Is there any information about how long this work will last? Is the project now long term? When this run is finished will there be another?

Cheers

yes - any chance we can get it added to the stats page and the two completed runs removed? :D

Thanks

The current ciphertext is a 'local' one (not from M4 server) and it has plenty of workunits. In the nearest future I'll probably set it as background work to run when there's no other work available (and I'll add more ciphertexts), because the M4 server is still out of work. I hope that Stefan Krah didn't forget about his project %-)

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So are we looking at 6 months or 6 years for work?

I have no idea, but a few months at least.
I'd like to run the bombe simulator (CUDA & CPU) on the unbroken M4 message, but that requires a lot of preparation and testing. The server requires a lot of patching to run another app and the app needs to be rebuild with BOINC API.

Unfortunately, recently my free time is very limited (I work at nights, during daytime usually I have a lot of other tasks to do, few days ago my father went to hospital so I have additional things to take care of). The list of other things to do here is veeeeery long, some entries on the list are like 2 years old (for example, the project has no official logo %-)), lots of pages have to be cleaned up, the Mac/Win wrapper has to be replaced... So I guess that the progress will be quite slow.

I'll try to add more ciphertexts this week, with the tool I wrote recently the process is almost automated, but still takes a few hours to add single text because manual benchmarking is needed to get estimated runtimes.

Right now the worst thing that might affect the future of the project is the combined cost of hosting, the monthly bandwidth consumption slowly increases with time (and the shorter workunits are not helping), soon I'll have to look around for another place for my download/scheduler mirror.

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Wasn't a contest to design the logo suggested earlier? Might be a good option, to get some quality work for free...

What kind of requirements are needed for a download server? Would standard webhosting work? I have a webhost with 100 GB of storage and 2 TB of transfer, of which I am only currently using 500 MB and 2 GB.

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Right now the worst thing that might affect the future of the project is the combined cost of hosting, the monthly bandwidth consumption slowly increases with time (and the shorter workunits are not helping), soon I'll have to look around for another place for my download/scheduler mirror.

Do you have a Paypal account? I know it won't result in a regular stream of money for hosting. However, I went through moves for both a personal machine and a rack for work this year. Hopefully we can get enough donations to let you have some time to find a host and plan a move and decrease some of the stress of it.

hey TJM,

Very sorry to hear about your father, I hope he will have a safe and speedy recovery. what are the bandwidth requirements for hosting the dl server? don't sweat about working too hard - hope you have had a break over the festive period at least!

I remember you mentioning that your psu was not quite up to the job, I may have something suitable lying around I would happily donate to the cause ;)

Fitz

hey TJM,
Very sorry to hear about your father, I hope he will have a safe and speedy recovery.

Thanks. Unfortunately today I heard probably the worst possible news, he was diagnosed with cancer and his condition is quite bad, I think he doesn't have much time left :-(

what are the bandwidth requirements for hosting the dl server? don't sweat about working too hard - hope you have had a break over the festive period at least!

100GB/month used to be enough, for most of the time the server used maybe half of that on average. A lot depends on the average workunit length, because all the client <-> server communications goes through the download mirror/proxy to fix the problem with BOINC not handling IP address changes properly, and the main server has dynamic IP.
Other than that the dl/proxy server has almost no requirements, right now it runs on a machine with 96MB RAM and has also been tested on virtual machines. It's just apache configured to work as reverse proxy which also handles all the static files (and even generates part of the dynamic contents to save main server's upstream bandwidth).
Theoretically the proxy could even run on a typical 'shared' webhost without root access, but it requires a couple of apache mods which aren't typically available on web servers, at least I haven't seen one with all required modules.

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I'm very sorry to hear that news TJM,

In regards to the servers I presume...

A) there is the main server and the download/feeder server. The main one at home on a dynamic IP and the download hosted with a static?

B) It is expensive to obtain a static IP for the main server to reduce the bandwidth usage (perhaps more than the bandwidth usage cost)

C) The two servers cannot be combined for a software limitation or a hardware issue?

Perhaps you could list out what you have hardware wise, and what the needs of various boinc server components are.

Sorry - i'm not too familiar at the moment with the ins and outs of boinc server side, just trying to figure out what the best setup is and how and if i can help :)

A) there is the main server and the download/feeder server. The main one at home on a dynamic IP and the download hosted with a static?

The download server acts as a http proxy, it hides the main server's dynamic IP. Most of the older versions* of BOINC core client were unable to contact the server after each IP change, so I had to use this setup as a workaround.

* - I don't know if the issue was resolved in newer versions, however last time I checked 6.10.x core client still had some problems, probably caused by the dynamic domain's TTL.

