We are recovering from a database crash

I am a university team leader and I posted this in another board a few days ago.

"This issue, need I say so has been a server issue for months. It gets a band aid every now and then. But it continues to occur in one form or another. Either no one knows how to fix it, or they just don't have the time. Is is now costing us members. I know that other projects do not have constant problems keeping up and running. What will Seti do when all the members are gone and they have to pay for Computer time to analyze results. IF they don't put some emphasis on getting this under control, that's exactly where we are heading. My own team has seen a decline in participation over the last 8 months. When I ask why, these issues are given as the reason why members move on to more stable projects."

I am Sorry to see members go but I can not blame you. It appears to me that no one is minding the store. The only recent post from the administrators has been about the fund raising. No one has responded to our problems and no one even updates the news section. On the seti Home page it still talks a about a server crash on October 24. None of of the News is current in any of the boards except someone is posting about fund raising. This is very sad for a worthy project to just ignore the very people that donate Hundreds of thousands dollars a month in energy cost and equipment wear, just to help. I can not believe that Jill and Seth would be happy about this if they knew what has been happening.

As I said we are loosing members because of it.

I am "Suspending" SETI because BOINC has issues dealing with other clients when there is a lot of tasks waiting to be uploaded/reported. I'll see how things are going next week sometime.

Tom
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I sent you a PM, Harry62. I hope you will take the time to read it before you go.

I, for one, sincerely hope that you will stay. If not, then the best of luck to you.

Either way, thank you for the time and effort you have given us!

I have also sent you a PM, Clyde.

As I told Harry62, I sincerely hope that you will not decide to leave the SETI project.

Regardless, I wish to thank you, too, for all the time and effort you have given us!

I understand that the Seti Institute has no direct connection, but where does the computer time come from to analyze the massive amounts of data generated by the telescopes. It comes from volunteers who donate power and equipment wear to the cause. If that is not what we are here for then, what is the use to stay around. Does the Institute wish to drop us and just pay for Super computer time to do the grunt work. Maybe you are right the institute does not care about our work. That might explain why we have these problems.


Certificate of Computation


This certifies that team

Clemson University Team 1

has participated in SETI@home since 1 March 1999, and has contributed 99,586,993 Cobblestones of computation (86.04 quintillion floating-point operations) to SETI@home.




David P. Anderson
Director, SETI@home

16 November 2012
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I am a long time Seti@Home supporter. I started with Seti@home started. Since the change over to Boinc there has been a change. First, we were treated as nothing because we had old "Work Units" and "Time". Second, Seti only wanted the very fastest computers. Third, Seti did not want to run all the time. The project has gone down hill; results nill. The attitude is do the work units, when we give them to you and be quiet. The project is down Tuesdays for maintenance; the only thing regular about it. Yes, they should do their own work or get a better network to handle the traffic. I have said before farm out the network to someone that can handle it. Seti@Home is running people away!I have tried; in the past to not say bad things about the project. The Newbies will talk bad about you, but Seti@home is getting free computing and they should at least run themselves as if they care. I have been cutting back and may still cut back more. Fix the project or get out of the business. Seti@Home is wasting computer time.
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Well... I posted to this thread out of frustration, and most of the comments have re-enforced my main frustration.

We are just talking to ourselves. Where is the response and communication from Berkeley?

It would only take a few seconds to post what the problems are, and possible time frame for a fix. Would it really matter if it would take days, or weeks to fix, if we - The Volunteers - were given this information?

There is no understandable reason to keep us in the dark.

David, perhaps even that simple statement from the project folks 'we know there is a problem, we still haven't figured out exactly what it is' - might help regarding 'mood'.

Given the oft cited -- too many users, not enough resources -- mantra, one folks have heard here for years, perhaps an extended unresolved problem here might finally result in an adequate user shift over to other projects, thus reducing the load here. There are other projects pushing quite a lot of data about - including in the astrophysics area (Einstein and Milkyway). This project not only has a very large user load, but also has a fairly high (relative to other projects) resource capability. Perhaps a 20% drop off in user activity here, redirected to other projects, might be the actual form of 'load balancing' needed here.

I'm not saying that as a result of frustration, rather it seems that SETI has quite a decent set of resources and simply might be at an activity level where greater resources might not be as effectively 'deployable' here as people believe.

That being said, it is hard to accept the problems of the last two weeks are really as user activity dependent as some seem to believe. It isn't as if SETI has all of a sudden acquired a surge of new users. I realize that changes regarding Astropulse might have spiked activity -- though if that were the case, I would think that backing off there might resolve things.

Frankly, I think the current problem is not a user activity surge, but some, as yet undetermined gremlin which introduced itself two or three weeks ago and thus hasn't been tracked down and dealt with.

Again, in terms of mood, if that is the situation, those who are frustrated might be less frustrated if this was acknowledged.

As for me, SETI is but one of many projects on my plate, and with the current situation, I simply have let SETI caches drift down. I do find that when I have some time to 'work the problem' from the user side -- since I do have a proxy server which can *sometimes* be encouraged to work around the SETI project based problem we are all facing -- I can get some small about of additional work.

Maybe because they don't know what the problem is, they're still trying to figure it out. Maybe because they're human beings just like us and after a long day of trying to figure it out and doing all the other scientific stuff they have to do, they just want to go home and not take a few minutes more to explain the stuff that's still frustrating them.

And for all those who say no other project has these problems, if they had as many users as Seti@home, they'd have the problems too.

The problem is that the infrastructure (servers and bandwidth capacity) is way under what is needed for the current operation.

BINGO. There are more volunteers than there is data. Result frustration.

To the project admins:
Will (have) you consider asking the university giving you a second network line to ease the data connection?
Do you have enough Aceribo data? Will you look for alternate Radio telescope data?