Seeing Matt's posting here (which basically is the wrong place, it should be placed here : http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/bb/bb3/index.cgi) is something that happened very often, leaving some 250k people wondering what might be going on.

WARNING: We will soon be ramping down these message boards and we highly encourage everybody to start using the BOINC message board system:
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_index.php

Of course, you'll have to register your account with BOINC to post new messages there. In case you haven't done so, information is here:
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_participate.php

More information about the new SETI@home in general: http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu

...Heck, I would be in favor of an additional forum here (with no credit requirement for posting... That *IS* configurable by the project) named something like Cafe Classic... Where all the former (and soon to be former) participants in S@H-Classic could maintain their sense of community... But this is another issue.
...

...Heck, I would be in favor of an additional forum here (with no credit requirement for posting... That *IS* configurable by the project) named something like Cafe Classic... Where all the former (and soon to be former) participants in S@H-Classic could maintain their sense of community... But this is another issue.
...

There are the Q&A forums that do not need any credit to be able to post.

Aside: I also view s@h-classic and Boinc-s@h as parts of the same s@h project. At the time, s@h-classic was groundbreaking bleeding edge stuff. We're now in new times to develop new improved software from what has been learnt from s@h-classic. Note that s@h-classic is a great achievement and is still as great as ever for what it is. Now it is time to build something even better from that with the Boinc system.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

I personally have over 100,000 hours in computer time...

That’s been the problem for over 20 years in the typical computing environment. Problems in coding errors were pointed out in the late 80’s still are plaguing systems today in the form of buffer overruns, stack errors/faults and pointer problems, these faults being present in many libraries currently used. But the assemblers, compliers and linkers were shipped nevertheless with the “known issues” present! Staff has moved on, documentation not completed or even existing at phase one, with patches upon patches upon patches.

Profit being made at the expense of users! It appears Academia still teaches these unfortunate techniques today, assuming students have any contact with this project and its hardware?

After over 30 years, where is the “Warranty of merchantability” in virtually any operating system. If my vehicles quit, would not travel in the direction wished, had to be restarted, and were as insecure as my operating system, well you get the drift.

Why should this be any different in a computing code project and/or process? Don’t give me this is so “much more complex” check out the amount of design, documentation, planning and reporting in a typical motor vehicle. Not to mention the regulatory necessities involved.

... I hope the existing problems can be resolved in a reasonable time frame, for if the storage requirements become too great, I will dump the completed results to date and project in general.

I personally have over 100,000 hours in computer time being donated under the seti classic project and after reading this set of “Here are some reasons off the top of my head that SETI@home Classic is shutting down” I feel a response is necessary to some of your points of perpetual misinformation, this all too typical of the computing environment.


SNIP


I hope the existing problems can be resolved in a reasonable time frame, for if the storage requirements become too great, I will dump the completed results to date and project in general.

Dennis

if some people had migrated earlier as requested for months on the Classic site

BOINC WORKING REALLY WELL!
OR IS IT?

I have not uploaded of downloaded for over 2 days!
uploads of blocks are still waiting.
perhaps xmas & new year hols have started early for BOINC team?

old seti classic never had any probs!
and worked over holidays with no probs.

but perhaps i'm the only one??

Don't feel bad my BONIC has been nonfunctional for 4 days now. I have over 29 uploads qued up on this system alone, and probably the same amount on my other systems. Now it's quit downloading data for processing. I agree with the other people you shouldn't have switched to this system, the classic one NEVER had these problems it ALWAYS worked. Please get your act together, and fix the problems.

the classic one NEVER had these problems it ALWAYS worked.

I keep seeing in these forum threads various valid complaints. Here are some reasons off the top of my head that SETI@home Classic is shutting down, and other facts of life that may very well address your particular concern:

1. SETI@home Classic has no funding at this point. Hasn't had it for years now. Costs about $500,000/year at a minimum to run the thing. SETI@home as we know it now is coasting on fumes until (hopefully) more funding somehow appears. BOINC has funding. Therefore, putting SETI@home on BOINC has given it at least some life in the past two years, and is really the only chance for any kind of future.

2. SETI@home Classic was supposed to be a 3 or 4 year project to begin with. So it's well past it's proposed lifespan with no money added to keep it going.

