Hi guys, im new here, so im gonna ask some stupid qustions in the future, so dont judge to hard :P

I see people have had problems before with transmisson and unable to upload and so on, and this is the case now aswell. But as I checked out, the upload server is disabled. Now I now several reasons why it can be disabled, just wondering if anyone knows when it gets up again, or maybe were we can find that kind of info, or if its just turned off?

Thank you for all of your answers...

See the news on the front page:

Weekly Outage and Initial Catch Up
Every Tuesday morning (Pacific time) we begin a 3 day data distribution outage to focus on science processing and development plus any needed systems maintenance. The upload/download servers will be offline during this time. The web site (including the forums) will only be offline during the database maintenance and backup portion of the outage. On Friday, you may experience connectivity issues as the servers catch up with demand

So, Friday late afternoon (European time) the upload server will be back.

---

yea, i am so sorry, i read that it wouldnt be before thursday they started maintenace, my bad.... so so sorry,,,

So - -You're telling us that we can only process 4 days a week - if we can get upload/download time during the madhouse initial rush?????

---

You can process 7 days a week, if you have allowed enough work to be downloaded during the time allotted. I got 60 tasks in on Sunday, yet while I also run 5 other projects, I am not in trouble running out of work to do for Seti.

Just set your additional work queue to something around 4 or 5 (maximum 10) days. The option can be found in the web-preferences (computing prefs), or the local advanced preferences in BOINC Manager. Do know that when you use those preferences, that they override the web-preferences and that both work for all the projects you're attached to.

---

why does seti @home require three or four days down time every week and have needed that kind of time for months i spend more time waiting for you guys to turn things back on than i do running seti. can you shorten that matinance period every week so theres not so much wasted time

---

Seti's been running well over 10 years now, but over the course of the past 10 years+ there wasn't anything checking the science done. That's partially being done now, during those 3 days off-time.

I say partially, since they're also in the process of swapping servers around, trying to lose the crash-prone server(s). Plus all kinds of odds and ends that they weren't able to do while the project ran full-steam, since then they were mostly busy fixing broken stuff. Not anything they were actually hired for. (Do read the technical news for lots of updates on what is happening)

I hope you want that we finally get to go through all the results of the past 10 years, not that we accumulate another 10 years of data and do nothing with it?

---

First, there is no need to wait for Seti to be up, Boinc can manage very well on it's own. Just set it to cache 3 or 4 days of work (as Ageless suggested) and your computer will stay busy all the time. Alternatively, attach to additional projects, there are 50+ to choose from.

For some time now, we have had Tuesday outages to back up the various databases and to do patchwork maintenance on the servers. There are several reasons why this has now been extended to three days.

One is the major chores being done at the moment is reorganizing and repurposing of servers. Older unreliable servers need to be removed from the system. This is not an easy task since most the servers and software running on them are interdependent. Operating system and software upgrades are being done as well as long overdue repairs to the hardware where possible. Seti is run mostly on donated pre-production models whose hardware can rarely or easily be upgraded. Fortunately, some of the volunteers have recently pitched in to help buy a new server. This is a rare treat for the project and will it likely be ordered in the next few weeks.

But, the main reason for the extended outages is to finally get some science done. For 11 years, Seti has been collecting data. Very little has been done with it. They are now starting to sift through this massive database and assigning a priority value to likely candidates for re-observation in the future. This search puts a very heavy load on the database and can't be done effectively while we are continously inserting new data.

I expect that these scheduled outages could continue for a year or two. You never know, they may find a way around the database overload, but for now this is the new normal for the project.

Edit: As often happens Ageless made a succinct post, while I composed a long winded one.

---

Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

thank you for the detailed explanation I am running four other projects but started with seti almost as many years ago as its been offered to the public and am partial to seti

---

thank you for the detailed explanation I am running four other projects but started with seti almost as many years ago as its been offered to the public and am partial to seti

If you're joined to 4 other projects, then there's really not any wasted time. Your CPUs are kept buy with other work.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there's really no such thing as wasted time with SETI@Home. We're only analyzing data recorded from space that comes from light-years away. Even if we find a signal, there's no guarantee that the civilization is still there. And if they are still there, we have no immediate way of contacting them.

If SETI didn't require 3 days of downtime per week, they wouldn't be scheduling 3 days of downtime. Asking them to shorten the maintenance period therefore is not really a realistic request. Bear in mind that the project needs to do what's best for it to get the science done, and they have never promised work to all participants at all times.