Horsemen of the Invisible (Nov 29 2011)

We're coming out of our usual weekly maintenance outage. I was quite productive today. Outside of the usual tasks I upgraded the OS on a couple backend servers. This was much smoother compared to similar chores last week.

I also rebooted the master mysql database server, thinking it could stand to have its pipes cleaned (see my post griping about this last week). Well, that didn't help. This may just be a perfect storm. There are a lot of BOINC backend queries which run "every 24 hours" but the way these jobs are implemented they run on average "every 24.05 hours." Over time they migrate to when the outage is happening, and therefore they wait, and then slam against the database once we come back online. We might have to force migrate these until later. At least that's the next thing to try.

By the way recently, as a cost saving measure, the entire Space Lab has migrated to using Calmail - the campus wide e-mail system. That way we can stop wasting scant precious IT resources on maintaining our own lab wide mail servers. Turns out the Calmail is turning out to be kind of a bust. Now that most of our lab is dependent on it it's been crashing almost constantly. For example, we didn't have e-mail for most of the Thanksgiving weekend, and today the whole system is once again kaput. One or two short outages here and there are acceptable, but I'm starting to call this a major disaster.

- 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 for the update Matt,

Claggy

Thanks for the heads up there Matt, appreciated.

Thanks for the update.

Perhaps you need to set them to run at a specific time each day so they don't start a bit later each day. As in 24 hours from when they last finished?

Now as to that mail, you might send a resume ...

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Didn't I just read an article that stated the "government" is putting money into SETI to check out the signals at some new "Earth-like" planet far, far away? Must be a different SETI.

..of course.. we collected the same data from Kepler a while ago. This is really another case of SETI Institute having a better PR engine than the University, and thus getting all the $$$ and attention even though we did all the same stuff already times 1000.

- Matt

Didn't I just read an article that stated the "government" is putting money into SETI to check out the signals at some new "Earth-like" planet far, far away? Must be a different SETI.

It may help to link to the article you're referring to. SETI is a generic term that refers to at least a dozen different scientific endeavors, so the "government" stating that they are putting money into "SETI" isn't exactly clear, nor does it mean SETI@Home will see a dime of that money.

The only article I could find after doing some searching was over at slashdot: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/12/07/0349259/us-air-force-pays-seti-to-check-kepler-22b-for-alien-life. If that's the article you're referring to, they are paying the SETI Institute and not SETI@Home. So yes, it is a different SETI.

..of course.. we collected the same data from Kepler a while ago. This is really another case of SETI Institute having a better PR engine than the University, and thus getting all the $$$ and attention even though we did all the same stuff already times 1000.

- Matt