News archive

FTNBK broken
The 101 letters long FTNBK message was broken.
Please abort all m3_ftnbk* / g3_ftnbk* workunits as they're not needed anymore.

There might be a short break in WU availability as I have to clean up batches that are not needed anymore and prepare new ones.

More info will be posted here: http://www.enigmaathome.net/forum_thread.php?id=1109
15 Sep 2017, 22:34:34 UTC · Discuss

KLDIO broken
(this is a quick repost from Number Crunching)

A few hours ago Dave GPU returned the plaintext of KLDIO 90.
More info was posted in this forum thread

Please abort all the g3_kldio* workunits that haven't started yet, as they're not needed anymore.
2 Aug 2017, 17:13:07 UTC · Discuss

New app: "Enigma Test", OpenCL and Linux tests
I'm going to add a new application which will be used to test new app versions and platforms/plan classes.

It will run it's own mini batches of test work and once the tests are done and finished with success, the test app / app version / platform will be reassigned to standard workunits.

Test app will have it's own checkbox in project preferences and it will be reset to off for everyone on each app version change.

First app versions that will be tested soon are:
- OpenCL/ATI version of GPU app.
- Linux version of CUDA app.

I'm not sure when it will be released but my early estimate is somewhere around end of this week.
12 Jul 2017, 13:37:38 UTC · Discuss

Enigma Cuda 1.07
CUDA app version changed to 1.07 for both Windows x86 and x86_64.
I have removed the plan_classes "cuda" and "cuda23" because the app required compute capability 2.1+ cards & I haven't seen even a single task completed with success on "cuda23" plan_class.

The new version was recompiled to allow compute capability 2.0 cards:
GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 580, GeForce GTX 570, GeForce GTX 480, GeForce GTX 470, GeForce GTX 465, GeForce GTX 480M (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA)
so in theory anything from Fermi up should work.

The CUDA app requires Visual Studio 2015 c++ redistributable package installed to run.
8 Jul 2017, 11:19:50 UTC · Discuss

GPU app
As some of you may have already noticed, there is a GPU version of Enigma software available for testing. It requires nvidia GPU, and probably will run on anything that supports CUDA, I have tested it myself on a couple of low end cards and it ran just fine, except that the system was lagging and WU runtime was very long.

Until yesterday it required app_info to run, this was changed and currently it will be sent to any host that has 'beta work' allowed in preferences. I have reset the beta flag to off for everyone.

The app is marked as "beta" because there are still some issues both on the client and server side. Also, currently the GPU app runs via wrapper and that causes some issues, for example, this page says that interrupting GPU app while it is running the kerney may cause system crash. This is worst case scenario and so far I haven't seen it myself, but I assume it's possible.

Other than that, if left untouched, the app runs smoothly. At this moment it'll only run on CUDA device #0.

Progress bar does not work with the current version of the wrapper, but it's not a high priority thing at this moment, as tasks are relativery short: from ~20 minutes on GTX1050 to around 3m30s on 1080Ti. The app uses internal checkpoints and will automatically resume from the last checkpoint if restarted.
26 Jun 2017, 18:22:48 UTC · Discuss

Scheduled upgrades
The server requires BOINC server code upgrade to support GPU app,
Per-app credits, application selection and a couple of other things.

I have scheduled the upgrade for this weekend, the server will be stopped on saturday, in worst case it might even go completely offline for a couple of hours.

25 May 2017, 21:37:06 UTC · Discuss

Web server moved to new location
Since May 1st my VPS (which is running the web server) was unreachable almost half of the time and it eventually died. The tech support was unable to fix the problem so I decided to move somewhere else.

The server now runs on Amazon Lightsail with a new IP address - 34.203.18.49

13 May 2017, 11:04:00 UTC · Discuss

The reason why work generator is stopped
I have stopped the work generator because IMO it does not make sense to continue the batch that runs with the original ("naval") dictionary set, where upgraded dictionary sets have already failed with similar number of target restarts.

IMO it's better to try with another dictionary set and tweaked app.
Both cases, however, require major upgrades on the server side - for performance reasons, I have removed some of the functionalities it originally had and now I have to add them back. It's going to take 2-4 weeks because my job leaves me very little spare time. I'm also going to clean the database from any leftovers, there are still over 20k workunits in the db, probably most of them are broken WUs that accumulated over time (at some point there was a sudden failure of SSD drive where the database filesystem is located, it was replaced by RAID5 setup with the data restored from backup, but ~4500 workunits/results ended in messed up state). I'll wait a few days and then all the orphaned workunits / results will be removed.

