I'm not here to split hairs with you or anyone else. Congress cut the money off in the early 90's to NASA on SETI. Short-sighted people like Sen. Richard Bryan and Rep. Silvio Conte were two of the culprits. I can't help it of Proxmire is short-sighted as well. Restoring the funding will bring SETI more into the public eye. Indirectly it may help the project. I fail to see where it would hurt. We're talking about only 4 mil. That's almost nothing to Congress. Doing nothing will not get us anywhere. Anyone on this board that thinks SETI deserves a Golden Fleese Award shouldn't be here.

I'm not trying to split hairs or pick a fight, either. I'm just pointing out that going directly to Congress will not have any useful effect, no matter what size the request, unless you have a LARGE constituency or a substantial amount to donate to a re-election campaign fund. For both the braying donkeys and bellowing elephants, SETI (and scientific research in general, if not related to Global Warming) is a non-issue, not worth their time. (I'm politically active in Veterans' issues - I speak from experience).

The money IS out there, it just takes some creative grant-writing. Someone recently mentioned that either S@H or BOINC had received a NASA grant for research processing radio astronomy signals. Sometimes those grants include funds for "overhead" items like upgraded servers, environmental controls, and the support personnel to operate and maintain them. Those are the kinds of grants this project needs.


Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

Congress cut the money off in the early 90's to NASA on SETI. Short-sighted people like Sen. Richard Bryan and Rep. Silvio Conte were two of the culprits. I can't help it of Proxmire is short-sighted as well. Restoring the funding will bring SETI more into the public eye. Indirectly it may help the project. I fail to see where it would hurt. We're talking about only 4 mil. That's almost nothing to Congress. Doing nothing will not get us anywhere. Anyone on this board that thinks SETI deserves a Golden Fleese Award shouldn't be here.

Proxmire WAS short-sighted. (I met him in 1983, and told him so.) Fortunately he's retired (probably dead), so not a factor anymore. But there are LOTS like him in our Congress, and maybe always will be.

No elected official wants to have his name connected to anything that could subject him to ridicule, give his opponents ammunition to use against him, and maybe cost him re-election. As much as WE believe in the value of S.E.T.I. (or we wouldn't be doing this), there are enough people who will make fun it, and others who will get angry that "our tax dollars are being wasted on looking for little green men and not used to __________ (fill in the blank) that most Congresscritters won't touch SETI with a 10-foot pole.


Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

I'm not here to split hairs with you or anyone else. Congress cut the money off in the early 90's to NASA on SETI. Short-sighted people like Sen. Richard Bryan and Rep. Silvio Conte were two of the culprits. I can't help it of Proxmire is short-sighted as well. Restoring the funding will bring SETI more into the public eye. Indirectly it may help the project. I fail to see where it would hurt. We're talking about only 4 mil. That's almost nothing to Congress. Doing nothing will not get us anywhere. Anyone on this board that thinks SETI deserves a Golden Fleese Award shouldn't be here.

Umm, I hate to say this, but Senator Proxmire has been dead and gone for 5 years, And Rep. Silvio Conte is dead too, Oh and Sen. Richard Bryan is retired, He was replaced by a Republican who's the incumbent now, His name is Nevada Senator John Eric Ensign.

---

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

Congress cut the money off in the early 90's to NASA on SETI. Short-sighted people like Sen. Richard Bryan and Rep. Silvio Conte were two of the culprits. I can't help it of Proxmire is short-sighted as well. Restoring the funding will bring SETI more into the public eye. Indirectly it may help the project. I fail to see where it would hurt. We're talking about only 4 mil. That's almost nothing to Congress. Doing nothing will not get us anywhere. Anyone on this board that thinks SETI deserves a Golden Fleese Award shouldn't be here.

Proxmire WAS short-sighted. (I met him in 1983, and told him so.) Fortunately he's retired (probably dead), so not a factor anymore. But there are LOTS like him in our Congress, and maybe always will be.

No elected official wants to have his name connected to anything that could subject him to ridicule, give his opponents ammunition to use against him, and maybe cost him re-election. As much as WE believe in the value of S.E.T.I. (or we wouldn't be doing this), there are enough people who will make fun it, and others who will get angry that "our tax dollars are being wasted on looking for little green men and not used to __________ (fill in the blank) that most Congresscritters won't touch SETI with a 10-foot pole.


Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

Yeah like they need more ammunition for their Waste, Abuse and Fraud campaign, But I guess they haven't had their whole wheat WAFfles. ;)

---

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

I got so depressed reading this thread and hearing everybody grouse about how the government isn't supporting SETI I went to the Donate page and coughed up $100 out of my retirement check.

Stop bitching and pony up a few dollars. If you can afford to put all that money into your blazingly fast computing platforms you run BOINC on then help out the guys in the back office.

END OF RANT

---

Thanks Matt,

This news is very welcomed. (Y)

But, and I'm sorry to mention this, to save some friction in the message boards, could we at least get a regular update every week here (in a closed thread I think would be a good idea too)? :">

And also , I'm sorry about this again, but if we could also get a regular Friday update (in a closed thread again) as I think this would also cure a lot of woe's on the participants' side of things as well.

PS: I don't mean that you personally have to do every update message either as it can be spread about there surely. :)

Cheers! (B)

---

Whew!

Am I the only person who noticed the "three-day" outage notice? Or the word "initially" contained therein?

Are we reaching the point of dimenishing returns?

