Posts by Toby

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Issues with Lunatics site ? (Message 1502155)
Posted 10 Apr 2014 by Profile Toby
Post:
It should actually be working again now. There was indeed a change in the DNS setup. We need to update the name servers but the old ones were put back in place until we can get that updated.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Issues with Lunatics site ? (Message 1501239)
Posted 8 Apr 2014 by Profile Toby
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After further review it seems more likely that something has changed with our name server setup and some ISPs are just caching the last known value longer than they technically should. Queries have been sent.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Issues with Lunatics site ? (Message 1501224)
Posted 8 Apr 2014 by Profile Toby
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Not quite sure what is going on. I got some DNS errors at work today but looking now things seem to be working for me. I'm wondering if there is some weird routing problem that is preventing some parts of the internet from talking to our name servers or something.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics site access broken (Message 1435165)
Posted 29 Oct 2013 by Profile Toby
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Yeah that's the second time it has blown a mother board. And the server is past the provider's end-of-life mark so spare parts are getting hard to come by. I think we will be moving things to a cheaper cloud based host in the near future. Last night I actually set up a nightly job to move a database dump over to a new host on a nightly basis so if this server does blow another gasket, we will just abandon it and move over.

What likely won't make the move is the stats. That is pretty much the only thing that needs serious horsepower. And while I am happy to have been one of the first people to work with aggregating the BOINC XML stats, others have far surpassed my efforts and I haven't touched mine in quite a while. So I don't feel it is worth the resources to keep them running once this hardware finally goes beyond recovery.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Acces to lunatics not possible (Message 832519)
Posted 20 Nov 2008 by Profile Toby
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As Pooh said, the server was physically moved from one room to another. I got a call from the guy right as I was about to leave work saying "you need to shut it down right now or they are going to just yank the power plug" so I did. He was hoping it would be back within an hour or two but it seems there was a routing and/or network cabling problem in the new location that wasn't discovered until today. However those were sorted out just a few minutes ago and we should be back online now. Sorry there was no notice in advance but it was a surprise to us as well.

Ni!
6) Message boards : Cafe SETI : Windows Vista (Message 755396)
Posted 18 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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I find it funny that back in 2001 or 2002 Microsoft first announced their "Palladium" platform. "Palladium is a system that combines software and hardware controls to create a 'trusted' computing platform."

Everyone got upset about it because of privacy concerns and "lock-in" and other things. I think there were even lawsuits. Then suddenly Microsoft stopped talking about it and it seemed to go away. Fast forward a few years and we now have a lot of the elements of Palldium sitting right there in Vista except it was done silently without MS trying to hype the platform by name to the public. They just kind of stuffed it in and said "oh yeah... thats... um... security stuff"
7) Message boards : Cafe SETI : . . . Toby is UOTD @ SETI Sunday - May 18th 2008 (Message 755385)
Posted 18 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Does that mean I have to thank you 10 times??

In celebration of my UOTD status I treated myself to a 20 mile bike ride all the way around the city! Off to the shower now to wash off the dirty sunscreen smell.
8) Message boards : Cafe SETI : . . . Toby is UOTD @ SETI Sunday - May 18th 2008 (Message 755179)
Posted 18 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Thank you and Ni! to all!
9) Message boards : Cafe SETI : Windows Vista (Message 754870)
Posted 18 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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I don't like the built-in DRM...

This is from early in the thread but this is one of the major reasons why I am trying my hardest to not touch vista with a 10 foot pole. MS is essentially assuming every user is a criminal and locking things down to insane levels in an attempt to make bits uncopyable. And it doesn't work anyway - go check thepiratebay.

Want to play a blu-ray DVD in your vista machine using your S/PDIF audio hookup? Good luck. It turns S/PDIF off for "premium content" because it isn't encrypted. Why? Its my DVD and my audio system, I should be able to use it how I see fit. I am not willing to accept MS's artificial restrictions so I use Linux for everything I can, which is just about everything these days. I even have plenty of eye candy if I want it. Compiz works pretty well on the newest release of Ubuntu. Hardware accelerated window animations, transparency, etc. Its all there, except without Big Brother telling me how to use it.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 749676)
Posted 7 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Yep guess that was a false alarm. Now that I've had some time to look at it, it seems as though the ISP that my employer uses changed their routes to avoid using Global Crossing. Instead they route to Cox communications and then savvis before it gets to onering.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 749524)
Posted 7 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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About to go to a meeting at work so I'll make this short and sweet. I just tried another traceroute from work and got all the way! I can connect to *.kwsn.net from work now. Everyone please try again.
12) Questions and Answers : Unix/Linux : Reducing CPU usage on 5.10.45 Linux client (Message 749468)
Posted 7 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Setting it to 50% means that boinc will "pulse" - run for one second, pause for one second, run for one second, pause for one second, etc. you should be able to see this if you use a system monitor to view your running processes, as long as the update interval is short enough. For example you could fire up "top" in a terminal and then set the update interval to 0.5 seconds (hit 's' then enter '0.5')

This pulsing may still cause the CPU to stay in full power mode most of the time. What may help is telling linux to keep your CPU in powersave mode all the time, assuming your CPU supports frequency scaling. There are several ways to do this. I usually just go to a terminal and use the cpufreq-selector utility. 'cpufreq-selector -g powersave' should do the trick, assuming suse has the cpufrequtils package installed.

