I'm getting a cold. In July.

Jeff who is currently the major contact point is open to suggetions as long as they fit in the goals (undefined).

I had suggested opening a thread about what the goal of this weeks outage and that did catch his attention.

I know that as many of you have talked about working with the "quota part" he spent weekend time working with that and is now working on scripting to automate increases.

So as I have as much information as your do... I am at a loss for what happened this morning. Yes I was going to abuse buttons to force a Manual update (as my work venue is still one day of work).

I have to think about this.

Regards

I got up at 4:30 this morning and tried to upload, but I got the project backoff message and couldn't upload anything before I had to go to work. Now, the upload/download servers are off for three days and I wonder if I'll be able to upload at all on Friday.

Ya so
4:30 What time zone ?
things messed up a bit before the shutdown this week
so What's your schedule suggestion change ?

Chill its no biggy

The suggestion in this thread is based on the kind of problem we are seeing today.

From the front page:

The project down due to a network problem.
We have lost connectivity somewhere between our two routers. One of these routers is located at the Space Sciences Lab and the other at the Peering And Internet eXchange (PAIX) in Palo Alto. Until we get this problem cleared up we cannot distribute new work.

If this happened on Saturday, or if this problem persists into the weekend, we who crunch would be unable to connect for more than half of the week. If there needs to be a three-day upload/download outage, and Pappa has convinced me the need exists, then as soon as possible it should be moved to the weekend.

Then the staff would have to work on the weekend to do the things they try to get done during the tue-fri outage.
My understanding is the extended outage is to have the db free for them to work on things. Which can't be done with everyone using it.

The project down due to a network problem.
We have lost connectivity somewhere between our two routers. One of these routers is located at the Space Sciences Lab and the other at the Peering And Internet eXchange (PAIX) in Palo Alto. Until we get this problem cleared up we cannot distribute new work.

It took me a minute.

Yeah, that was one of my many weird moments.

It's a shame she decided to abandon everything..

There is more:
If we look at bringing a single server uptodate for the OS and and various "patches" to make things behave correctly... That alone can take a couple of days. Not to mention machines that are not listed doing Science. To Bring MySQL uptodate with various patches to keep all the machine talking to the MySQL Database in sync...

So while Jeff is working fixing qeuries that talk to all databases to make them work more effeciently (not cause an outage).

The last I heard the Boinc Database (MySQL) is one of the largest active databases (number of transactions/second) in the world.
With over a million (as reported WU's sent/daily) Results reported, as the tapes are split, As the Scheduler links the WU to the User and returned result to the user, then silly things linke credit granted as a result of the validdation and finally as the WU's gets purged and the Cannonical Result gets transfered to the Science Database. A few User(s) scrapping stats via the web... And Then Users wanting to post in forums (open a long thread and hit refresh each message that has a Number has just been queried).

The Tweaks the Staff does or asks for help to improve the quality of the Database Engine and Nix. They know the Developers, your outage means someone gets an email.

As far as the suggestion to move the Science (downtime) to over the weekends to increase User productivity. If they are not worried about the servers then it would make some sense. It would presume they are not having to stop and restart processes as they needed to tweak a program that was mis-behaving. As things get stablized, I would suppect we will see some changes.

If I remember correctly, and I would have to go back and look. There was a statement I believe Matt made to the effect that due to Budget shortfall for UCB that people were required to be taking "Furlow Days (non-paid)." Which was supposed to be running into the Fall.

I suspect that as it implied there was some flexability in timing of the days and that there are a few of the Staff that are overdue for the postponed timeoff. That was also an implication in Staycation.

Regards

All of this may not answer your question directly, but Matt did say that future outage schedules may be adjusted as productivity improves. I'm speculating, but it may be that once they've completed some of the hands-on projects, the data analysis (the "science") will be able to run over weekends, without requiring constant human supervision or intervention.

By coincidence, last night on the History Channel, the series "The Universe" showed an experiment in which a laser beam was fired at a small plasma cloud in a vacuum tube (I hope I'm getting these terms right). The plasma cloud was cooled to just above absolute 0º and the light beam slowed down to a crawl. I didn't catch what was done then but something sped it back up to its normal speed. I don't know what this means in terms of exceeding the speed of light but it's the first I have heard that the speed can be manipulated.

Light does travel at different rates depending on gravity, and frequency. I forget the spacifics, but you can slow it down. I know of no way to speed it up past the 386,000 miles per second limit. One of the neat experiments uses gravitational lenses, to see stars behind some object. If the stars are visible, and an object is in front, you can deduce how much behind it it is by watching the light bend around the heavy object. This is getting difficult with the beer.

Steve