News archive

October 3, 2007 Scheduled Maintenance.
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

October 2, 2007 Server Temporarily down due to maintenance.
The feeder is currently down, due to maintenance. It should be up by the end of the day.

September 15, 2007 Temporary Network Outage for Campus Network Upgrades
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."

August 8, 2007 IT strikes again.
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.

August 2, 2007 Temporary Power Outage
Due to a campus wide power outage, the project was temporarily down. Hopefully, this is an isolated incident. Sorry for any inconvenience.

July 17, 2007 13:12 End of Alpha/Beta Testing
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.

June 25, 2007 21:04 Upload/Download problems.
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)

June 18, 2007 16:27 Current State of Windows Science App
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.

June 14, 2007 15:11 Network Connection Restored (Obviously)
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.

June 13, 2007 19:01 Alpha Status
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.

June 11, 2007 12:29 Account creation temporarily disabled.
Account creation has been temporarily closed until actual workunits can be given out. Please check back later.

June 10, 2007 14:53 Checkpoint Testing
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.

June 6, 2007 21:28 Changed RSS/url count.
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.

June 6, 2007 17:01 First Successful workunit has be completed.
First Successful workunit has be completed. As of now there is only a linux gnu version available. But it works!

June 6, 2007 12:06 Scheduler host name fixed
I believe I have fixed the schedule hostname error (6/5/2007 21:36). There was an incorrect host name in the scheduler link.

June 5, 2007 21:36 Cannot Resolve host
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.

June 5, 2007 19:30 First day up.
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