Data Servers Back Online
I am not sure when they got back up, but the SETI Data Servers are
back online. It doesn't appear that the server downtime was due
to a DOS attack, but instead internet connectivity problems within the
UC-Berkeley Campus. Erik Korpela seems a bit frustrated with the
down time in a couple of posts on the SETI newsgroups:
About 6 pm PST, we
lost all internet traffic to the building housing the
servers. I'll let you know when we know more.
also
We were down for 2
hours friday night (PST). Then we went down again last night at
about 6 pm, PST. We're still working on the problem which is
with some hardware that doesn't belong to us, nor is the hardware in
a location accessible to us. I've very tempted to give out the
email addresses and phone numbers of the persons most responsible
for the extended duration of this outage.
Macmillian Y-4 posted
in the "unofficial"
team thread this post on sci.astro.seti (didn't show up on my
news server though):
They're not really
down but they are currently blocked from the UCB campus (and therefore
the rest of the world). (Well, one server is, but it looks like it's
the one serving work units.) There was a serious problem that had
developed over the course of a few hours and we had to separate them.
We have notified SSL, who in turn sould notify the SETI folks. Once
they examine the problem we'll try to have things back up.
+---+
Michael Sinatra
Network Services Group
IST Communication and Network Services
UC Berkeley
+---+
I wanted to point out that the SETI Data servers have
had a pretty good uptime record for the past several months.
AFAIK there was only one data server outage between now and the
beginning of the year, and that was due to maintenance of the
servers. Even if you can keep the servers up and running
flawlessly, sometimes you are at the mercy of your internet connection
which you may not be able to control (which appears to be the problem
here.
As an attempt to piece things together, there was a
problem with the connection of the SETI Data servers to the main
Cal-Berkeley connection (Friday Night). This was beyond the SETI
team's control. The Data servers were isolated, but the rest of
the SETI web pages were still online. This was apparently fixed
within a couple of hours and the Data servers were back online.
Saturday night the same situation popped up again with the Data
servers and they were isolated (I was still able to get the stats at
the time from the other web pages) but the rest of their servers lost
connectivity and all internet access to the SETI servers went down.
Right now the Data servers seem to be back up and
online, but the rest of the web servers seem to still be
disconnected. I was able to upload results and download new work
units albeit slowly. The Data servers are most likely swamped
from everyone trying to connect to them. Currently (4pm EST), I
still cannot connect to the SETI web site to get any stats data.
Hopefully they will get this straightened out and I can get some stats
for the update today :/.
Stats 'r' Us
The rest of the SETI web pages are back up so I was able to update the
stats for the day *YAY*. The numbers for the team and all around
are a bit down because of the server down time though. Of course
on the alt.sci.seti newsgroups, the armchair IT consultants have given
"suggestions" to the SETI team on how to keep their servers
going......Eric K. in another frustrated reply said:
>They should
try redundant server ...
If anyone wants to give us 3 fairly hefty server machines, a place
to put them outside of Berkeley and 100 Mbps internet access for
them, we'd gladly take them up on it. Until that day, the
servers we got are the servers we got.
Eric
Food For Thought
Someone also posted on the newsgroup a
suggestion...or hypothetical (however you would want to take
it). The SETI guys may actually accomplish what Eric suggests
above if each and every SETI@Home participant contributed just one
dollar to their project....I am sure that they could come up with some
reliable server/internet connectivity solution with $1.7
million at their disposal....hell that would probably
triple their current budget for the entire project!
Weekly Stuff
The top mover over the past week turns out to be JerkyChew
moving up over 25+ spots this week, pgardner
was movin' up next, up 21 spots. As for the tops in Work Units
for the week....that crown goes to SpeedRacer
with almost 2500 work units for the week......again stuck in second
was Tobler Design turning in a
shade under 800 WUs.
Stepping back and looking at the big picture, the Knights
Who Say Ni! passed up FreeBSD a couple of days ago taking
over the Club Team #12 spot......currently they are neck and neck with
User Friendly for the #11 spot
though....and may pass them in the next couple of days.