3. The science in SETI@home Classic is basically over. We collected more than enough data with the current instrument. We have a new data recorder close to finished and a new BOINC client will be in the works to analyze this data. To keep Classic going would mean compiling a new Classic client to analyze this data. It's been a loooong time since a new Classic client has been built. The code is stale, and the build machines are ancient and painful to use (if they even exist anymore).

4. The SETI@home Classic backend is a tangled mess. There have been many problems over the years, most of which were invisible to the participants. None of these problems were fatal to the project or its science, but have resulted in an obnoxious web of ridiculous dependencies, confusing configurations, and unweildy databases. I am practically drooling dreaming of day when we get to turn all that stuff off and be done with it already. The BOINC backend is sooooo much easier to deal with.

5. The current crises are just par for the course in the history of our SETI project and public resource computing. Things break, deep breaths are taken, and they get fixed eventually. This isn't good for making our participants happy of course, but we do our best with what we got and so far our user base has stuck with us through the painful periods (thank you!!!).

6. BOINC was written so you can connect to other projects when there are server issues with a specific project. This is a good thing. SETI@home Classic has no such ability.

7. BOINC credit, while not perfect (though we're working on that), is much more fair in that it represents actual work done, and is valid between projects which do all kinds of different work. There is no way to translate Classic credit to BOINC credit, and so this will never happen. Classic credits will be noted in a separate field in a user profile (and will be eventually sync'ed up again after Classic shuts down).

8. Though I don't have any accurate numbers to back this up, I personally feel that so far SETI@home/BOINC has had more uptime on average than Classic. We had science database crashes every week at times back in the day, several whole weeks when we were down for database recovery or because somebody stole a cable, network bandwidth issues that brought us down for months. And these were just the public-facing downtime events (among but a few).

9. There is no tech support on staff. I end up with dozens of e-mails a day from people who figured out how to reach me. If I dealt with all these, that would occupy about 15-20% of my time. I don't have this time and neither does anybody else around here. Many of these e-mails go unaswered. Sad but true, and I personally find this painful but part of the big picture.

10. Yes, we can do better in the PR department. See #9 above. Don't have the staff or the money to add the staff. And it's not so easy to add news items to the page. I can't be bothered to go into detail why. I leave this as an exercise for the reader to figure out why.

11. The staff is small. Me and Jeff are continually up to our necks dealing with everything. We've both been here working on SETI long before SETI@home came around, so we both are well versed in every aspect of the "big picture" around here. Bob, the main database guy, actually only works half time. Court is busy dealing with various long term network/systems projects that Jeff and I can't handle since we're diagnosing, debugging, programming, or maybe actually getting science done. David and Rom (and other various programmers) strictly work on BOINC code. Eric works overtime on other non-SETI projects when he's not building the next SETI@home client. Dan, the project director, is spending a lot of time building spectrometers for other projects because that's where the money is. Outside of current academics (Kevin and Josh) working on other applications of SETI data, and students helping Dan build hardware that's it here at the lab. No administrative staff, no tech writers. When it comes time to fill out a new grant proposal, we all drop everything and work on that, for example.

12. If anybody complains elsewhere about any of the above, please be kind and point them to this post. People have the right to be upset with us since they are kindly donating their resources to us. However, there is a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about this project and I hope I cleared some of it up.

Now I'm off to bed. Going to LA tomorrow. Be back Sunday night.

- Matt

Hello
after 4 days awaiting that seti@home resolves by the appropriate way the problems related with your servers i'm displeased to announce that after a lot expending of power consumption and some money to acondicionate 7 servers to run properly the seti units processing i decide cancel my personal project due to deception that supose seti's best collaborative project i know ever, wasn't capable to preview the necessity of a High Availavility server or cluster that can't permit this bad moment and situation.

Hello
after 4 days awaiting that seti@home resolves by the appropriate way the problems related with your servers i'm displeased to announce that after a lot expending of power consumption and some money to acondicionate 7 servers to run properly the seti units processing i decide cancel my personal project due to deception that supose seti's best collaborative project i know ever, wasn't capable to preview the necessity of a High Availavility server or cluster that can't permit this bad moment and situation.

Good Bye

P.D.: I'm sorry for my and for my team. Thanks people.