1) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (81) Server Problems? (Message 1340494) Posted 24 Feb 2013 by Brother Frank Post: Thanks for the reminder. Be sure and use the e-mail you used for registering at Seti@Home when you fill out your online donation form. If you don't, getting your green star will take many contacts and a long time. My wife and I donated $100 about a month ago and no green star yet. I forgot what e-mail I used for Seti@Home and mistakenly used my business related e-mail on the donor form. Even with Uli's help, the correction takes a long time. Some of us may be in the same boat I am. I'll try to keep getting my green star, but realized that the University of California got back to us right away via letter and e-mail saying the money went to the Seti@Home account and acknowledging it. That green star is nice and a way of acknowledging a contribution, but more important to us is that we plan to make regular donations to Seti@Home and continue with our crunching electrical contribution in kind. Even more important to me is realizing how close we might actually be to putting Seti@Home on firm financial footing with just a little consciousness raising.There is an incredible amount of upside for us. Imagine if only 10% of active participants in number crunching gave cash contributions averaging about $25.00 per year instead of the current contribution level of less than 1/10th of 1%. Seti@home would be on very firm financial footing because 15,000 of us donating $25 per year on average would result in roughly $375,000 per year in annual budget support. Wow, we have it within our hands to make this really work well. We just need to ask for help and make that request visible and noticeable to people who care.

2) Message boards : Number crunching : The 84 cents a month fundraiser. (Message 1333972) Posted 2 Feb 2013 by Brother Frank Post: A very fine encouraging message. When people donate to Seti@home they need to be sure to give the e-mail associated with their account. I forgot that and used the account I use most for business transactions. Whoops, it was not the one associated with Seti@home. My Green Star will be delayed because of this and Uli is helping me with that. I thought about my willingness to donate much like you did Mark. I've invested all this money in graphics cards. A donation will help Seti at Home with getting the project's needs fulfilled. I'm thinking of improved handling of uploads and downloads and improved staffing. With hundreds of thousands of active volunteers, there's good reason to believe a large proportion of us would contribute to help the project's center and staffing needs. Beginning now with this first donation, I promise to talk about Seti with my friends and raise its charitable profile with them. P.S. Here's the link that explains how effective Seti@home is as a scientific project. Overall about 90% of the funds go directly toward project expenses and very little to fund raising expenses. That's excellent and up there with the best. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_donate.php

3) Message boards : Technical News : The New Year Unfolds... (Jan 10 2013) (Message 1327168) Posted 12 Jan 2013 by Brother Frank Post: Thanks so much Matt. I appreciate the overview of your quick check and diagnosis methods. It makes a great deal of sense given your shortage of staffing. When things go wrong on my six computers here, it is often an internet connectivity issue like Comcast being down or my modem or router getting turned off accidentally. I check that first. If it is common to all my machines, I often just let it go for a while and let the issue rest. As I run out of work, I gradually switch machines over to backup projects. My favorites are GPU Grid for my Nvidia cards and Rosetta at Home for my CPU's They respond very fast and soon all machines are running flat out on them. The main thing for me has been to learn to relax and take it easy with all this. I do what I can without running around too much from machine to machine. Sometimes, I get a bad update from Nvidia and have to roll it back to the last widely accepted version. Other times, I've had a section of memory go bad or a hard drive fry. Am slowly learning to take things in stride. Like with you, but to a much smaller degree, I often have something not quite working right and every so often, a major repair is involved. It was very kind of you to share with us. It puts me much more at ease because I know now that you attack the problems and find and tweak many issues. I love your idea of computer malaise or network malaise. A vague type of discomfort from an unpecified source describes it well. Generally my malaise turns to specific types of issues as I am with Seti @Home longer and longer. That's headed in the right direction. Brother Frank

4) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (80) Server Problems? (Message 1321491) Posted 29 Dec 2012 by Brother Frank Post: My upload timeouts began about Wednesday and got worse day by day. Noticed that my RAC rose and rose from Dec 5th until Dec 27th time point. I am getting work unit limit reached even on my little i3 notebook without dedicated graphics. Nothing is working here anymore. Am switching to alternate project GPU Grid and Rosetta @ Home today. Have tried proxy servers and no new work setting used during that very bad set of scheduler/server problems from November to early December time period. This last two + days feels as bad as the last meltdown.