Also, all future (larger) batches will be split into a group of smaller sub-batches. While the batch is running, the server requires access to all the results that were returned and if the database gets to big, performance suffers. It also makes creating 'offline' backups harder due to the amount of data in the db dump.

In a few days I'll post downloadable results from the previous batches in case anyone wants to take a look.

19 Apr 2017, 23:04:21 UTC · Discuss

Recent changes in account creation
As everyone may have already noticed, the project has been heavily hit by spammers. For the last weeks I've been fighting with up to 10k registrations per day, mostly just empty accounts which were created for unknown reasons (very few of them actually posted anything on forums or created profile/spam team).
I've been looking into possible ways to filter out the spammers right where they start (registration) and after looking at a few of possible solutions, I made a patch for the BOINC server to use StopForumSpam databases. For now, the server does not allow access to registration script from any IP listed in SFS db and it also refuses to create account with email address which is blacklisted there. This immediately filtered out more than 99,9% of new accounts, the rest is reviewed manually and eventually spammers that slipped through registration are reported back to the SFS.

There is also a daemon scriptwhich runs in background, randomly picking account and checking it against the blacklists, all accounts registered with blacklisted email address will be gone sooner or later together with any team and/or profile they have created (the script works very slowly, checking one account every few minutes, as I dont want to stress the SFS API which is a great free service).
The script won't touch anyone who has any credits or even hosts attached, so legitimate accounts should be safe even if someone has their email blacklisted.
24 Aug 2016, 12:44:25 UTC · Discuss

Work generator paused
Recently the work generator has been paused because the server needs extended database maintenance (there is a significant amount of workunits stuck in unknown state, which affect performance).
I'm also running data analysis on all the results returned so far, the process eats a lot of resources so probably the work generator will remain stopped until the data analysis is done.
24 Aug 2016, 12:23:43 UTC · Discuss

FNYG MXHU broken
Today around 02:30 GMT+2 ThrasherX-17 from team Keep The Fire Alive! returned the plaintext of 76 letters long FNYG MXHU message:

leitungvvvuuustuetzpktxwwwhavenxxfffttteunszwozwovierhuermitvrrhhhvvvgeloest

The message says:
"AN LEITUNG VON U BOOT STUETZPUNKT WILHELMSHAVEN: FUNKTELEGRAMM EINS ZWO ZWO VIER HIER MIT RHV GELOEST"

Which translates to:

"[To] Control from Submarine Base Wilhelmshaven: Radio message 1224 solved with RHV"

If you'd like to know more about the context of this message, read Dan Girard's explanation
20 Jun 2013, 8:01:37 UTC · Discuss

Planned maintenance on April 18th
The company which is hosting part of my server (download mirror, domain and a few other things) announced that my VPS will be moved to another location (datacenter) on 18th of April.
The IP address is going to be changed so I think the server will be unavailable for at least couple of hours, maybe up to a day.

6 Apr 2013, 19:45:41 UTC · Discuss

Server maintenance
Tomorrow (04.03.2013) around 08:00 GMT the server will go offline for 12-24 hours.
The reason for this is hardware replacement, the old server barely keeps up running under load and has serious performance issues.
The swap is going to take a while because I need to copy data from both old drives, I hope that 'dd' image will do the trick.

3 Mar 2013, 10:09:18 UTC · Discuss

New M4 batch - U-534 P1030680
The work generator will be restarted today, running a new M4 batch on VROL NMKA naval message.
At first there will be only a short test batch to check the server backend, after the tests the server will resume in auto mode with lots of work.

It's also possible that the server will go down for a couple of hours during the next days; as the system hard drive needs to be replaced.

18 Feb 2013, 13:41:18 UTC · Discuss

Third naval message broken
The third Enigma message from Stefan Krah´s M4 Project (the last from the Ralph Erskine messages) was broken. See http://enigma.hoerenberg.com/ for more details.

13 Feb 2013, 0:06:48 UTC · Discuss

No work available
As probably everyone noticed, there is no work available for a long period of time.
Unfortunately it's not going to change soon, because I have to find a replacement server.
The old machine is not reliable anymore, it passes stress tests yet freezes randomly after couple of days (or even weeks sometimes) during normal operation, which is not acceptable.
The worst part however are the HDDs, only two still alive, one is damaged already while the other starts to suffer from old age (was online for over 3,5 years).

In current state the server barely keeps the website up, so any work has to wait until I'll get the new hardware setup, which is going to take a while.