B) It is expensive to obtain a static IP for the main server to reduce the bandwidth usage (perhaps more than the bandwidth usage cost)

Static IP is not available for the Internet connection I use; anyway - the download mirror helps a lot, as it handles almost 100% of static files.

C) The two servers cannot be combined for a software limitation or a hardware issue?

Theoretically it would be possible to switch to dedicated hosting, but it's far too expensive for me, running the server at home and additional host as a mirror is much cheaper.

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I have a fiend who has some rack space and an old server. what kind of hardware is the main server running on at the moment? we'd be able to get full access to the server sorted for you and the software could be tailored etc.

just thinking of ways we might be able to help out and save you money :) from what you have said my friend might be able to do the proxy server for you cheaper than it currently costs you. Is there a speed requirement on the connection? or is it merely the amount of bandwidth it uses that costs.

Depending on what the main server needs hardware wise we may be able to sort something out for you so that the proxy and main server be hosted on the same network thus cutting that bandwidth cost out.

Do let us know if there are things we contributors can do to take some of the workload off you :)

fitz

The main server is an old Phenom X4 running on a cheap motherboard, with 4GB DDR2 memory and a few harddrives + single Gigabyte iRAM (which was donated by AiDec - BOINC@Poland member).
The proxy server has no hardware requirements, all it needs is an old PC capable of running any linux distro (preferably Debian) and Apache 2.2 with PHP + MySQL (it could run without MySQL, but database is the easiest way to store and access data needed by the server).
The bandwidth is also not critical, I think it would run fine (perhaps a bit slow) on a 512kbps link.

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Thanks for the info TJM, i'll have a word with my friend on thursday, the old server is a dual PIII 800, which will be fine and its on a 2mb link.

fitz

I'm sure the community can help you to handle a bit this problem.
I'm doing a server at home on my own connection (22MB in DL with a good 1MB in upload) to do some website.
I'm not sure if I can help you with this computer (Q8300 2gb on gentoo)

Fitz's friend can be a good idea no ?

What about asking help from some hosting association. It will be far cheaper than a dedicated. I know a good association in France (Don't know if it helps, but I may ask them if they can do something to suit your need and what will be the price if there will be.)

Well, the offer still stands for space/bandwidth on my dedicated host...

BURP uses a system where users can contribute various amounts of storage space and bandwidth to hosting various files for the project; not sure how complicated it would be to implement here, but perhaps there's a framework that could get you could look into?

Example of this on my host: http://www.hsiprodsvcs.com/burp_mirror/

The link to the main status page seems to have changed, but it was just a list showing the hosts (not all BURP users, just those who have signed up to mirror) and their pledged and actual storage/bandwidth measurements. While you probably wouldn't need as many hosts on your network since you're not throwing (pieces of) full-resolution video files around, a small network of a few hosts would provide reliability and keep you from going over your bandwidth limit.

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Click Here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats

Sounds like no-eraser's hosting offer sounds like a good plan if you can get the proxy to work - thats an insane amount of bandwidth :)!

Though don't worry about things too much at the moment - we have work so its all good, can worry about updating things later!

Short question by the way: Is this project intended to end at a time, or will there always be new messages added to decipher, weither they are yet cracked or not?

Short question by the way: Is this project intended to end at a time, or will there always be new messages added to decipher, weither they are yet cracked or not?

The number of unbroken ciphertexts is limited.

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About the proxy: I forgot about one more thing. It also runs the SMTP server.
It wasn't really needed until recently my ISP started blocking all outgoing traffic to port 25. Since then I'm forced to use my own mail server which listens on non-standard port and is set-up to relay outgoing mails from my domains.


I noticed that the company which hosts my current server has changed offer, the plan I use right now is no longer listed, but there's a similar one, which offers over twice the bandwidth I have right now, more disk space and RAM. I'll ask them if it's possible to switch from the old plan to the new one - that would be great, because the price is exactly the same (14.99$/month).

The 'new' offer runs virtual machine with OpenVZ kernel. I hope that it will eventually run simple apache, php + mysql setup without problems...


Tomorrow I'll ask Stefan Krah about the future of M4 server, because it's still offline. I hope that he didn't give up.
I'll also probably release a very small batch (less than 1000) of test workunits to check various things in the M3 subsystem of the server, because
there are hidden bugs which are hard to trace, for example during last 2 days the server marked a lot of valid workunits as invalid.
I'll use ciphertexts which are known to be breakable (and of course were broken already) by the software in use, so probably it will be very easy to spot any errors.

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