Today was a "normal" Tuesday outage to back up the mysql database. You may have noted the result table sizes have dropped considerably since we turned on the "resend-lost-results." Hopefully this solved a lot of the ghost workunit problems people have been wondering about forever. If the database can handle it, no reason to leave that setting as is. A lot of people also noticed the server status page line "Results returned and awaiting validation" should really read "Results returned and awaiting validation as long as all the other back-end queues are zero." So most of the time this reads correctly, but if there's a large backlog somewhere this can be quite misleading. It's a painful query to get exactly what we want all the time, so fixing this is low priority.

Meanwhile, after the outage we started the splitters up (though there were some initial configuration snags that required a quick shut down and restart). Actual new work is being generated and sent.

So here we are.



Well, not so fast. I'd say we're "at the light at the end of the tunnel" as far as the public side is concerned, but there is still major cleanup on the inside before we're fully out of the tunnel. Some agenda items include:

1. Getting oscar up to speed: Right now it's operating pretty much as fast as thumper (which seems disappointing at first), though without using any CPU or disk i/o (which means it's able to do a LOT MORE if we tell it to). That's because informix is configured exactly as it was on thumper, so there are some artificial bottlenecks in place. We're collecting stats to understand what knobs to turn, and then we'll really crank them up.

2. Converting thumper to it's new role as internal file server: Remember that our main internal file server (which houses a bunch of important, heavy-random-access data and accounts) is as much of a crashy liability as mork was. So this conversion still needs to take place, but can happen over time while we're live.

3. Basic electrical stuff: Jeff and I tried to move as much around as possible, but there's still some server closet power issues to address.

4. All the tiny specks of sysadmin revolving around replacing old servers with new ones (dangling mounts, dead entries in /etc/hosts, zillions of scripts referring to now-defunct paths, etc.).

I'm also busy revving up the engine to start sending out the annual end-of-the-year news/funding drive mass e-mail. I know many of you already donated in some form or another (thank you!) but this sort of thing needs to happen. I apologize for any redundancy on this front.

- 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

Thanks for the update. Nice to see things going again :-)

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Regards
Anthony Coleman
SETI.UK Team Founder

Thanks for the update Matt, good to have thing running again properly,

Claggy

Cut over complete, you earned a cookie. Of course there is clean up and spit polishing. But YAY!!!

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Janice

Thats' great to hear. Got a new work unit today when I just decided to check to see if things were up and running. Now that they are I am up in the air riht now if I should contune to run Enstein@home and Seti@home at the same time. I think Enstien slows my computer down alot much more then Seti ever did. Must have bigger files over at Eistien.

Congratulations and thanks for all your (plural) hard work.

Thanks for reminding us about the work still needed to convert Thumper. It was easy to think you could all now go to Hawaii for vacation.

I guess this means that Ptolemy is still likely to crap out at some random moment, effectively halting the whole shebang, at least for a little while.

Good luck with that Ptolemy conversion to Thumper.

When you can, could you please speak to the new Raid that was installed on Oscar and Carolyn? I recall long, long ago that you were eager to change Raid-5 to Raid-10, or something like that. How did that go for you?

Thanks for everything. Swibby Bear (Whit)

Does this mean I won the pool? (Practicing his happy feet dance.)

Congratulations to you all. I hope you all have a chance to to relax a little.
Thank you for all your hard work and TIME.
Best Wishes to all.

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Bob Swift

Good job All, thanks for the update Matt. Lou W4NY...

Thanks for the update. Great work to everyone at the lab. Thanks to everyone who donated.

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"clap! clap! clap!"

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mambo

"clap! clap! clap!"

"penicillin! penicillin! penicillin!"

Great job SETI gang! Not bad for a bunch of college boys!

wow.. finally got a batch, and they downloaded in record time. WTG!!!!!

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Janice

All 4 of my machines have varying amounts of work, slowly building. Only the GPU's have been able to return the results faster than they are coming in. It looks as if the splitters are *almost* able to max the link out, which might be a good thing. With 0 WU's waiting to be sent when the project went live again, the link didn't completely peg at ~90mb immediately. Sooo, that's good news for possible ghost avoidance and download speed :)

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If the database can handle it, no reason to leave that setting as is.

Just to clarify... I hope you meant 'no reason to not leave [resend-lost-WUs] setting as is (switched on)'?

Congratulations to everyone involved for getting to this point. I'm not one of those lucky enough to get a steady flow of WUs, but this is great news all the same.

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Soli Deo Gloria

Hip! Hip!

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Hooray!

thanks for all your hard work the couple of last weeks
lets crunch again


gr Jeroen

Thank you for the strong and successful commitment!

This is a day we will remember!

Now let's hope we are lucky and that the next WU we crunch will be carrying Christmas greetings from Aldebaran! ;-)

Sleepy

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I gots lots!!!

I can keep my apartment warm again!!

Thanks for all the hard work!!

Merry Crunching!

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