I am sorry but I dont understand all this computer geek mumbo jumbo.

Can someone please tell me in simple english why SETI is not downloading any work from the project?

Thanks.

The Berkeley (project) servers are broken.

I am wondering why when the status is green that I don't receive the downloads that are shown on my computers page. Under the task tab of boinc, it shows no task just a blank page, but when I click on my computers it shows many work units status unknown or in progress. What's up with this?

As I don't think the servers are broken any longer.

The servers themselves are starting to settle down; the problem is in the new server code that was deployed recently.

On any host that has an app_info.xml file (and thus uses the anonymous platform mechanism), scheduler requests fail with an "Internal server error". The server thinks it has successfully sent you the WU header (which tells BOINC where to grab it from), but it never arrives.

The net effect - when you check your host's WUs, you will notice that the server thinks it got some, while they do not show up in BOINC at all. This is what some people call a "Ghost WU".

It's only been happening for a short time, and started during the outage. My 64-bit BOINC hosts also cannot fetch any more work - the server is telling them their platform doesn't exist and refusing any finished WUs as well as new downloads.

So while the servers may be up (accessible), not all is well yet (they don't fully work).

HTH,
Simon.

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Optimized SETI@Home apps + Information

Hello all,
Over the last few days I have seen a number of people suggest that perhaps "the" "outage" problem, or rather the problems recovering from it had to do with a changed IP address.
Can someone that is still having problems do the following and let's see if there is any positive effect?

Close BOINC/SAH app.

***
Under Windows 2K, XP, etc. run this from the command line:
ipconfig /flushdns
***
Then start/restart BOINC/SAH.

This purges the internal DNS resolver cache so that Windows will refresh it's DNS entries.

If that works then it does seem like evidence that an IP of some kind may have changed - perhaps without SETI knowledge. Even if one intermediary hop between user and server changed this would cause problems.

There is an equivalent command under *nix but I don't recall what it is.

Joe

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I am sorry but I dont understand all this computer geek mumbo jumbo.

Can someone please tell me in simple english why SETI is not downloading any work from the project?

Thanks.

Seti software is badly broken .. older versions and optimized versions are
not functioning properly ... install/reinstall version 5.8.16 from the website
and at least it functions.


More good management by the seti team.

1. Hardware fails -------------------- Make busy work till someone bails us out
2. new hardware materializes ---- It's weekend party wait till monday
3. problems with restart ----------- Take a vacation let it slide


And they want grants and expect money donations.
Must be a college or california thing .... I guess I just don't get it

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I am sorry but I dont understand all this computer geek mumbo jumbo.

Can someone please tell me in simple english why SETI is not downloading any work from the project?

Thanks.

Seti software is badly broken .. older versions and optimized versions are
not functioning properly ... install/reinstall version 5.8.16 from the website
and at least it functions.


More good management by the seti team.

1 Hardware fails Make busy work till someone bails us out
2 new hardware materializes It's weekend party wait till monday
3 problems with restart Take a vacation let it slide


and they want grants and expect money donations.
Must be a college or california thing I guess I just don't get it

Hello Robert,
First, my intention here is not to start a flame war or anything of the sort. My intentions here are good and absolutely not meant to be malevalent toward you or anyone else.
You seem to have had much more contact on the message boards here than I, which I will try to keep in mind.

The last few comments you have made seem to be quite unproductive. In fact, they seem vindictive. Unless a person is so close to the management of a project or is an active, part of the internal project team, then making the kind of negative comments you are making seem senseless. Generalized statements such as those you have written serve only to attempt to anger others, damage relationships and hurt the feelings of those who are truly trying to make the best out of what is not always a good situation - no matter how hard they have worked to make the best of a situation.
The statements you have made could have equally been applied to a dozen ore more projects I have worked on. It is the nature of things to have problems and also to have people complain about them. People who only complain about the problems rather than try to help, understand or otherwise support the team may be doing more harm than good - often very intentionally.
Entirely sarcastic or insulting statements will not be productive or otherwise helpful.

I have the utmost respect for the folks on the SETI/SAH teams. I recognize that there will bumps along the road - it wouldn't be any fun otherwise. I just try to keep in mind how much work has to go into something that "we at home" see as overly simple. Simple is most often a strict design goal.

This is all just my opinion, for what it's worth.

Joe

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Two items:

First, the suggestion to restart my BOINC client worked. I have now reported my (old) work completed and obtained (and started) more work from SETI@home.

