News archive

Campus Network Maintenance
March 14, 2009
According to campus IT staff, 'the provider for Internet services for UMSL, will be performing upgrades on their backbone. Brief outages will occur'. Therefore, on Sunday, March 15th, (the ides of March, btw), there may be intermittent outages. This is solely due to the internet provider. Once they are done with their maintenance, everything should be back to normal. Thanks for waiting in advance.
Campus Network Shut Down :-(
February 2, 2009
Yesterday (Sunday), the entire campus network was removed from the internet due to router/firewall issues. This meant that BRaTS@Home was down. According to the IT department, the issue has been resolved. Sorry of any inconvenience.
Loss of Power
January 3, 2009
Overnight the campus unexpectedly(?) lost power, resulting in a temporary loss of connection for the server. Everything should be back to normal, keeping in mind, from the previous news posting, that there will be maintenance on the network hardward tomorrow (1-4-09).
Happy New Year and Possible Intermittent Outages
January 1, 2009
The campus IT staff will be working on important network hardware. As a result, access to this server may be intermittent on Sunday, January 4th from 7 to 9am (UTC -6hrs). Thanks and Happy New Year!
Test works units
December 26, 2008
I sent out work units today testing some (significant) changes I made to the science app. Depending on how these go, work units will be issued shortly to take advantage of the changes. I will keep an eye out for these results to see if all goes well. If not, we'll know why. As always test works units are run with the application "betaapp".
Problems with the Feeder
November 7, 2008
It appears that something happened to the feeder during the last upgrade. Fixing that is my project for this weekend. Once that's corrected, work can be resumed. Just wanted to give an update since I hinted at work. Thanks.
Upgrades
October 29, 2008
I am currently upgrading the BOINC server, as you can probably tell by the new layout (which I'll probably change :-/ ). So for about a day, you'll have to bear with my as I go back and add my own customizations that you usually see here. Then we'll be back to normal.
SSL
October 23, 2008
As I mentioned in the message boards earlier, I am setting up SSL to be used the login processes of the project. With this added, passwords will no longer be sent as plain text, as is the default process with BOINC projects. I am working on this today(10/23/08) and will update in the message board if/when something changes. There shouldn't be a loss of login ability (aside from possiblly for a minute or two).
July Update
July 12, 2008
I posted a brief update in the forum about the state of the project in upcoming months. It can be found here: http://maxwell.dhcp.umsl.edu/brats/forum_thread.php?id=50#689
Out of Town
May 12, 2008
From May 10th through May 26th, I will be out of town and therefore unable to check the message boards and issue work. Everything will still be running; I just wanted to give everyone a heads up if things go silent a bit. For a couple of weeks.
Brief interruption
March 3, 2008
So you may, or probably may not, have noticed the site go up and down for about an hour. I was upgrading some other things on the server and had to take web services down, unexpectedly. Everything should be fine now.
Back Online and Upgraded
February 1, 2008
After an unannounced firewall change, BRaTS@Home is back online. I took the forced hiatus as an opportunity to upgrade to the new BOINC server. In fact you may have seen some changes already. You can read about these changes in this post. Next step is to upgrade the science app to the new API. That I will start (and hopefully finish) Monday. Thanks, David.
Work unit comments
November 28, 2007
I added a comments feature to the workunits table. You can now look at the page of information on the workunit and, if I added comments, view the comments. This will be helpful if I want to communicate about a particular workunit (like the ones running now. hint, hint). Check it out. Let me know what you think (those of you with work).
Update
October 25, 2007
I thought I'd write to give an update of how things are going. At this point the (new) server seems to running fine. I am working on some changes to the science app. Once that is finished (tomorrow?), I will send out some work to test the changes. FYI, all test are sent under the application name betaapp. Just in case you're curious. Once those are fine, things should be back to normal. It's just been slow work. Things have been busy and I was out sick the past couple of days. That never helps.
Website back up (mostly)
October 16, 2007
The website is back up! Next I will be working on restoring the database and then things should be back to normal. Once I get that working, you will be able to log back in and I will post in the message board so that you can read the interesting details of the BRaTS project this week.
Scheduled Maintenance.
October 3, 2007
On Friday, October 5, I will be upgrading the server storage. Therefore, on Friday the project will be unreachable, both at the webpage and via BOINC client. Since the server will be down, I made a page that will list the current status. This may be found at: http://research.davecoss.com/brats_status.htm
Server Temporarily down due to maintenance.