In the Overall Team front, Team
Lamb Chop still sits in the overall team #7
spot.....currently safe for a long while. Microsoft
is still holding on to the #4 spot for right now, but they
are cowering from the onslaught from Art Bell.....I
figure that sometime this week Art Bell should pass them for the
overall #4 spot. Microsoft has been slacking and even Team Lamb
Chop has been catching up to them albeit slowly. In matter of
fact over the past week or so Team Lamb Chop has been holding up quite
good with Art Bell. Art Bell has been out-producing us, but to
the tune of only 200-300 work units per day. I would say
we are holding up pretty good especially since Art Bell has 12,000
members while Team Lamb Chop has only 1,800! GO
TEAM LAMB CHOP!
Daily Stuff
Word on the streets is that C. Eric Smith
has been able to add a slew of 550E FC-PPGA PIII computers running at
733MHz to his stable. His production is on the way up!
Those new computers, plus the server outage hampering SpeedRacer's
sending in of work units put him on tops today in work unit
production. Those numbers may change tomorrow though :).
With the new fleet of computers C. Eric Smith has joined in earnest
for the race for the #5 spot! I have added him to
the graph......currently it looks like Tobler
Design may pass Gonzo first, but only time will
tell.
I haven't done any top 40 move updates in the past
couple of days, but there has been a battle going on especially at the
bottom of the top 40. PGS
turns out to be the top mover in the battle down there....over the
past several days they have moved up a net 5 spots, and is now sitting
at #34. jfaulkner after
bouncing up and down lands up one spot and is now #40. Warthog
made a strong move early in the week but slipped in the past two days
but is still up a net 2 places and is now #38. 77rickyli
posted some strong numbers and powered up 5 spots for #37. mzanthrope
was up a net one spot to #36. Vasp
just ahead of the mayhem moved up a spot to #32.
Moving on up the rankings, Turbo
moved up one spot and is now knocking on the door of the top 20 at
#21. Dan Dan the Linux Man
moved up one to #16......AutoLign
is up one also to #13......and last but not least Tobler
Design passed up leech for the #9 spot
Finally.......
Man has this been a big update today :)
For those of you who want to avoid having your SETI clients sit idle
while there is a server outage, waiting to download a new work unit,
you should look into several different solutions. There are
several different ways to download some work units to continue
processing work units while either off line or while the SETI servers
are down.
With the previous version of the CLI client I was
using a batch file to download about keep a "buffer" of 6-7
work units, to process (this can be found on the tips
and tricks page). One of the problems (if you can call
this one) is that I really had to manually upload/download
results/work units. Since changing over to the version 2.0 of
the CLI I have been using SETIBuf.
This utility is basically a series of batch files which gives you a
maximum buffer of 9 work units to process. The advantage of this
solution for me is that it uses a separate batch file to upload
results and download work units, and this can happen even when having
a work unit analysis in process. This solution even uses SETILog
to log each work unit that is done. Even though the readme for
SETIBuf is quite confusing (to me at least :) the setup and use of it
is pretty easy. With the server outage for the past several days
I had a buffer of 9 work units to work with, and didn't cause me any
downtime. If you have a single computer this solution may be for
you.
A second solution that I know many team members use is
SETICache. This solution is more geared towards those who
run SETI on several computers over a network/LAN. I haven't used
or taken a close look at SETICache, but testimonials from several team
members give it a thumbs up. I may be wrong here, but it sounds
like SETICache is set up such that one computer is used for uploading
results and downloading work units. This computer can download a
Cache of work units and that is kept on this computer, and the other
computers subsequently gets work units to process from the one
computer (instead of downloading from the Berkeley servers)
If you want more info on these add-ons I suggest that
you check out the respective homepages and give them a look....if you
have any other questions, head on over to the Team
Lamb Chop Thread at Ars Technica and post any questions you
may have. The readers of the thread are quite knowledgeable, and
may be able to help you out!