Second, there was a problem before I restarted my BOINC client. It would appear that unsuccessful requests for new work and to upload completed work seriously degrade BOINC's throughput.

Like many here, I am also a member of another project (rosetta@home in my case) but SETI has a higher resource share. However, when SETI was down for a few days, I suspended SETI because I saw no point in adding to the unsuccessful traffic flurry. Rosetta blossomed in my Statistics screen; no surprise there. Later (~5 days ago) I resumed SETI and started getting those pesky little red messages (again). I let this continue for about a day and a half and then noticed that the rosetta graph had leveled off (i.e. no real progress on rosetta). So I suspended SETI again (~3.5 days ago) and rosetta resumed its upward climb. And just now I restarted BOINC (didn't have to flush the DNS buffer or anything else) and was able to report old work and get new work. So, from my perspective, things are back to normal.

As the little red messages are a weekly feature of SETI, I would expect that there will also be a weekly cessation of progress on my alternate project when that happens. I have two suggestions.

First (long term) fix BOINC so that unsuccessful reports / requests do not have such a disastrous impact on its throughput.

Second (perhaps medium term) provide a staging area for reports / requests able to span the Tuesday shutdown. I'm sure many folks would appreciate this, if it's possible.

Third (my local solution) suspend SETI each Tuesday morning and resume SETI Wednesday morning.

As the pointy-haired boss would say, "It's just a simple matter of programming." (Anyone who doesn't read Dilbert may not get this joke.)

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One of my computers refused to download new wu's, I solve this by detaching the proyect and joining again, then the computer inmediately downloaded all the files and the new Wu's, now is crunching again.

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Hello
I have two PC with Core2Duo, XPWindows and LinuxDebian x86_64.
In Linux I have message:
2007-05-20 18:58:34 [SETI@home] Sending scheduler request to http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi
2007-05-20 18:58:34 [SETI@home] Reason: To fetch work
2007-05-20 18:58:34 [SETI@home] Requesting 86400 seconds of new work
2007-05-20 18:59:36 [SETI@home] Scheduler request failed: HTTP internal server error
2007-05-20 18:59:36 [SETI@home] Deferring scheduler requests for 10 minutes and 6 seconds

no work are downloaded, but in stats on setiathome web this work's are sent.

What to do??

So I suspended SETI again (~3.5 days ago) and rosetta resumed its upward climb. And just now I restarted BOINC (didn't have to flush the DNS buffer or anything else) and was able to report old work and get new work. So, from my perspective, things are back to normal.

That is interesting. I was not able to restart BOINC to get it communicating properly. Again, that may still have had to do with the server issues. What was odd was that I was able to start up a new system with a fresh BOINC/SAH installation and it worked without a hitch - while my desktop was failing communication. Hmm.
[/quote]

Third (my local solution) suspend SETI each Tuesday morning and resume SETI Wednesday morning.

As the pointy-haired boss would say, "It's just a simple matter of programming." (Anyone who doesn't read Dilbert may not get this joke.)

As a developer of many years, I have heard that saying - or something like it - many times. You know your [technical] boss is trying to move up in management when he/sh starts to say it too - without smiling.

...
I don't watch my PC's closely enough to know when there are minor SAH outages. If this is consistent enough and enough people agree in the concept of a Tuesday am-pm shutdown then I have an idea.
First, I'm sure that making an architectural change in BOINC or SAH is out of the question to deal with a local (though often) problem.

What about *someone* creating an application that would run in the background (Winodws service, taskbar app, command-line ?) that would simply shut down BOINC at the configured time and then start it back up at the configured time?
I don't think the app would need to be supported by the SAH team nor be a burden on them.

Perhaps there is a generic tool like this already around - I haven't looked. I'm trying to think of something that would be very simple to install, run and manage so it would be simple to deploy. Yes, you could do it with shell scripts, batch files/resource kit tools too.

Good idea? Bad idea?

Joe

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As of this post -
This thread Viewed 10,000 times !!

We are needing some sort of new update I think :)

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When the new server camr online, I was able to get 8 WUs to process. They can over a several hour span. So I have 8 results waiting to go back. They have been waiting for a few days. I've retarted my computer and BOINC several time, but still can't connect

When wull we get back to some kind of normalcy?

LarryO

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Too many massages, many topics, no really seen results...
I have seen all themes from the beginning of May.

Sorry for my bad-bad-bad English! Many people wish to inform on the problems, but they do not have not enough knowledge of language! I try to say...