31 May 2012, 22:43:01 UTC · Discuss

Updated apps
Yesterday I released new app versions for Linux and Windows.
On Windows, very little was changed, mostly minor fixes around BOINC API code and checkpointing/progress calculations.
Linux version fixes all known/reported wrapper bugs (and hopefully didn't introduce new).

There is also a new platform supported by the server - armv5tel, however the platform-id returned by the client varies on those machines, so if the server says the platform is not supported, you need to submit the platform name (as returned by core client), preferably after veryfiying that the app works.

P.S. I'm looking for someone to build the updated wrapper for Mac.

21 Mar 2012, 12:01:17 UTC · Discuss

Server issues
On 24 Dec one of the server's hard drives failed, as a result I had to set up a fresh system so I decided to switch to new OS version as well as the latest BOINC trunk, since the amount of work to do didn't change by much.
It took almost 2 days to get most of the things working again, but there are still some things broken/not working at all. Please report all anomalies, I'm trying to get rid of all bugs/glitches but it will definitely take some time, as the list is still long.

27 Dec 2011, 20:05:26 UTC · Discuss

Enigma badges
Few months ago one of the participants proposed a set of graphical badges for the project, since then a couple of designs (which can be viewed here: http://www.boincatpoland.org/smf/enigmahome-78/propozycje-odznak-dla-enigmahome/) were made by BOINC@Poland members.
I'm going to implement the badges before the end of this year (or early 2012 in the worst case), next week I'll make a poll which will decide which one of the sets will be used, so there is still some time if anyone else would like to submit another set of icons.

Also I'd be glad to hear opinions on the amount of credits needed for badges, considering the fact that (at least for now) it's a project with with just one app.

21 Dec 2011, 23:17:55 UTC · Discuss

Database problems
Yesterday the server crashed during strong thunderstorm, as a result one of the tables ("workunit") was seriously damaged. I had to restore both "workunit" and "result" tables from backup, so unfortunately some of the workunits/results were lost.

25 Aug 2011, 20:26:35 UTC · Discuss

Server down - power issues
Today morning the server went down unexpectedly most probably due to power failure. A bit later it was automatically restarted in disabled mode because at least one of the database tables needs to be repaired.
The server will be up again today, however it has to wait a couple of hours because I do not have access at this moment.
13 May 2011, 9:40:58 UTC · Discuss

Server downtime
The server is back up after it's longest outage. Unfortunately I had no money to pay the hosting bills so after a while my account got disabled and the server became unreachable.

I also had hardware problems with the local part of the server, as a result minor part of the database was recovered after critical failure, it's not yet entirely fixed so most probably validator will mark some of the results as invalid. Since it's already late night here, I'll fix that tomorrow, together with the WUs marked as timeouts.
It's also possible that I'll be changing the server location, I'll post more info tomorrow.

27 Apr 2011, 23:40:54 UTC · Discuss

Windows app updated to 5.26
After a few weeks of testing, I decided to update the Windows application to the latest development version.

V5.26 fixes all bugs related to progress indicator and checkpoint reporting, as well as many other minor glitches. If it doesn't work for some reason on your system, please let me know.

5.26 for Linux is coming soon.

1 Sep 2010, 19:58:52 UTC · Discuss

Server down
The server is down since yesterday due to very bad weather conditions and local flood.

Around 17:30 local time the water level was extremely high, no one ever has seen it higher or even close.
As a result there are random and unexpected power outages, so I'll keep the server down for a while to prevent database damage.

31 May 2010, 9:52:10 UTC · Discuss

KEJNQ broken
Today at 07:24 GMT Nuller[NDS] from Russia Team returned machine settings which decoded the following plaintext:

dievonkolonneabteilungyfenf
neundreikommandiertendiolawtkr
aetwagenfuenutonnxtslcbygvhayc
taqtakdayywlypo

Check out the forum thread to read more details.
6 May 2010, 8:38:05 UTC · Discuss

Spam attack and profile credits requirement
Due to the large amount of spammers creating profiles with stupid ads, I had to enable server's built-in spam protection - right now it requires the user to have certain minimum of credits to create profile, I've set it to 100.
19 Apr 2010, 12:58:58 UTC · Discuss

Server downtime
During this weekend the server will be taken down for O/S upgrade.
The old distro (Debian 4) will be replaced by Debian 5 amd64, since the older version has a limited support and probably slows down the hardware a bit.
It's hard to estimate how long the upgrade process will take, but I'd say that 8-12 hours minimum, because I have to do a complete backup first, so in the worst case I'll be able to rollback everything to the previous state.
9 Mar 2010, 10:25:45 UTC · Discuss

