Sound Chaser (Dec 12 2012)

I returned to the lab again on Monday (after nearly 2 months off traveling all over Europe from France to Bulgaria and everything in between). Many thanks once again to Jeff and Eric who maintained operations during my absence (and dealing with the heinous power outage/database corruption woes last week).

During that power failure we lost one of our lesser servers (lando). Not sure exactly what happened to it, but it kept crashing. Luckily we had an ample replacement server on the shelf, and thus lando has been reborn. I set up this new system and more and more we're using Scientific Linux, which is a lot like Fedora but geared towards a bit more stability (instead of major version upgrades every 6 months and falling off support shortly after each upgrade). Basically it's an OS for people who use computers to actually compute! So far so good.

Anyway, the fallout of this last outage is that we are weighing several giant plans to move forward in the new year regarding how we maintain (or perhaps relocate) our server closet, with better network, cooling, power, remote kvm access, and UPS protection all parts of this equation.

Our assimilators are falling behind, or not catching up as fast as they should. Jeff and I are stumped about this at the moment, as there are no obvious smoking guns, but it may just be a typical case of several hidden bottlenecks working in conjunction with each other to give us a headache. It's not a real problem right now, but we'll be kicking things around on this front in the coming days.

I also just started a secondary funding drive e-mail, basically a follow-up to the mass mail sent in October/November. If you haven't opted out of such mails, or your spam filter isn't too aggressive, then you should be seeing one of those in your mailbox sometime in the near future. Of course, we already vastly appreciate the donation of your computer cycles!

Okay, back to work. I'll be around for the next while. There's more crazy world tour plans in the spring, but nothing solid yet, and definitely nothing until then. I'll be here until at least mid April, if not longer...

- 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

Welcome back Matt.
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Welcome back Matt.

Welcome back Matt, thanks for the update,

Claggy

Welcome back world traveler Matt!! Glad you had a good tour(I think you said that).
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The BOINC_VM Virtual Machine downloaded from Test4Theory@home, using only 256 MB RAM, is running CERN jobs using Scientific Linux. This is a Linux with no GUI but I see the OS booting and starting up in the BOINC_VM window. All Windows and Mac OS X user can download their BOINC_VM and they all run the same CERN jobs using a program called PYTHIA simulating proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.
Tullio

Welcome back Matt, we and Seti have missed you!!

And thanks for the Technical update, it always helps the troops to know what's in the pipeline. Back until April? Wow we should be in fine form by then!

Welcome back and thanks for the update. We all hope you enjoyed your time away, and that the New Year plans can solve this and future potential problems.

Thanks

John
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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

Welcome back Matt and thanks for the update. Hope you had a rocking time in Europe.
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In an alternate universe, it was a ZX81 that asked for clothes, boots and motorcycle.

Beer/wine o'clock, the best of the o'clocks.

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall, along came a giant, and cooked him for breakfast.

I'm sure you had a rollicking time on your tour, Matt.
But many of us are very happy to see you back in the lab.
Glad you will be around to do some sorting and kicking for a while.


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"Ask not, what your kitty can do for you. Ask what you can do for your kitty."

As it is kitten, so shall it be done.

Matt,

I bet Jeff and Eric were really happy to see you!

-Boomer
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