you're saying it's okay to do a lousy job, as long as you don't get paid much?

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You know what really gets me?

Matt said this on April 16:

"We're also finding that we don't have the processing power we'd like. It seems like we lost a lot of active users over the past few months. I blame the recession."

And today I'm trying to get work and all it says is "Project has no jobs available."

You can't have it both ways, guys. You have plenty of people who'd be happy to crunch as much as you can throw at them. If it's not an outage, it's lack of work. C'mon already.

The important thing is that the project keep their promises.

The project has promised that there will be times with no work.

I realize we're all extremely dedicated, but keep in mind that it is the project that sets their goals. SETI@Home Classic would recycle work when the queue ran short. BOINC won't.

We're also (supposedly) harnessing a waste product -- time spent in the "idle" task. Letting a waste product go to waste is not that big a deal.

If you're making waste product, then you probably should take steps to make sure you don't run out of work, including crunching for more than one project. If you just like SETI, consider crunching for SETI Beta, they often still have work when this project is out. You aren't necessarily finding ET, but you're helping refine the software for the search.

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I like that explanation far better than "suck it up and cut 'em some slack." Thank you.

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I'm a sysadmin too. My job doesn't end at 5 pm and start at 9 am. It's 24/7.

If I said to my boss, "Yeah, it's broken, but I don't get to work until 9 am," I'd expect to be out of a job pretty quick.

I appreciate your sentiment, but the fact is SETI@home is, in my opinion, incredibly unreliable.

I'm not looking to place blame, I'm just saying it's amazing how frequently problems occur.

They are servicing a much heavier load than the typical commercial installation, and they're doing it with antique and/or hand-me-down hardware.

They also have a totally different requirement than most sites/networks: if the main servers are down, or the splitters are off, most of the BOINC clients will work off of their cache, and report when they can.

24/7/365 is not a requirement.

That said, most of the staff do what they can during off hours. The splitters may have been off for a reason (reasons like "free up resources for the validators/assimilators" or "not flood the disks").

I don't think they would have left at 5:00pm with the splitters down unless there was a good reason.

Blaming this on a lack of dedication without more information is just rude. Would your boss hold you responsible if a power spike blew out critical equipment (including spares), or if the power was off past your UPS capacity?

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I did not intend to imply that this and other problems are due to lack of dedication. I was merely responding to the apologists who don't seem to have a very good handle on the situation. You do seem to.

These rants are mostly borne of frustration from the past ten years of volunteering computer resources and for one reason or another being unable to do work. I think I will take your suggestion and diversify my distributed projects, thus alleviating the frustration.

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I like that explanation far better than "suck it up and cut 'em some slack." Thank you.

But you really should cut them some slack.

There are two critical concepts here that most people miss -- and then they turn it right around and blame it on "lazy staff."

The BOINC servers are not BOINC.

BOINC is a system comprised of Clients and Servers, and there are features in the BOINC system that are designed to deal with a less-than-reliable connection between them.

That's something you can't do if you're running a big E-Commerce site. If Amazon is down for an hour, they lose a huge amount of money because people will buy their books someplace else, or not at all.

For BOINC there are no people in the loop. The BOINC client runs well if you leave it alone and don't molest it, and it has layers of features to prevent running out of work.

It's designed that way so that a project can run without expensive redundancy, and without commodity servers, not expensive high-reliability stuff.

But we as spectators apply the "Amazon" standard of reliability, and it is the wrong standard.

My suggestion: if you don't want to run more than one project, run a big cache, and don't limit yourself to just Multibeam.

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A possible cause? It seems the servers have been hit lately. Perhaps this is another as well

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Ned, the problem isn't the fact that work isn't always forthcoming, as has already pointed out, the guys have never made that promise.

But the system CAN'T cope with the current number of users. Asking for more users at a time when the servers seem to be more fragile than ever isn't the smartest thing to do. Over the past month Seti has been in the worst state I have seen since I joined.

We are always hearing about the lack of funds, that the project is struggling to keep going. Have they ever considered actually scaling things back a little and running the project within budget instead of trying to stretch things to the points of breaking.

As for concentrating on NTPCKr for the anniversary. Have you heard anything? I sure as hell haven't. Christ there isn't even anything on the front page of this website.

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Ned, the problem isn't the fact that work isn't always forthcoming, as has already pointed out, the guys have never made that promise.

But the system CAN'T cope with the current number of users. Asking for more users at a time when the servers seem to be more fragile than ever isn't the smartest thing to do. Over the past month Seti has been in the worst state I have seen since I joined.

We are always hearing about the lack of funds, that the project is struggling to keep going. Have they ever considered actually scaling things back a little and running the project within budget instead of trying to stretch things to the points of breaking.

As for concentrating on NTPCKr for the anniversary. Have you heard anything? I sure as hell haven't. Christ there isn't even anything on the front page of this website.

Now you've heard

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Ned, the problem isn't the fact that work isn't always forthcoming, as has already pointed out, the guys have never made that promise.

But the system CAN'T cope with the current number of users. Asking for more users at a time when the servers seem to be more fragile than ever isn't the smartest thing to do. Over the past month Seti has been in the worst state I have seen since I joined.

We are always hearing about the lack of funds, that the project is struggling to keep going. Have they ever considered actually scaling things back a little and running the project within budget instead of trying to stretch things to the points of breaking.

As for concentrating on NTPCKr for the anniversary. Have you heard anything? I sure as hell haven't. Christ there isn't even anything on the front page of this website.

Now you've heard

Skildude, please don't take offence, but I think you missed the point. I wasn't referring to not having heard anything on here. I was meaning away from here.

There hasn't been a single mention of it anywhere in the UK, and I doubt for that matter anywhere else in the world. Let's be honest given the current financial crisis, now coupled with the sneezing pig end of the world stories, no on outside of these forums is going to give two hoots about Seti.

To quote Google when searching :-

"Your search - Seti 10th Anniversary - did not match any documents."

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They are trying to get it ready and announce it for the anniversary....
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=53329&nowrap=true#889271

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PROUD MEMBER OF Team Starfire World BOINC

Heads up - we have splitter action.

Coffee machine must have done its work.