Real Life Calls
Sorry for the lack of updates in the past several days. I have
been quite busy at home and haven't had time to post any news.
Right now it seems that the Berkeley servers have been down for 24 or
so hours. I am not sure what is wrong with them, and I haven't
read any "official" word on what is going on. I
believe that the data servers went down sometime last night/overnight,
but it seems to have spread elsewhere. Earlier tonight I was
able to grab data for the stats update (which I just was able to get
around to posting), but the data server status page said that the data
servers were down. But as of 1am EST 2/13, I cannot access any
of the SETI web pages (which I could do earlier). Because the
servers have been down, this is the reason why the daily numbers for
members are a bit lower than normal
One can only speculate why the servers are having
problems. One thing that you probably can rule out is
"routine maintenance". They usually only do
maintenance stuff on the weekdays, because they want the weekend off,
and there is usually more server activity on the weekends...plus they
usually mention on the newsgroup when there is a scheduled downtime
for the servers...and they haven't done that. More likely is
some last minute Berkeley work/problem where they decided to bring
down the servers for some planned power outage. The other
Berkeley pages were still available until some possible network outage
that happened later....but again this is only speculation.
One last possibility (but I have a feeling that this
hasn't happened), is one that I think that the SETI project is a good
target for. There is a possibility that the Berkeley servers are
under a "denial of service" attack like the ones that his
several major websites earlier in the week. The SETI project is
a high profile "target" and I do believe that their servers
are vulnerable for a DOS attack. On the other hand, I don't
think that this is happening because the data servers were down, but I
was still able to access the rest of the Berkeley web pages.
But again I may be wrong.
Hopefully the servers will be back up
soon.......otherwise the Sunday stats update may be in jeopardy.....
CLI on Win95???
There have been reports of using the CLI client on Win95
miachines. Several people have said that it works fine with
Win95, but there are others who say that they are having problems with
the automatic dialup. It looks like the client expects the
Winsock Update to be there or they will get an error saying
"missing WS2_.DLL and WS2HELP.DLL". Apparently you can
get around this by downloading the Winsock
update from Micro$oft. If you want to use the CLI
instead of the GUI on a Win95 machine, this may be a solution.
Stats Up!
I messed around with things and got the stats up tonight. It was
a little pain in the butt but it is done....you can have your fix now
:-). There was several moves in the top 40 today. romkey
moved up one spot passing Panders and is now #12. R.
Marvin passed XYZZY and is hops into the top 20 at
#20. Finally the big move of the day goes to PGS.
He/She/They moved up a whopping 4 spots, posting 101 WU for the day
and ranks in at #40. Way to go!
On the Club Team front, The
Knights Who Say Ni! passed FreeBSD yesterday, and moved up
to the Club team #12 spot. Lets see if they can hold on!
No Stats
Update Tonight?
I was just in the process of updating the daily stats for the team,
and it appears that the Team Stats page on the Berkeley servers have
changed a bit. This is causing me much grief in the updating of
the stats. Apparently they have merged a couple of columns from
the pages, and changed a couple of other things around and it totally
messed up the way that I am doing the stats. A third party
program (SETITeam) that I have used before will not work correctly,
and crashes because there are several members of our team who have not
picked out a nickname (and the name field is blank). This
crashes that program at that point so I cant use it.
IF YOU HAVEN'T PICKED A NICKNAME PLEASE DO
THAT!!!!!!! PLEASE???????).
If I can use the third party program then I can avoid
any problems with the Berkeley page changes. It would make my
life a heck of a lot easier ;-). Thank you for your attention!
Movin' on Up
The Weekly Stats are up! Joker
is on tops this week, he moves up some 23 spots this
week. He currently stands at #61 on the hit list.
Unfortunately, reliable sources have it that his production will fall
soon. I am sure the Team appreciates the effort! (Thanks to
Gabe, Microprose and Hasbro ;-). Next in line in the movement
category were ElderRaven and Kagato....each
of them moved up 18+ spots this week!