October 2, 2007
The feeder is currently down, due to maintenance. It should be up by the end of the day.
Temporary Network Outage for Campus Network Upgrades
September 15, 2007
Tomorrow, September 16 from 7-11am(UTC -6), campus networking staff will be implementing new software configurations on the core networking hardware. According to the IT staff, "there may be intermittent outages lasting 10-15 minutes each."
IT strikes again.
August 8, 2007
The IT staff for the University of Missouri - St Louis is completely overhauling the campus network. This should't cause a problem with this project, but this campus's IT staff has surprised me before. I just wanted to put that out there as a warning in case there is some temporary outage. I can't apologize enough for the blunders of the staff here, but sorry if there is any disruption in service. If there are any questions, please post about it on the message board. I have removed my email address from the main page, due to the emails I keep getting about invite codes. So message board is the best way to get in touch with me. Thanks.
Temporary Power Outage
August 2, 2007
Due to a campus wide power outage, the project was temporarily down. Hopefully, this is an isolated incident. Sorry for any inconvenience.
End of Alpha/Beta Testing
July 17, 2007 13:12
I have removed the label of beta testing for the front page. To keep this news posting from getting to long, I've added details of this change to my developer forum in the message board. That can be found at this address: http://maxwell.dhcp.umsl.edu/brats/forum_thread.php?id=21#179. In the future, I may (and by may I mean will) have to beta test a program change. I will then denote that beta app by the name. As for now things are running smoothly and I am at a point where science can be done.
Upload/Download problems.
June 25, 2007 21:04
Upload/Download problems. If you are stuck downloading a file, reset or re-attach. Also, I've got windows and linux apps out. Once I'm done beta testing them, real work will be out. (See also this thread)
Current State of Windows Science App
June 18, 2007 16:27
As some of you have noticed you have gotten windows work units. They were small but they were on XP! I resolved a checkpointing issue. The windows science app is nearly finished. It seems slow. I'm going to see if I can do something about that. Otherwise I hope to be beta testing the actually science app soon. The current windows betaapp is just the wrapper I'm using to go around my code. That's why the workunits were small. Once the real science app is done, expect bigger units! Just wanted to give out an update.
Network Connection Restored (Obviously)
June 14, 2007 15:11
For about 7 or 8 hours, BRaTS@Home was shutdown down due to campus (see .edu) network confusion. Sorry for any inconvenience. This will hopefully be an isolated incident.
Alpha Status
June 13, 2007 19:01
I have added the status ALPHA Testing to the projects index page to try and make it clear that I'm working on resolving a couple of issues until I am ready to send out a bunch of work units. Once I fix the checkpointing and release the windows app I will remove that status.
Account creation temporarily disabled.
June 11, 2007 12:29
Account creation has been temporarily closed until actual workunits can be given out. Please check back later.
Checkpoint Testing
June 10, 2007 14:53
As you may or may not have noticed, there were a number of work units released yesterday. This was part of my checkpoint beta test. After I am content with the results, I will release the windows version. Also, if you see a user called "dude", that is my test user. It's the account I use to "punish" my app to try and get bugs to come out. Otherwise units are first come, first serve.
Changed RSS/url count.
June 6, 2007 21:28
I changed the way the news RSS generator counts and creates links. The default BOINC RSS counted so that the newest item has a value of 1 in the URL, including the Permalink. Now my thinking is if everything I add a message the permalink changes, that's not very perma. So I switched it and the firs is 0, second is 1, etc. If this is a problem, let me know.
First Successful workunit has be completed.
June 6, 2007 17:01
First Successful workunit has be completed. As of now there is only a linux gnu version available. But it works!
Scheduler host name fixed
June 6, 2007 12:06
I believe I have fixed the schedule hostname error (6/5/2007 21:36). There was an incorrect host name in the scheduler link.
Cannot Resolve host
June 5, 2007 21:36
As of now, a user can attach to the project but cannot receive work. The client tries to connect to my locally named server. You will get a "cannot resolve host" error. I'm working on it.
First day up.
June 5, 2007 19:30
Today is the first day of BRaTS running online. As of now there is only a i686 linux gnu version of raytrace, but hey it's a start