If this is Mr. Anderson's idea, it is a bad one. Two pieces of information would be helpful:

1. Exactly what is needed in terms of equipment? Servers? How many? and what type? Peripherals, What and quantity?

2. Costs, detailed.

3. Your mailing address, should someone whish to donate a piece of equipment?

I believe, once this information is available to the participants, it is then up to us to put our money where our collective mouth is!

I have been a member of both "SETI Classic" and "BOINC" for some time. I enjoy the project and my participation. I do not wish to see it die the "Death of A Thousand Cuts."

And it appears that the project may be reaching that point.

Thank you for your dedication!

ront

---

To me, it does not seem a bad thing to have an 'extended outage', which would probably mean that it makes things easier on the Team as opposed to the usual 'outage'. As long as people set their cache accordingly and the servers can handle the initial 'hammering' on the Thursday, this seems an eminently sensible idea - especially if more time is then given to the science side of things.


Quite a few people have mentioned funding, hardware and grants to replace or add to existing equipment and without doubt, additional funding, by any route would help to significantly reduce the number of hardware issues we've seen of late. Personally, whilst I'd love to make a modest cash donation, I'm a little uncomfortable with the means of doing so...however, on a personal note, I think I've found a solution to that.


Now to my main point. Is it possible, for the project to obtain grants for replacing existing equipment with equipment that is more energy efficient and generally 'greener'? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, thats going to mean newer, better featured, cooler running and cheaper to run. In this country, private companies, as well as educational establishments, could get grants to replace old equipment etc with newer, 'greener' equipment. Perhaps approaching the old hardware problems with the 'green angle' might be the way to go..... It can't hurt to find out.

---

Don't take life too seriously, as you'll never come out of it alive!

My two cents regarding RAID systems... having 100+ distributed RAID systems in the field.

I find that more often than I have drives failing, I have the RAID controller failing. Either an outright hardware failure, or just going berzerk and not letting the drives come online (except with a lot of manual massaging).

So while RAID is a good idea because drives do fail, don't count on it to protect your data, because RAID controllers go berzerk every so often.

Approaching the server problem from the More Efficient/Green angle sounds like an excellent idea...i am part of a group that builds Rail-Trails...we have recently realized that we can approach trail construction from the Water Quality Improvement angle...

---

we have been running 2-5 day outages often followed by a crash as it is. A planned 3 day outage sounds like an improvement. And I salute that they are considering that the way things have been implemented could be a problem.

Having come from a basically "must be up 24/7" environment, I understand what
that would mean. And no that is not realistic. Even if they converted to fault tolerant hardware. (redundant cpu's/controllers/disks/and everything else).
While it would still be advantageous(and very expensive) it is most likely not required. I will take a planned outage hands down over a crash.

A planned 3 day beats a surprise 2-5 any time.

---

Janice

Will the last person to upload their work, please turn the lights out? A 3 day outage is so wrong, There may as well be no seti, Some or a good amount of people from the forums will leave and then It'll be the rest who may wonder why they can't get work and why Seti is down for so long and some may think Seti has gone offline for good.

---

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

So, with these long outages I guess I'll be hooking up to some other processes, anyone got a suggestion.

Rad

if you set your cache up correctly you won't be running dry. I run about 7 days extra in my cache. I still have 2-3 days on my main machine.


for backups Primegrid and Einstein always have work or you could try one of the smaller projects like Enigma or spinhenge. These project have smaller WU's available you just have to pay attention to what you want

---

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

I've been working on Distributed.Net longer than I've been on Seti. They seem to now have a windows BOINC version of their project. They could always use some help.

---

I got so depressed reading this thread and hearing everybody grouse about how the government isn't supporting SETI I went to the Donate page and coughed up $100 out of my retirement check.

Stop bitching and pony up a few dollars. If you can afford to put all that money into your blazingly fast computing platforms you run BOINC on then help out the guys in the back office.

END OF RANT

Well, I guess I shouldn't have sent the contribution. It has been a while and the shock must have been too much for the system.

---

if you set your cache up correctly you won't be running dry. I run about 7 days extra in my cache. I still have 2-3 days on my main machine.

And just how do you propose to do that, considering this abundance of WU's recently, broken quotas, chaotic WU-time estimates...etc.
Let me guess... If I move back to my old PI 233 MMX it shouldn't be to hard to fill 7-10 day cache. Even in these conditions. About outages, let's see... Tuesday through Thursday plus weekends leaves us with Mondays and Fridays to get some work, and if we took Fridays like this one into equation, guess how much happy crunchers will be out there. [irony]But in the end, why we should find ET in next few years instead in couple of decades?[/irony]
Just my 1 euro cent. (I lost the other one. lol)

---

Who the hell is General Failure and why is he reading my harddisk?¿

I've been working on Distributed.Net longer than I've been on Seti. They seem to now have a windows BOINC version of their project. They could always use some help.

Isn't Distributed.Net a commercial (for profit) operation?

---

Thanks Skildude. I think I have my cache set correctly but the WU never seem to last more than say three days (yes I have it set to ten).

I'll check out your suggestions.

Rad

...From the looks of it we had something like a six drive simultaneous failure. Jeff and I beat on it for a while - we eventually assumed this was just a hardware blip, and the data was more or less intact on the drives, but the RAID metadata got a little screwed up. Long story short we were able to carefully bring down the RAID and recreate the meta devices from scratch with the data intact, and all was well....

- Matt

how where you able to recreate the metadata?
software raid or hardware raid?

---