5) Message boards : News : Scheduler is back up... (Message 1312362) Posted 8 Dec 2012 by Brother Frank Post: I've been getting new work since yesterday. Then there was a blip for a while when I was not able to upload work easily. It must have gone on for most of the day today with my desktop with one Nvidia Ti 550 Card. Today has been better. My RAC really took a hit over the last two to three weeks, but for perhaps ten days I was not able to get any new work at all or upload any either. Soon after Eric's message about Servers being up but that there would still be some problems everything started to get better. I had turned most of my computers over to GPU Grid and Rosetta @ Home, and Milky Way, my backup projects. Now I am turning them slowly over to Seti at Home again by not getting any new work from my alternates. I don't believe Seti @ Home is able to handle the work load reliably anymore and will move into and out of these alternates and World Community Grid too for my little i3 notebook. I really believe that staffing issues and low priority for them at UC Berkeley is hurting the project a lot. Since that is true from my experience over the past year, It's all a matter or spreading computing capability around some more so that disease fighting and cure discovery projects get some benefit. Don't want to get compulsive anymore about just running Seti work. If I just adjust my attitude more toward doing the best I can and not getting too unhappy when Seti at Home goes down, I'll be much happier. I enjoy sharing on Google+ a great deal too and writing back and forth to people there with similar interests (photography, nature, helping people to understand complex topics, science fiction, human interest stories, animals and conservation, and having a smile on my face and enjoying life, and my computers and love of the web and sharing). I'll start making some donations to the Graphics Processors Users Group for Seti at Home equipment needs and to Seti at Home directly too. Year after year it will add up and I really want Seti at Home to succeed. I want to be positive, constructive in any criticism, and will try to help others on Seti at Home as I gain experience in my own right with using this software and managing my computers using BOINC. One thing is for sure. I am getting more and more committed to Citizen Science and Citizen Computing Projects.

6) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (79) Server Problems? (Message 1308028) Posted 20 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: SETI UPLOADS of finished work are slowly being retrieved. I had to turn off my proxy server activity and return to the normal BOINC communication channel first. First I used the Network Communication request to break out of a long time-out. Then I did manual update. I am going to try to let them all run by themselves now. A hint came later this afternoon when my little Toshiba Portege R705 with i3 processor and integrated graphics was able to send back its finished work. My Intel i7 2600k based box with two Nvidia GTX 550 Ti cards was just able to send about 60 work units back over the last half hour. The first time in about a day. It had run out of work too. All day Sunday and Monday until mid-afternoon were very dry periods here. I also got new work units to process this evening. Other boxes with Nvidia cards are also slowing returning to life. I found that I could break out of the long timeouts and issue a manual update soon after I updated my i7 2670qm based notebook later this afternoon. Seti is not running right yet, because it is only sending gpu jobs to my i7 2670 qm notebook with one dedicated Nvidia 525m card, but no work at all for its other 7 processors. It's a start. Thank you Seti at Home team working at the lab. Whatever changes you made are helping variety of windows 7 machines and my one core duo notebook using Windows Vista. All have 64 bit operating systems and are running Home Premium. My Core Duo desktop is running Windows 7 Ultimate. Brother Frank

7) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1307216) Posted 18 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: It's movie time at the homestead. Streaming Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with Judy Dench. It is funny, affirming, adventurous journey for several newly retired English couples finding a new life in What They Think Is a luxury retirement hotel. Hmhh haha.... It's on Amazon.com for $3. The main crunchers: Amber, Henri, and Lilly (kitties all) are on set and forget till tomorrow later morning. Good luck volunteers; happy proxy dreams. Goodbye kitties. Hope you have enough to eat. Here: a link for the movie: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120502/REVIEWS/120509993 Brother Frank