Temporarily out of work
The server is out of work, for two reasons: the M4 server is out of work, because the awgly keyspace is finished. Also, I was going to run one of the other known unbroken messages while waiting for Stefan Krah to update the M4 server, but unfortunately during the last few hours one of the BOINC server's hard drives failed. Luckily nothing seems to be damaged except one table which contains unimportant log data, but until I'll fully diagnose and fix the problem, I'm taking all the daemons offline. It's also possible that later today I'll shutdown the server to replace the drive.
16 Nov 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Test workunits
I have released a small number of test workunits to check the server software. Read more in this forum thread.
5 Oct 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Database maintenance
The project server will be shut down tomorrow (26th Feb) around 12:00pm GMT+1 for a quick database optimization, the downtime shouldn't last longer than 2 hours.
25 Feb 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

BOINC 6.6.0 for Mac
BOINC 6.6.0 alpha for Mac is now available at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php. This version fixes wrong file permissions issues with Enigma@Home (and probably any other project which uses copy_file flag). Also, BOINC dev-team could use some more Mac alpha testers, if anyone would like to become an alpha tester, please read here about it: http://isaac.ssl.berkeley.edu/alpha/.
12 Jan 2009, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Short downtime
Today (11 December) around 1pm GMT+2 the server will be shut down for a short period of time (around 1~2 hours), because one of the databases has to be moved to new hard drive.
11 Dec 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Hardware replacement
I'm going to shutdown one of the servers to replace faulty network card. The BOINC server will stay online, however the work generator will be stopped so it's possible that the server will run out of work.
4 Nov 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

5.19/5.20 Optimized app
If you're running v5.17 optimized app, please update your app_info.xml and all app files to 5.19 (Windows) or 5.20 (Linux). Old version can't handle new task templates so it can't run awgly100 workunits. Forum thread
10 Aug 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Server up
After a long break the project is up, with a lot of workunits to crunch. Please read these forum posts to see what's planned/changed: 501 505 504
20 Jul 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Planned outage
Starting at early February, the project will be out of work for some time, please read this forum thread for more details.
20 Jan 2008, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Happy New Year
I wish you all a happy New Year !
31 Dec 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Mac Intel/PPC apps
Lars Bausch has compiled both enigma and wrapper for MacOS running on Intel and PowerPC CPUs. There are some minor issues with these apps, but returned results are valid. Please report any problems on message boards.
2 Dec 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Private messages email notifications
There has been a discussion about email notifications, David Anderson stated that it should default to off. I have tweaked the database, it's already set to off by default for all new accounts. I'm going to reset it to off for everyone, so if you want email notifications, go to your forum preferences and switch it back on.
22 Nov 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Server upgrade
I'm going to shutdown the server tomorrow (31.10.2007) at 7:30pm GMT to do a full upgrade to the latest SVN revision. The server will be down for a couple of hours, during this time only forum will be accessible, I'll make a post there with informations about progress.
30 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

URL Change
The project has changed its url to http://www.enigmaathome.net. While the old url will still work, it is suggested (although by no means required) that you detach the project and reattach to http://www.enigmaathome.net, you might also have to log in again on the project's page. Should you experience any problems, please contact us at forum .
14 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Server maintenance
Today at 6:30pm GMT I'll shutdown the server to do a full backup and database cleanup. The server will be offline for about 2-3 hours, during first 30 minutes website may be offline.
1 Oct 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Experimental linux app
Few days ago I put experimental linux app online. It should work on most modern linux distributions. It uses enigma executable compiled with -march=pentium3, (gcc 3.2), so it may not work on older CPUs, I haven't checked that yet. If you want to try it out, please remember, that you have to chmod +x enigma_0.76_i686-pc-linux-gnu manually (it's inside project's dir) after you attach to project. For some reason, BOINC does not do that automatically. EDIT: I think it's fixed now.
18 Sep 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Alpha test started
At this time, only Windows platform is supported. Linux client coming soon. Server looks stable, but please keep in mind, that it's alpha test and anything can happen. Expect a lot of errors and crashes ;) Check this link for a list of known problems.
9 Sep 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Hello World
24 Aug 2007, 0:00:00 UTC · Discuss

Enigma@Home changelog

-Server software upgraded to 14087:

David Anderson wrote:

I added a "user search" feature (html/user/user_search.php).
This is of critical importance for teams - e.g.,
it lets Team Ireland easily see what users from Ireland have
joined your project in the last few days.

This is intended to be linked from your front page.
(see, e.g. the SETI@home home page).

I recommend that all projects upgrade to this code,
and add a link from your home page.

6 Nov 2007, 12:18:59 UTC · Discuss

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