On the Work Unit front, tops again this week was
guru. 2000+ work units per
week? THAT'S SICK! ;-). I have a strong
suspicion that he won't be on top next weekly stats update. I
predict a very stong showing from previously idle SpeedRacer.
I imagine that SpeedRacer might even have the same WU output that guru
had previously.......Coincidence? I think not! Tobler
Design ranked in second, followed up by svdsinner.
Milestones!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
| 40,000WUs |
guru |
2/2/00 |
|
|
|
| 6,000 WUs |
Vomesh |
2/5/00 |
| |
|
|
| 5,000 WUs |
C. Eric Smith |
2/3/00 |
|
leech |
2/2/00 |
| |
|
|
| 4.000 WUs |
mjdewitt |
2/3/00 |
| |
|
|
| 3,000 WUs |
Dan Dan The Linux Man |
2/3/00 |
|
ojohnson |
2/3/00 |
|
|
|
| 2,000 WUs |
VulTure |
2/2/00 |
|
_Quinn |
2/5/00 |
|
|
|
| 1,000 WUs |
Joker |
2/3/00 |
|
soab |
2/4/00 |
|
ChrisLeif |
2/6/00 |
|
|
|
| Top 200 New! |
pgardner |
2/4/00 |
|
Free Pick 2 Lotto! |
2/4/00 |
|
Ulysses4 |
2/1/00 |
|
DeGauss |
2/5/00 |
Ready For Prime
Time!
Yup.......Its here! Contrary to what was posted a couple of days ago
the version 2.0 i386-winnt-commandline client is available for
download. It is even official like, available for download
on the download
page. Get it. It is FAST!
I didn't do a benchmark on the new command line version, but I did do
a normal work unit with it and it shaved almost
2 hrs off of my average time!
There are also two BeOs clients available for
downloads....one for the i586-PC and one for the PowerMac.
Hiding the GUI and CLI
clients.......
I found this on the alt.sci.seti newsgroups from poster Durk van Veen:
I've seen a couple of
requests for a program that removes the SETI
application icon from the Windows system tray. I whipped up such a
program
just know. You can download it from
ftp://24.30.130.161/d:/ftproot/users/anon/seti_iconremover.exe
If people find it useful I'll find a more permanent server to house
the
program. The idea is that you set your machine up to run this
program after
the SETI client has started. One way to do this is to package
start-up for
SETI@Home and this thing into a batch file, to be run from the
RunServices
key in the registry. I'll consider making a version that runs as a
service
and continually kicks the icon out of the system tray in case the
program is
stopped, then restarted, but this is it for now. Just download it to
any
directory on your machine and run it. It doesn't have to install
anything.
It will immediately exit after you start it, but the SETI icon will
disappear from the system tray while leaving the application itself
running.
I tested this program with the v2.00 client on a Windows98 machine.
It
should run as is on Windows95, WindowsNT and Windows2000, but I
haven't had
a chance to test it. Let me know if you find this useful. Just
respond to
the group, unless you feel the urge to respond directly to my
e-mail.
Durk
I personally haven't tried it to see if it
works......but if you want to hide the GUI SETI icon give it a whilr.
Also on the newsgroup there was a couple of posts from
the makers of SETILog and SETI Spy saying that their programs can let
you hide the command line clients. Again I haven't tried them
out, but they could be a way of hiding the command line clients for
you. Finally there is a new version of SETILog for you to be
able to use with the version 2.0 command line client. Hopefully
sometime this week I will try both of the new versions out and write
up a little blurb here on the page.
Team Stuff
I haven't done the weekly stuff yet. That will probably get done
tomorrow, not today/tonight. There are a few things of note with
the team in the past couple of days. It looks like guru
thinks it is lonely at the top. It appears that he has shut down
his guru account, and fired up his SpeedRacer
account to give guru some company up top!
There was a couple of movers in the top 40 the past
two days....romkey moved past AutoLign
and now is #13. Grimas moved
up one to #30, Vasp up one to #33,
and finally mzanthrope is up one
to #37.