8) Message boards : Number crunching : Suggestions for people having problems connecting to the servers (Message 1307175) Posted 17 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: I found this useful helpful hints post on the number crunching Message Board. I may be violating some protocol, but at the University I often share very useful helpful hints to one or more of my lists. This was posted less than an hour ago. I may try the second solution on one of my boxes. I am also having the same problem with my proxies that Juan mentions. They are not working well at all: Here's the useful post: Thank you cdemers. Brother Frank cdemers Send message Joined: 18 May 99 Posts: 8 Credit: 6,469,801 RAC: 17,205 Message 1307159 - Posted: 17 Nov 2012 | 20:08:43 UTC Last modified: 17 Nov 2012 | 20:11:32 UTC I thought I would start a new thread and not clog up the other threads with information/suggestions/etc... I know this problem should be solved on the server side, but it is a bit of a complex issue and may take a while to resolve, and myself like others want to keep on a crunching. :) This is just my observations and recomendations from working though the connection problems. Further reading can be found in the following threads: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=69890 http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=69995 There are a couple work arounds that seem to be working for some people. The simplest one is to use a proxy, the problem is finding one that you can use. I won't recomend any particular one, best to find one that works for you. For myself I took a differnt route which is working for me. I use Windows 7 and Windows XP on my crunch boxes. What I found is that the default TCP settings for me were not working well for slow links, so I ran the following program to adjust the settings to work better on slow links: TCP Optimizer - Info about the program: http://www.speedguide.net/tcpoptimizer.php Where to download it from: http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php I would only recomend this to anyone that is comfortable with doing this. It makes changes to your windows registry. As with any program like this you should take precautions. Run the program as Administrator, select the Optimize button at the bottom, then apply. It will show you what it is going to change and press OK. After that for the settings to become active you need to reboot your computer. Note don't change any other settings in the program unless you really know what you are doing. I'm just trying to keep this as simple as possible. Since I have done it on my boxes I have had little trouble downloading and reporting work. Now it's not a 100% fix, but it does allow me to download and report with minimum of fuss. Just as a side note, I am running on DSL, might be interesting to see what other kinds of services people are using that are having issues. Average ping time to setiathome.berkeley.edu is 95ms no packet loss Average ping time to setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu 145ms odd packet loss Well that is my 0.02 cents for now. I will go back to lurking. :) EDIT: If anyone else has an suggestions the seem to work for them let us know. ____________ ID: 1307159 | Reply Quote

9) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1307053) Posted 17 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: My desktops and newer notebooks with Nvidia graphics cards are getting work now after changing them all over to proxy servers. My little laptops with integrated graphics are not getting new work anymore and timing out. My i3 notebook is timing out, told there is no work, and has reached it's limits for jobs in progress. Lots of ghosts. The integrated graphic card notebooks started to have big issues with downloading work today and are fast running out of work. I'll try to keep my desktops and new notebook going, but I am not going to intervene anymore manually with the upload and download problems with my slightly older notebooks. I hope Seti at Home can work these networking/scheduler and ghost issues out. Am switching the 2 and 3 year old notebooks over to other BOINC projects like world community grid and a cosmology project or two. These issues have to be affecting a huge number of volunteers, as in hundreds of thousands. Many of us are making hundreds and thousands of dollars of in-kind donations. Very important and critical good will is being lost here by letting these upload and download issues to remain unaddressed and low priority. I hope project leaders understand how large an impact this loss of good will is going to be. Please listen to what many of us are saying here. We are among your most dedicated. Brother Frank

10) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1306863) Posted 16 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Thank you so much Juan. I used the url you gave us and the message of yours that I have replied to here and asked for United States proxies with an uptime of more than 90% for upload and download. I used the https proxy. The table of proxies I got back listed the host and the IP address. This is all under Projects and then Tools above it in a light blue in the Boinc Manager. I had to enter the IP address with each followed by a period. When I just used the standard spacing without a period mark, I got an error message in my log file saying "unable to resolve host" This takes a little bit of experimentation in entry format because it is assumed that everyone has this spacing and form of entry knowledge. No user name or password was necessary. In my HP Intel Core Duo Desktop E5200 processor with Nvidia 550 Ti graphics card I got more than 20 new fermi cuda work units right away. I hadn't got anything in more than a day. Thank you. Thank you Juan. You are a lifesaver for this frustrated cruncher. I believe this is some kind of telecommunications issue or networking issue that may not be very difficult to solve because the change to proxy url worked so fast in getting me new work. I hope this detail helps some of you. My RAC is sinking below 30k now, but I have more hope thanks to many of you who have been discussing the proxy server interim solution. This is helpful for my computers running Nvidia graphics cards. My machines without dedicated graphics cards are still doing ok, but with some time out issues still. Brother Frank

11) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1306671) Posted 16 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Thank you Horacio and Juan. I just needed someone to confirm that I set this up under my advanced options for http and now you have given me hints on how to find the proxies. I haven't seen anything written so far on what port setting to use. Anyone have any suggestions there? I will try to google this idea, but I would sure appreciate it if someone would poing us/me to a good article on the topic. I am feeling pretty frustrated now and have switched over to alternative projects GPU Grid, Milky Way and World Community Grid and Einstein for my desktops with Nvidia 550 Ti cards. My newer notebook with an i7 2670 qm processor and Nvidia 525m graphics card is also having a lot of trouble getting work since this morning. Even this little Toshib i3 computer. a Portege R705 with integrated graphics is having trouble now getting work with lots of time outs and no work available during most of today. Am frustrated just like a lot of others, but will keep trying and handing off to alternative projects when scheduler problems get this bad. Seti RAC is dropping like a stone, but hey, I'm just trying to lend a hand when I can. I hope that we don't lost a lot of SETI at Home participants over this. Brother Frank

12) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1306440) Posted 15 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Frank, I've been having a lot of this too and all my desktops with Nvidia GTX 550 ti graphics processors have been slowly running out of work. I have used the No new tasks option and then update followed by the allow new tasks and update a few minutes later after tasks upload routine again and again over the last week or so with gradually decreasing success. As of about 6 a.m. this morning I was out of all work on both desktops. I've switched over to my old standby's gpugrid, world community grid, and a few other cosmology projects. Some of us believe the problem is with the scheduler not being able to keep track of tasks completed and sending out way to many tasks. Many of us have many dozens and many hundreds of ghost processes in the system. There also seems to be an association between Astro Pulse work being split and sent out which may be fouling the rest of the scheduling work. The internet bandwidth of the 100 meg line from the lab to BOINC seems to be far beyond capacity. Some of us have noticed this big problem of getting work and reporting work after a maintenance downtime about 3 or 4 weeks ago. I noticed that the system seemed to come out of that maintenance fine and all my computers were happily send working out and getting new work without time outs or failures. My recollection is that it (Seti at Home) stopped running well after just a few hours. My notebooks, even one with an Nvidia 525m graphics processor and an i7 2670 qm core processor is still getting some work and reporting out, but having dozens and dozens of reporting failures and time outs every day. My i3 notebook with intel integrated graphics is doing fine. My little core duo notebook whose Radeon 2600 series processor doesn't qualify to run jobs is working fine too. As I wrote earlier, I am gradually switching over to alternative projects with my desktops beginning today. I have never seen it this bad in my year here and am rethinking my priorities. Right now I am thinking a new project mix will be 2 parts medical discovery and disease fighting projects along with some Seti at Home work with my notebooks. I have fought this kind of chronic frustration at work before and it is too stressful for many people to handle well. The low limits on work per cpu and graphics processor are already hitting my desktops even though they were both down to just a few dozen short work units each. The limits will not help with the problem at all according to what I have read here. From my point of view, the download/upload issue became much more severe after that maintenance downtime around 4 weeks ago. I remember it all happened not too long after my wife and I got back from a memorial service for a close family member around mid October. We had just returned from visiting our families for an extended period and were building RAC up again slowly. Momentum stopped. Sorry, I don't have enough data to track it back to an exact date. I hope the Seti folks address this very, very soon. They are way understaffed, but I know they have the project's interests at heart. I know too that there are times when a project just has to step back and solve serious issues that may negatively affect project morale if left without at least a partial or interim solution. Brother Frank on Seti at Home.

13) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1306261) Posted 14 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Cherokee150, I know something went very seriously wrong after an update or maintenance period three or four weeks ago. Things went very well for a few hours and then I stopped getting work. Seti@Home has never been right since. My notebooks without dedicated graphics cards are getting work in and then back out fine. One has a RAC of about 700; another has a RAC of about 1250 and then a single core machine has a RAC of about 175. (That's an older Pentium machine about ten years old). My desktops with Nvidia GTX 550Ti Cards are the ones having a lot of trouble. My Core Duo with one Nvidia GTX 550 Ti is about to run out of work and is getting lots of time outs and some transient https failures. It has a RAC of about 7,400, but normally has been around 8,000 My i7 2600k machine with two Nvidia GTX 550's normally has a RAC of 22,000 to 24,000, but is down to about 18,000 now. Again, lots of time outs and no work available messages, transient https failures, and time outs as well as backoffs. I have had to play with the NNT button a lot with the desktops to keep them in work, but that tends to foul up the getting work routine. I also have a newer notebook with an i7-2670qm processor and an Nvidia 525m graphics processor. It tends to keep its queue full, but sometimes I've had to play with the NNT and update buttons. I think I get upset with it all and kinda forget for a few minutes that it runs pretty much ok if I leave it unattended, but just check in twice a day. It has a RAC of just about 5,000. I don't know for sure about the number of ghosts, but I believe both the desktops have a lot of them because I see a message every so often about recovering lost work or jobs. With the new notebook running at about 5,000 RAC I should have an overall RAC of about 37,000 or close, but I am running several thousand behind that even though we run 24/7. This is another indication to me that something might be pretty wrong in getting work credit or sending work back. I don't know what is wrong. I am not a technical or database expert, but like I said near the start of this message something very wrong happened with a maintenance cycle around 4 or 5 weeks ago and the problem has remained in both sending work out and getting new work. Brother Frank. Black, white, and tabby kitties here are worried about me. Henri, my big tabby, lies on my chest comforting me from PSA (Post Seti Anxiety).

14) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1304658) Posted 10 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Tom, I do notice in the Tools option in the Boinc Management Menu there are ways of setting connections with two kinds of proxies: One is a socks proxy and there is one other option. Is this where I would put my proxy internet ID numbers? The next question is how to find these proxies. I am not at all sure how to do that and where to look to find it. I use Comcast as my ISP and have an enhanced help service available to me. I am running pretty well with my notebook computers except for the very powerful one which is now not able to download much at all when I set to no new tasks. My two desktops with good Nvidia graphics cards are gradually running out of work. Perhaps you or some others here that are informed and good explainers of setting up the proxies can give me some informed finding aids and tools here. I am willing to work at it once I know how to start. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. It will probably help many others too. I am sorry to say this, but we are really getting very little help out of the project as this grinds many of us to a halt. Brother Frank

15) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (78) Server Problems? (Message 1304254) Posted 10 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: What SETI Really Needs And Our Current Data Problems $350 Gift On The Way By Frank Elliott, Brother Frank on Seti@Home It's very discouraging to be purchasing computers especially designed or manufactured to give my wife and I a high level of Seti @ Home signal crunching and read very little about any efforts being made to solve problems undercutting our ability to do work for the project. However, I think the problem is not likely that of the dedicated staff and scientists at Seti not wanting to communicate with us. I think instead it is a funding problem at the personnel level and at the equipment and communication level too. I think too that many of us may want to and be able to step in for funding help. The difficulty I see is that I really don't know what would be needed to get the project running well in terms of handling the huge amount of data that needs to be analyzed. We probably need an interim funding goal and a continued yearly funding goal. I don't know either if there are gifted people willing to step in, but who absolutely must have it be a paid job so that they can support themselves and their families. There is a severe loss in productivity and turnover if the project relies on too many part-time and volunteer positions at headquarters. Continuity and staff knowledge and skills are so important in the medium and long term. I am able to do the following. I have about 200 dollars in one of my bonus accounts for a credit card and can use it to pay the bill for that account. I'll use it this November and send the roughly 200 I didn't have to pay to Seti. I also have another 150 bucks from a bank bonus account for reaching some goals. I will send that to Seti too. I hope some of you or maybe many of you who can will send money you have in bonus or credit giving card accounts to Seti. So, the next business day, On next Monday, I will send $350 to Seti. I am wanting Seti to dedicate $175 of that money toward staff and $175 toward equipment if they can. However, this first year, you may use this money in a general account toward any of your needs as you see fit. When my life and I lived in Toledo almost thirty years ago, we belonged to an Astronomy Society. I believe there were about 100 of us. We had a fund drive to build a rather large 25 inch reflecting telescope, the mounting, and an observatory. You wouldn't believe how much money we raised in that small group. Owens Corning donated the 25 inch mirror blank to us and we ground it ourselves. Other people stepped in with a land donation. We all worked helping to build the telescope and the observatory and then mount the big rotating dome on top of the building. I hope that Seti can raise several million dollars a year. We should be able to with the dedicated volunteers we have. We will need a much larger fund raising group and many contacts with local and national media to spread the word that we are serious about finding a way to continue funding the project. Then, other large donors like Paul Allen and many medium and small ones will step in too. We need the help of a dedicated group of small donors year after year with sustaining pledges like Public Television does, with one at a time pledges, and with large donation that do special things. I have been taught in fundraising that most large donors don't want to supply ongoing funding to a project and that it is very important for a project to have a self-sustaining base. Then that attracts donors who want to help with the very important extra's that are very important but not quite essential and start up funds like Paul Allen provided for the Allen Telescope Array. So $350 is my immediate pledge. I hope many of you out there will donate as much as you comfortably can to Seti's fundraising for this year and on a regular basis if you can. I will make further donations as I am able, but the majority of that is contingent on Seti really deciding what it wants to do on a yearly basis and what that would cost. I want that to be realistic. Not a low ball figure that counts on all kinds of good possibilities happening. Not a high ball figure that goes far beyond making the staff adequate and solving some very severe problems we are having now like getting data into and out of the volunteers. I have watched as things have gone down hill with data delivery and data input problem since about last February. It is now about as bad as it can get for very high level crunchers, perhaps in the top 200. For me at 313 now in the top 1,000 participants (about 34,300 RAC) it is a big issue running around to my computers and turning no new tasks on and off and then remembering to turn new tasks on so I can get some data to crunch. Please, please SETI. Let us know what you need and make a reasonable budget. I know many, many of us are willing and able to help. One time small donations of $l0 or more are also going to help, but just think what having 10,000 donors who are willing to send $200 to $500 per year and above to the project would do. The project would be on firm footing. What is $350 average times 10,000. It is 3.5 million dollars. My wife and I have donated a few hundred to $1,000 per year to many projects over the years. I don't understand why Seti could not be one of those for us and perhaps many of us who are committed to astronomy and space exploration, and the search for intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and it star systems that we can target as likely locations for life. That would work for the project wouldn't it. I am thinking it would make people like Paul Allen very happy too. My first donation of $350 will be sent to you online or via the web on Monday.

16) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with Update (Message 1302375) Posted 5 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: The technique you describe Fred of setting updates to no new tasks (NNT) and then updating has worked very well for me and the little crunchers around here. Sometimes I hit the do network communication too so that I'm able to break out of a long time out. Then when that clears the hour or so time out delay, I hit the manual update. It almost always works within a few minutes. After I get the update out, I set Boinc Manager to accept new work again. A few hours later I repeat the sequence again. I have noticed my core duo notebook and my i3 notebook run ok by themselves sometimes, but I'm always having to do this for my desktops and my new Dell XPS 15.6 i7-2670qm with a dedicated Nvidia GT 525m graphics card. I am wondering if the dedicated Nvidia graphics cards are part of this problem too because the computers without them are not having the update problem constantly in the last few days. I sure hope this can be addressed as part of maintenance next week or before. Please, Please. There is something else though that is bothering me a great deal more than this one issue though. It is a that there is far too much unreliability of the equipment and network that gets the signal data out of Seti to be processed by the volunteers and then back to Seti when it is processed. That unreliability is causing far too much wasted time and effort from a great number of people. It is probably getting to the point where it must be worked out and solved. If this "burping and indigestion" needs a fund drive to solve it centered around new equipment, I would be happy to donate a hundred or two to be part of a solution with a funding drive of some kind when the folks back at Seti know what the equipment issues are. Really though, I don't know if this is a telecommunications bandwidth problem, a server and database problem, a power and voltage reliability problem, or some combination of the three. Could a technical expert in a set of complicated issues like this who has an interest in Seti help us get to the core problems and give us suggestions as a non-profit or even donate time to help us? I've just been a volunteer part of this for less than a year now, but would really like to see Seti@Home get to the bottom of this and solve it. It's about time to attack this issue. Brother Frank

17) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (77) Server Problems? (Message 1301141) Posted 2 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Dear Sutaru Tsureku, I did what you suggested and set my download to no new tasks and then waited five minutes or so. Then I "abused my Update button" by pressing it, but only once. I used to really hit the darned thing so often, but I'm getting more subtle and not "using that hammer" all the time. A few minutes later, all of my 50 or so built up completed tasks had been swallowed up. I moved from this desktop with one Nvidia Ti 550 graphics card to my new notebook and did the same thing. Again in just a few minutes my 40 or so completed tasks were swallowed. I went downstairs to my i7 2600k desktop with two Nvidia Ti 550 graphics cards and it had swallowed all its completed tasks -- probably 70-80 of them. I am feeling a great sense of relief like you have helped me find a wonderful brand of computer laxative. Wow, Thanks for reminding me of this wonderful inexpensive procedure. I am breaking out in song,"Oh What A Relief IT IS -- la la la la la.... la la. Hurray." I hope this is not too racy. It's in the same fine tradition found in the writings of the esteemed 16th Century author Francois Rabelais, a scholar and humorist who penned the tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel. French literature including Rabelais and Michel de Montaigne was one of my very favorite college courses. Brother Frank

18) Message boards : News : We are recovering from a database crash (Message 1301097) Posted 1 Nov 2012 by Brother Frank Post: I don't think so. Yesterday I noticed that none of my computers have been able to send completed work in. I have 40 to 60 completed jobs sitting in my task list for each of my two desktops and my powerful notebook and my RAC number has not been modified for a couple of days now on either of those machines. This afternoon I started to get long Communication deferrals of 3 hours or more. That started a little earlier with a 60 minute delay. Things looked ok when the site first came up out of the maintenance period. I haven't been able to find anything posted on this when I search all the message threads, but it appears that something is very wrong with the upload process. I am continuing to process the work I have hoping that it will resolve itself. I notice a number of transient http errors and messages saying the internet connection seems to be down. My computers are reporting jobs completed, but on my more active machines, nothing gets out. My less powerful notebooks seem to post eventually, but they too are having problems with reporting out.

19) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (75) Server problems? (Message 1253985) Posted 1 Jul 2012 by Brother Frank Post: It feels just like that doesn't it? Something I have started to learn through SETI is to be very patient and let life flow around and over these slow downs. I used to get pretty upset when my RAC would drop by 25% and all was humming along just fine. No more. I turn to Netflix and my episodes of Burn Notice, MI-5, Plain Sight, or Jeremiah, etc. and just wait it out while enjoying myself. Makes no sense to let SETI hiccups take my emotions downhill. Life has been a good teacher for me in the ways of being centered and looking at the big picture. Your way of making humor out of a hassle is great. Thank to you Grumpy old Swede... Brother Frank from Minnesota

20) Message boards : Number crunching : Panic Mode On (73) Server problems? (Message 1214474) Posted 6 Apr 2012 by Brother Frank Post: Whew, something or someone really opened the flood gates the later part of this afternoon. I had one download say 127k, but it went back down to 10 right away. Then gradually it has built and built until I had three downloads coming in at once and all of them at 70 or 80k to start. Just a few minutes ago, one hit around 327k for its brief second of activity. This is what happens sometimes with GPU Grid, but never on SETI for me. Thank you. Thank you. Either the folks at BOINC or SETI or both have really done good. I hope you know what it was that opened the gates up after about a week and a half of very slow going. Brother Frank from Minnesota

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