My messages indicate no new work. Is the project down again? I searched the forum, and there is no indications that the project is down.
What's up? Could it be on my end?

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I'm getting the same message- it happens every so often. have you tried increasing the cache? I have about a days supply of work in the cache, so when the project goes down my computer still has work to do.

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Back end servers are not running. See here...........

http://www.enigmaathome.net/server_status

The server has serious hardware problems.
Today morning I thought that one of the SATA drives has died, because the kernel went into panic mode with tons of SATA errors on sdb1. I copied the data and removed the drive, the server was left running but disabled, just in case. I had to leave it like that because I had various other tasks to do.

When I came back home I thought that I'll setup the server to run without the faulty drive, but suddenly it got worse: it shows errors on random SATA drives and also crashes from time to time. I won't be able to do much right now. Tomorrow I'll try to clear everything off dust and then I'll start looking what's wrong.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki

The old motherboard died, right now the server runs on a backup machine which has been sitting in the corner for occassions like this one. It should be fast enough to host the project. I hope that it won't fail anytime soon, because the backup of backup machine won't be able to run anything.
During the next few days everything shoult slowly go back to normal.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki

Thank you for the update.

Regards,
Graeme.

Time for (a) (another) donations round then? :)

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Jord.

BOINC FAQ Service.

Is this the motherboard from Debian 5 ?
Just wondering if that is still under warranty.

whats the hardware specs of the server affected, what sort of mobo would it need? i'd be happy to help if i can?!

The old server was a Phenom 9850 running on a cheap Gigabyte motherboard.
The 'new' one is an Athlon 3500+ on a decent s939 ASUS motherboard (I forgot the model name) , which has only two disadvantages: only 4 SATA ports (5th, the nvidia's RAID doesnt work for some reason) and DDR memory slots - this allows only 2GB (4x512) of RAM, because 1GB DDRs are way too expensive.

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Define too expensive?

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Jord.

BOINC FAQ Service.

Likely too expensive in terms of a volunteer project.

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Click Here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats

The definition: I believe that I would be able to find mobo with faster processor and 4GB DDR2 cheaper than 4x1GB DDRs.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki

Ok so if understand it correctly...the best solution would be an AM2+ board, which would allow you to re-use the DDR2 and Processor from the failed board?...is the raid merely there for redundancy or is there a large I/O demand on the server? Would on board RAID suffice or would a controller be Ideal.?!

Presumably the easiest solution (from my point of view of wanting to help out), would be to provide a donation, rather than source a board + post?! (from UK)

Thanks for all the effort you put in!

fitz,

I agree I'd like to donate money to the project and have asked for information on how to do so in the past. Not looking for any tax-deductible charity or anything of the sort just a gift to the project as a show of thanks and to help out in any way I can.

Ok so if understand it correctly...the best solution would be an AM2+ board, which would allow you to re-use the DDR2 and Processor from the failed board?...

I think that the processor might also be fried, however I don't have any other board around here to test it. During the last hours of it's life, the server had symptoms typical to overheating CPU, except that it wasn't overheating. It's also possible that the board is fine and just the CPU is dead.

is the raid merely there for redundancy or is there a large I/O demand on the server? Would on board RAID suffice or would a controller be Ideal.?!

I didn't use RAID here and I don't plan to, mainly because JBOD "array" of disks with database tables, logs and work folders spread across physical disks seems to be faster and regularly backed up shouldn't be much less safe.

Right now the server itself is not a problem, the backup machine should do all the work just fine. The only thing that is really needed is UPS, the old one failed few months ago and since then sudden power failures already caused lots of problems.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki

Ugh, I can feel for you on the UPS front. My 2nd APC Smart-UPS 1500 to die. Each lasted about 5 years total. "System controller board failure." Sad thing is this one I replaced the batteries earlier this year. I think I'm done with APC though all the brownouts and under-voltage conditions in the TX summer are harsh on a UPS. None of the many fold more expensive Lieberts at the office died though but I can't afford those or the special wiring :P

The excellent part of when the APCs die is that they can't even pass current so its death kills the power to the load. I experienced MySQL corruption that in over a decade of administration have never seen to that degree when this happened. (I was cheap on the raid card...it was already $500 so I didn't add $150 for a battery backup unit...which was fine until my UPS died.)

I used a small 300VA UPS (Ever) modified for long running. I made two 80mm holes on the both sides and attached standard 80x80 fans with temperature controller attached to one of the heatsinks inside. Then I replaced it's original battery (I think it was 12V 6Ah) with much larger battery - 104Ah which of course didn't fit inside, so it was just standing next to UPS.
With proper cooling, large battery and a little scripting on the server to reduce average load when running on battery, it could run for 6-8 hours.
There was only one problem - internal charging circuit couldn't charge battery that large and soon after first tests it broke, so I had to use external charger.

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M4 Project homepage
M4 Project wiki