On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:42:39 GMT, Johan Plane <johan.plane@telia.com>
wrote:

>It seems as if there is more downtyime for maintenance that uptime for
>us users at the moment. The redundancy seems to be somewhat lacking in
>my opinion.
My guess would be that you came late to Seti then, Classic had MANY
MANY downtimes in the beginning. Do you remember when the people stole
the piece of copper cable that was the ONLY connection to Berkeley?
They were down for almost a week, trying to figure out what was wrong
and then trying to fix it. The computers were pushed WAAAAY beyond
their limits and until the last year or so had numerous fixes to keep
them running. People tend to remember only the good things and forget
the tough times, human nature I guess. Classic certaintly had some
tough times! Do you remember when we had to connect to Berkeley for
every workunit, before the units were available by some remote users?
When Berkeley was down during those pre-remote cache times we users
would just be out of work for DAYS at a time. Then some users came up
with some add-on programs like Seti Cache, Seti Driver, Seti Queue and
many many others. These programs made Classic the program we all came
to know and love. Boinc will have these programs too, in time.
Boinc HAS some remote programs already, Boinc View, Boinc Spy and
others. Their are a ton of "stat" sites www.Boincsynergy.com
http://boincprojectstatus.ath.cx/show_graphs.php
http://boinc.mundayweb.com/ www.teamocuk.com/ there are MANY others!
Boinc is NOT where it will be next month, but it IS getting better and
better every day/week/month/year, and will continue to do so.

Well, i started with classic in summer of '99, and I do remember the bad times also. However, the longer the project as a whole is going on the tougher demands Berkeley will have to meet. What I find disturbing is that even though the transition from classic to BOINC was done over a substantial time, the architecture of the new system wasn't made better from scratch. Knowing the problems with classic, one would have hoped that they had learned the lessons and designed a system with a high grade of redundancy, instead of starting to plan for that now when the system is in full use. That is a slip that I guess would only be tolerated in academical environments and any other ad hoc governed businesses. Technical strategy is the keyword missing. The fact that there are many dedicated volounteers ready to join the choire singing praise contributes to keep the pressure off their backs. There are those claiming that, since it's volountary, we cannot ask for or demand anything, just shut up and crunch. I disagree on that. If I give the science my computertime it's their obligation to provide me with work. There is no better way to loose enthusiastic coworkers than to treat them negligent. It would be interesting to know how many active contributers there really are as opposed to the numbers that have registred over time, i.e. how many have abandoned the project over time. Any commercial institution would survey that issue, but I guess that it's not interesting facts to Berkeley.

/ Johan