Hi, All - I'm back from three weeks off. I don't claim to know all the details about what happened while I was away, but outside of (the usual) fits and starts here and there it generally seems positive. The extended weekly outages seem to have given Jeff a lot of time/focus on NTPCkr progress, for example.

I am however a little disappointed how slow the spike table merge has been going. It's still not even close to finishing. At current rates, if running 24/7 (which isn't likely) it'll take roughly 20 days to complete.

Now that I'm back some more effort will be applied on major server shuffling. The current plan is that we have server "marvin" ready to go (after I re-RAID and reinstall the OS) to become the new astropulse database server, freeing up bambi to become either the new upload server or internal file server (both of which need replacing). We'll probably end up buying a new server once we spec it out to become the new SETI@home science database server, and turn thumper into whatever bambi didn't between the two upload/file server options. Follow all that?

Nobody else was around on Monday when Dave requested some minor fixes checked into BOINC code get put forth to the public. This was fine and I did so, unaware that all this VLAR code realized during my absence was turned off by default. So for a couple hours there all workunit types were being sent out to all processer types. So be it. There may be other issues with this scheduler and the default settings. Waiting on input regarding that...

So what did I do on my summer vacation? Among other things managed family visits, tackled some iPhone game contract work (so I guess this wasn't a full vacation), recorded and mixed a bunch of music and played a few good gigs - one of my bands played last Saturday night at the Great American Music Hall (that's me on bass guitar, occasionally shaking the cramps out of my right hand). Anyway, it's nice to be back at the SETI mine.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Welcome back. Thanks for the info. Hope the staycation will keep you energized for a while.

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Welcome back Matt. Sounds like you had a great vacation. Thanks for the update as well.

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Welcome back Matt, glad you had a good holiday, keep up the good work, and thanks for the update too,

Claggy

Thanks for the news!


Oh a pity, at SETI@home Beta Test the 'VLAR WUs not to GPU' worked very well.

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someone forgot to bring up Beta again...

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

(...)
I am however a little disappointed how slow the spike table merge has been going. It's still not even close to finishing. At current rates, if running 24/7 (which isn't likely) it'll take roughly 20 days to complete.
(...)

If I understood correct, this means that we will have still at least 7 weeks 3 day/week outages?
And then the project will go back to the ~ 4 hours maintenance/week?

Or this have nothing to do with the 3 day/week outage?

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Well, here we are ready for another 3 day shutdown and I'm trying to get some WU's and this is the message from the server page:

Results ready to send 160,194 9m ago

However, I'm getting a message in Boinc:

Project has no tasks available.

So I will be out of tasks again for a day and a half.

I don't get it.

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Well, here we are ready for another 3 day shutdown and I'm trying to get some WU's and this is the message from the server page:

Results ready to send 160,194 9m ago

However, I'm getting a message in Boinc:

Project has no tasks available.

So I will be out of tasks again for a day and a half.

I don't get it.

"Project has no tasks available" means the Scheduler doesn't know about any, but the Feeder will tell it about another 96 or so in a few seconds so the next request may get some (if your computer happens to ask before other hosts).

                                                                 Joe

Well, here we are ready for another 3 day shutdown and I'm trying to get some WU's and this is the message from the server page:

Results ready to send 160,194 9m ago

However, I'm getting a message in Boinc:

Project has no tasks available.

So I will be out of tasks again for a day and a half.

I don't get it.

"Project has no tasks available" means the Scheduler doesn't know about any, but the Feeder will tell it about another 96 or so in a few seconds so the next request may get some (if your computer happens to ask before other hosts).

                                                                 Joe

Well all the splitters have been down for a couple of hours now so there will be no new work until they come back online.

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"Project has no tasks available" means the Scheduler doesn't know about any, but the Feeder will tell it about another 96 or so in a few seconds so the next request may get some (if your computer happens to ask before other hosts).

                                                                 Joe

Well all the splitters have been down for a couple of hours now so there will be no new work until they come back online.

'Tis true for all practical purposes. Once the splitters go down and the "Results ready to send" queue drains, as it has, then the only work available is reissues caused by errors and validation attempts which don't find strongly similar results.

                                                                Joe

Since following mentioned time I get following errors:

03/08/2010 13:26:20 (UTC) SETI@home [error] Error reported by file upload server: can't open file
03/08/2010 13:26:20 (UTC) SETI@home Temporarily failed upload of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: transient upload error
03/08/2010 13:26:31 (UTC) SETI@home [error] Error reported by file upload server: can't open file /home/boincadm/projects/sah/upload/xx/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: Read-only file system

IIRC, this had produced validate errors in past, right?

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Why is the upload server down? - does it have anything to do with the rest of the system woes?

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Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Why is the upload server down? - does it have anything to do with the rest of the system woes?

Check the 'server run' thread here. The results storage array crashed.

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"Time is simply the mechanism that keeps everything from happening all at once."

one of my bands played last Saturday night at the Great American Music Hall (that's me on bass guitar, occasionally shaking the cramps out of my right hand).

Good stuff!

Ohh a pity, to now 4 validate errors: hostid=5416857.

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