I've been meaning to do a tech news item for a while. Let's just say things have been chaotic.

Some big news is that campus is, for the first time in more than a decade, allowing SETI@home traffic back on the campus network infrastructure, thus obviating our need to pay for our own ISP. We are attempting this switchover tomorrow morning. Thus there will be more chaos and outages and DNS cache issues but this has been in the works for literal years so we're not stopping now. I apologize if this seems sudden but we weren't sure if this was actually going to happen until this past weekend.

We are finally seeming to get beyond the 2^32 result id problem and its various aftershocks. Due to various residual bugs after deploying the first wave of back-end process upgrades we have a ton of orphan results in the database (hence the large purge queue) which I'll clean up as I can.

Re: BOINC server issues galore, all I gotta say is: Ugh. Lots of bad timing and cursed hardware.

The Astropulse database cleanup continues, though progress has stalled for several months due to one Informix hurdle requiring us to employ a different solution, then simply just failing to coordinate the schedules between me, Jeff, Eric, and our various other projects. But we will soon upgrade the server and start merging all the databases back into one. This hasn't slowed the public facing part of the project, or reduced science, but it will be wonderful to get this behind us someday.

So much more to write about, but as I wait for dust to settle ten more dust clouds are being kicked up...

- 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 news and explanations, Matt.

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

now i wish i could bunker more then 100 wu's per machine ...i will have crunched through that in less then 3 hours and machines stay idle for at least a day while the contest continues (sadface)

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

Is this Seti only, Matt, or is the BOINC web site (and forums) also affected?

Edit: never mind, yes it will.

Due to network maintenance, the BOINC web site will be offline from 17:00 Pacific time today (17 Aug) until tomorrow morning.

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Excellent news Matt!
I can see these are long term improvements, and not just short term patches.
This is an exciting time for certain!

Steve

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Warning, addicted to SETI crunching!
Crunching as a member of GPU Users Group.
GPUUG Website

Thanks for the update Matt.

Claggy

Thanks for continuing to keep us informed Matt.