[quote]All my machines are back up, SETI-crunching happily. I hope that means whatever was broken is now fixed and everyone else's clients will get new work soon.

Unfortunately the problem has returned the next day. Now I can't upload either.
(Access succeeded - servers down)

... and this is why the BOINC client caches work, and why BOINC supports multiple clients -- so that problems like this can happen and not be "problems."

The only thing that is "inconvenienced" is your computer.

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WTF?? I've got 3 machines running at two different lacations. They have not been able to upload, or download anything for the past 8 hours or so, despite plenty of work being available.

Oh, looks like the problem has cured itself as I was writting the above. All of a sudden both machines at my current location "miraculosly" fixed themeslves... Hmmm, looks fishy....

Generally speaking, the best way to "fix" problems is to just wait them out.

BOINC is designed for less than 99.999% reliability at the project/server end, because five-nines reliability would put volunteer/public computing out of reach of most projects.

SETI is probably running somewhere between 90% and 99% reliable right now, and when there is a problem overnight, it gets fixed when Matt, Jeff, Bob, etc. come to work.

... and the client software says "woo hoo!" and sends whatever they've been holding for the last few hours.

If you read the fora (particularly technical news) you'll see that Kryten is getting really tired, and Kryten's load is being moved to another server.

Expect to see things get better as the changes get done..

poor Kryten, The sooner He's put out of His misery, The sooner things can look something like normal, I'd even suggest a party, But that may or may not be a good idea, But then poor Kryten is just a computer afterall. :D I'm sure the problem right now with downloads and not being able to report will be fixed, Of course when that will happen is a good guess as the hardware may be a bit cranky. ;) I'm sure the guys are working on the problem as best they can of course.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

BOINC is designed for less than 99.999% reliability at the project/server end, because five-nines reliability would put volunteer/public computing out of reach of most projects.

SETI is probably running somewhere between 90% and 99% reliable right now, and when there is a problem overnight, it gets fixed when Matt, Jeff, Bob, etc. come to work.

Just did some quick numbers. For those curious, 99.999% reliability works out to roughly 5 minutes and 15.36 seconds of downtime in one year (assumes 365 days/year, 24 hours/day). If you figure roughly two hours of downtime each Tuesday each week for maintenance, that works out to a 98.813% reliability. Fairly good if you think about it for the amount of stress put on some of the servers. For reference one of my servers that's been running for 381.5 days straight now has a total downtime of about 1.5 days and it works out to 99.709% reliability. That's how hard five-nines is to achieve.

Like Ned said, this is part of the reason Boinc was designed to cache work and support multiple client programs. Let it go about it's work, problems tend to get fixed within a day (unless it's a weekend).

Justin

...one of my servers that's been running for 381.5 days straight now...

Crap. Went to remote into the box shortly after posting to upload results/download new work. Some error message flashed on the screen but before I could read it the remote desktop window closed. Next thing I know I hear beeping noises coming from the system and I can't connect to it at all. Couple minutes later I can connect again and find that it rebooted for some reason, with no help from the system logs. On the plus side I guess I can go about trying to get Windows to recognize and use the second CPU in the system.

OK guys.

Off the top of my head

An auction for Kryten when he is finally decommisioned.

Highest bidder, donates to SETI.

A chance to own a piece of BOINC/SETI history.

A possible goer?

I like the idea. Before you posted I was actually kinda wondering what they do with the old decomissioned servers. My guess though is they'll keep it around as spare parts for the other Sun boxes they've still got going (kosh, klaatu, koloth, galileo, and penguin).

Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

Justin

Just did some quick numbers. For those curious, 99.999% reliability works out to roughly 5 minutes and 15.36 seconds of downtime in one year (assumes 365 days/year, 24 hours/day). If you figure roughly two hours of downtime each Tuesday each week for maintenance, that works out to a 98.813% reliability. Fairly good if you think about it for the amount of stress put on some of the servers.

It's actually better, because generally speaking, scheduled maintenance isn't counted against reliability.

I know that's kinda cheating, but hey, it's the industry standard cheat, so I'm good with it.

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...one of my servers that's been running for 381.5 days straight now...

Crap. Went to remote into the box shortly after posting to upload results/download new work. Some error message flashed on the screen but before I could read it the remote desktop window closed. Next thing I know I hear beeping noises coming from the system and I can't connect to it at all. Couple minutes later I can connect again and find that it rebooted for some reason, with no help from the system logs. On the plus side I guess I can go about trying to get Windows to recognize and use the second CPU in the system.

OK guys.

Off the top of my head


An auction for Kryten when he is finally decommisioned.

Highest bidder, donates to SETI.

A chance to own a piece of BOINC/SETI history.

A possible goer?

I like the idea. Before you posted I was actually kinda wondering what they do with the old decomissioned servers. My guess though is they'll keep it around as spare parts for the other Sun boxes they've still got going (kosh, klaatu, koloth, galileo, and penguin).

Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

Justin

... or the project could use Kryten to actually run the project! (let's see... 6 cpus x [maybe] 50 credits/day per CPU...) ;-)

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.

Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Justin wrote:

...
Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosh

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Sir Arthur C Clarke 1917-2008

Justin wrote:

...
Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosh

Interesting. So that's where the names came from, I'm actually kind of curious how/why they chose those names though. I'm guessing one or more of the guys is/was a fan of some of those shows. How about Jocelyn though (somebodys wife maybe?), Thumper, and Bruno. Galileo and Penguin are pretty simple to figure out, and I think I read somewhere about Sidious.