I have a trouble. I see a my results page on the SETI@home server. I have 42 WUs on this page but into the BOINC 4 WUs only. The BOINC doing requests of new work and on result's page WUs increased ("In Progress" server status, "Unknown" outcome status) but BOINC's WU list is not changing.

"HTTP internal server error" forever... Day by day...
BOINC restart - no actions. Machine restart - too.
Disconnect from the project - the decision of a problem!!!
Think...

It's working 100% perfect for me now, I can download/upload units freely. My PC only picks up one at a time, each taking between 3-5 hours to crunch - maybe it's something in my settings that makes it work?

I am sorry but I dont understand all this computer geek mumbo jumbo.

Can someone please tell me in simple english why SETI is not downloading any work from the project?

Thanks.

The Berkeley (project) servers are broken.

Not any longer. Most problems now on on the users side with Boinc.

First shut down Boinc and restart it. If that does not get you going them shut down your systems and turn it back on. All 10 of my systems are working with no delays or dropping of WU since early Friday.

David

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Too many massages, many topics, no really seen results...
I have seen all themes from the beginning of May.

Sorry for my bad-bad-bad English! Many people wish to inform on the problems, but they do not have not enough knowledge of language! I try to say...

I have a trouble. I see a my results page on the SETI@home server. I have 42 WUs on this page but into the BOINC 4 WUs only. The BOINC doing requests of new work and on result's page WUs increased ("In Progress" server status, "Unknown" outcome status) but BOINC's WU list is not changing.

"HTTP internal server error" forever... Day by day...
BOINC restart - no actions. Machine restart - too.
Disconnect from the project - the decision of a problem!!!
Think...

Need more info on the setup you have. Are you running a straight system or an optimized one? (ie straight down load from boinc and seti?)

Sounds like you have an optimized setup though and there are others that can help you there.

The wu's that the system is saying you have are called "ghost wus". The seti servers think you have the wus but there was a mixup between boinc and your system.

Sorry but I have just a short time right now and can not search for the thread that will help you better.

David

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Too many massages, many topics, no really seen results...
I have seen all themes from the beginning of May.

Sorry for my bad-bad-bad English! Many people wish to inform on the problems, but they do not have not enough knowledge of language! I try to say...

I have a trouble. I see a my results page on the SETI@home server. I have 42 WUs on this page but into the BOINC 4 WUs only. The BOINC doing requests of new work and on result's page WUs increased ("In Progress" server status, "Unknown" outcome status) but BOINC's WU list is not changing.

"HTTP internal server error" forever... Day by day...
BOINC restart - no actions. Machine restart - too.
Disconnect from the project - the decision of a problem!!!
Think...

Stop/exit Boinc Manager
Go to your seti folder (C:\\boinc\\projects\\setiathome.berkeley.edu) and rename the file app_info.xml in for example app_info.xml.rename_me
Start the Boinc Manager

This works great for me

It seem that Seti@home is functioning properly again. I don't know if this applies to everybody but i will share what i just done to get your computer to start crunching Seti@home work units again.

This has worked for me and i now have a full load of work units crunching again!

If BOINC manager is not uploading or downloading any work units, you have to delete BOINC off your computer and download it again. This will get you going again.

****Simple instructions for beginners*****
This is with windows xp because that is what i have running.

1. Click Windows Start Menu-> my computer-> C: ->program files -> Right click BOINC and delete it!

2. Visit SETI@home main page and download the latest version of BOINC. Here is a link
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

3. Run the BOINC software and when prompted enter the URL or Internet address; http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

4. When asked if you are a new or existing user, select existing user and put in your e-mail address and password.

5. BOINC manager will then connect to SETI@home and get you new work units.


I hope this helps some people as the SETI@home front page does not have much help on it.

John in Ireland.

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John's method will have important side-effects for some users:

It will delete all work in progress, including for other projects you are connected to, apart from SETI
It will delete any local statistics and logs stored on your computer (it won't affect stats on the SETI website, or any third party sites)
It will delete any optimised or other special applications on your system.

So if you have the simplest of installations, and don't crunch for any project except SETI, John's method is fine.

For everybody else - stop and take a deep breath first, and think whether you really want to do that. Other methods are available.

Which methods?

Kelwin since 99

Which methods?

Kelwin since 99

Try this one, tested and recommended by Simon the Great Chicken yesterday.

Which methods?

Kelwin since 99

Try this one, tested and recommended by Simon the Great Chicken yesterday.

I have checked the chickens, they are not charing with Old Chomputer Chusers..
K.