As long as the CPU stays at 1 GHz, my Core2duo laptop can run BOINC at full CPU usage with minimal fan activation. Obviously it takes more CPU time to finish work units this way but at least my legs don't get burned to a crisp.
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 747764)
Posted 4 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Well my bet is still on Global Crossing being at fault. It looks like everyone who CAN get to the site does not go through any Global Crossing IPs. There is nothing you can do about this. It just depends on who your ISP peers with and how routes are decided. Proxies or tor will be the only way to get to lunatics until GC notices and fixes their problem. I tried sending them an email but of course they only read email that is part of an existing helpdesk ticket so that went nowhere.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 746772)
Posted 2 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Well Onering networks is our ISP so when they have a problem it means the box goes completely offline. Tracing from the server to work, I can't get off of cogent's network and going the other direction I can't get TO cogent so my suspicion is still on a peering problem upstream. I did find this article that would seem to indicate that Cogent and Telia had a peering dispute in March but I believe that has been resolved so... I don't know!
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 746669)
Posted 1 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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Yeah I remember that too. I think it actually happened twice. Once was a french ISP if I remember correctly and it seemed like half of europe couldn't get work units.

The last IP I can get to from work is owned by Global Crossing so maybe GC and Cogent are having a lover's quarrel now?
16) Message boards : Number crunching : IE8 beta? (Message 746666)
Posted 1 May 2008 by Profile Toby
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I must admit one of the biggest things that really gets me wound up on internet message boards is browsser snobbery. I think people should be allowed to make their own choices.
I was suprised to hear about IE& being 'wrong' and too full of errors. I've never had a problem with it.


Yes, IE does work fine on most websites... but a lot of times that is because people MAKE their websites work in IE simply because that is the most common browser out there. If everyone wrote their web pages according to the official XHTML/CSS standards and didn't include special tweaks for IE, then it would be completely unusable on many sites. There is more to bashing IE than snobbery. There are technical merits that can be used to compare browsers objectively and IE ends up at the bottom of the heap in most of them.

Then there is the wole "lack of innovation" thing. Some people think that the "new" tabs are great in IE7. Well I've been using them for at least 6 years in Opera. Popup blocking was hacked into IE6 a year or two ago. Once again, that has been a feature in Opera for as long as I've been using it. Firefox has had plugins to do similar things for years too. Microsoft is always playing catch-up.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Lunatics outage (Message 746650)
Posted 1 May 2008 by Profile Toby
Post:
Yeah something weird is going on. The server is obviously up and running and I can access it from home but not from work. Yesterday Cogent appeared to be having a major outage in Milwaukee that may have affected some people but that seems to be resolved today and yet I still can't get to the server from work. It stops at the same IP as your trace does, Crunch3r. The server is in Atlanta so I don't think it is on our end but I don't know what is going on...
18) Message boards : Number crunching : power supply question (Message 740770)
Posted 18 Apr 2008 by Profile Toby
Post:
I actually hit the power limit on the first computer I built. It was a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird and it was a power hungry son-of-a-gun! It ran fine for several months but then one day in the spring I smelled something coming from the area of my computer. It wasn't very strong and at first I didn't think much of it. I was busy with finals and finding a summer job so I ignored it since everything was still working. But later that summer I took the computer apart and found that the ATX 20 pin connector had started to melt. I was eventually able to pry it apart and did some searching through forums and found out that I wasn't the only one to experience this. The 5V rails (used to power the CPU back then) were overheating and melting the plastic around them. Everything still worked... I just couldn't shove enough power though that connector. So I grabbed a soldering iron and soldered the 5V wire from a MOLEX connector to an area on the back of the motherboard where all the 5V rails from the ATX plug ran together in a large area of solder. Worked like a charm for another 2 years.

But this is why they added the "+4" to the original spec. The 4 extra pins carry 12 volts that is now used to power the CPU. More volts = less amps = less loss in transmission = less heat. Often the 4 pins are plugged into the motherboard in a different location than the 20 pin plug - usually right by the CPU. But some boards (I think it is more common in server grade boards) have the 4 pins right next to the 20 pins, essentially making a single 24 pin bock. Hence the difference between "24" and "20+4" but the connectors are small enough that you should be able to plug a "20+4" power supply into a "24" board.

My new AM2+ motherboard will accept 8 extra 12V pins but only requires 4 to operate.
19) Message boards : Cafe SETI : Possible forum bug (Message 740726)
Posted 18 Apr 2008 by Profile Toby
Post:
Well it wasn't easy but after standing on my head and waving my feet in his face I was able to get Eric's attention for long enough to get a brief answer. It seems they wrote a script that was supposed to quickly go back and purge some old content from the database. Unfortunately the "quickly" part didn't work out (deleting is one of the slowest database operations) so it has turned out to be a slow (days instead of hours) process that I believe is still ongoing. This purge is affecting post counts because of an apparent bug in the BOINC forum code. Go figure. Guess we'll just have to rebuild our post count (yes, I lost a few as well) with an extra round of TLPTPW!

Also, a round of PGGBs on me for your troubles!
20) Message boards : Number crunching : good *quiet* cooling fan (Message 740255)
Posted 17 Apr 2008 by Profile Toby
Post:
From the case makers I've seen cases without filters and ones with laughably thin filters You can see through that claim to be filters, If You can see through a so-called air filter, Then what good are they? You wouldn't put such a filter on Your cars intake as It wouldn't work or be smog legal either. Currently I use cases without filters, I've found cases get more dust near floor level than If their elevated at least 23" off the floor.


My older Lian Li case has an extremely porous filter with very little resistance to air flow. i didn't think it would do much but every time I check it I see that it has caught a fair amount of dust and needs to be cleaned. I figure the more dust goes down the sink drain, the less ends up in my CPU fan. The newer case has denser filters but I haven't had it long enough to judge its effectiveness.


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