Justin

Justin wrote:

...
Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosh

Interesting. So that's where the names came from, I'm actually kind of curious how/why they chose those names though. I'm guessing one or more of the guys is/was a fan of some of those shows. How about Jocelyn though (somebodys wife maybe?), Thumper, and Bruno. Galileo and Penguin are pretty simple to figure out, and I think I read somewhere about Sidious.

Justin

Read about Bruno here.

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I am not certain but I think the name Jocelyn came from astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell. As for Thumper, maybe the rabbit from Disney's Bambi?

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If you are from Greece, please visit the following:
Sicence Fiction and Fantasy Forum
The World of Science

As for Thumper, maybe the rabbit from Disney's Bambi?

Some Googling indicates that "Thumper" was the pre-release code name for the Sun Fire x4500 line of Opteron-based servers.

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Justin wrote:

...
Actually, that brings up a question, how were the names for the servers picked?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koloth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosh

Interesting. So that's where the names came from, I'm actually kind of curious how/why they chose those names though. I'm guessing one or more of the guys is/was a fan of some of those shows. How about Jocelyn though (somebodys wife maybe?), Thumper, and Bruno. Galileo and Penguin are pretty simple to figure out, and I think I read somewhere about Sidious.

Justin

This post from Eric in the Staff Blog gives most of the history.

Eric wrote:

... I'll take a few minutes before getting back to work to explain the history of names. We tend not to repeat names, so once a machine goes, the name will probably go with it.

When I started here people named machines after the research group leaders. Stu Boywer and Supria Chakrabarti had "stew" and "soup" repsectively. The rest of us had terminals. Then came "rocket," a 4MB, 16 Mhz diskless 68020, named so because that's what we worked on at the time.

The came a big NASA mission, EUVE. At that point things divided up into multiple camps. There were the big servers which were usually named with acronyms, SOC1 (science operations center) and SDAF1 (super duper aerodynamic frog maybe? I dunno.) Then we got a optical disk jukebox, so it seemed obvious that "elvis" would run that. Around this time the SETI group got a machine named "serendip"

Personal workstations were usually named after towns on the california coast. "pacifica," "bodega," "bolinas," "monterrey," and "laguna" all come to mind. When we ran out of those we moved on to single malt scotch varieties "highland," "lowland," "islay," "skye," "speyside," etc.

Then I worked on the Far Ultraviolet Coronal Rocket and got a machine named "mofo" for obvious reasons. (Don't explain them unless you want to be moderated.)

Following that, a trend for naming machines after famous scientists and writers developed, some fictional, starting with "albert" and continuing through "isaac," "asimov," "drake," "jill," "dyson," "clarke," "sagan," "ellie," "jocelyn," "herschel," "hawking," "jansky," "hertz," "galileo," "castelli," and "ewen."

There was a brief stint of Simpsons characters, "marge," "homer," "lisa," "maggie," "bart," "skinner," "syzlak," "milhouse" mixed in with Scooby-do's "shaggy" and "scooby"

Then there's the "K-rack" that when it was full contained "kosh," "kang," "kodos," "koloth," "kryten," and "klaatu"

There was talk of a "G-rack" which gave birth to "gowron"

Now we're onto Star Wars, although Matt named his new desktop machine "wahweap" which could start a trend toward naming machines after marinas on Lake Powell.

Keith.

My name is Chris, I am a believer in other life out in our vast Heavans. Anyway I am new to this, I will do my part and search for life we all know exist. If you think about it for every star we see, There is a solar system like any other, the conditions would be right for life as on earth, Lifeforms would probably look very close to us, As water is the begining of all Life. A Planet just far away from its sun as ours, Perfect conditions for life, Anyway not to bore you, I think the signal is comming SEDI just needs our help


Christopher Price

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I think the signal is comming SEDI just needs our help

What's SEDI? I notice it's similar to Jedi. Do they have anything to do with one another?

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I think the signal is comming SEDI just needs our help

What's SEDI? I notice it's similar to Jedi. Do they have anything to do with one another?

I believe it's called a "typo", something all of us are guilty of (i.e., being "human").

To Chris:
Welcome to the vast and exciting World Community of SETI!

I believe it's called a "typo", something all of us are guilty of (i.e., being "human").

Really? I guess no one's ever heard of playful sarcasm and joking about it with humility either? Both are also traits of being human. Are you telling me you've never ribbed your friends once in a while about dumb mistakes? Or that you've never been ribbed for stupid mistakes? Come on, lighten up a little.

If one can't laugh about their mistakes, then one truly has no joy in life. Sheesh. Tough crowd.

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Sheesh. Tough crowd.

I stopped laughing at tyops years ago, you need better jokes.
Let us pretend that those of us involved in Seti@Home are (on average) above average intelligence (more or less, and for the most part), and make funny jokes to match.

OK, I sound a bit like a wet blanket I know, but there you go.

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

I stopped laughing at tyops years ago, you need better jokes.
Let us pretend that those of us involved in Seti@Home are (on average) above average intelligence (more or less, and for the most part), and make funny jokes to match.

OK, I sound a bit like a wet blanket I know, but there you go.

It's even funnier (and ironic) that you misspelled typo too. Wet blanket indeed!

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I stopped laughing at tyops years ago, you need better jokes.
Let us pretend that those of us involved in Seti@Home are (on average) above average intelligence (more or less, and for the most part), and make funny jokes to match.

OK, I sound a bit like a wet blanket I know, but there you go.

It's even funnier (and ironic) that you misspelled typo too. Wet blanket indeed!

Good Catch! I almost didn't see that one.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Back on the server name issue....
Were not the devices used in Dune to attract
the huge sandworms and harvest their spice
called 'Thumpers'.
I hope Thumper isn't attracting any of them !!

S

Edited the mis spelling typo. Wet Blanket Defense on !

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