Thanks Iain do nothing always suits me!!

Ian

---

Hi Dave.
I have got connected to the project. For anyone else wanting the url it is
www.climateathome.info/climateathome

In the interim, star gazing it is, still the check for work units is functioning, even with the feeder offline.
Thanks Vicki.

you have to add it manually. - type www.climateathome.info into the url box after clicking on the add project button.

Does not seem to do any good.

$ ping -c 5 www.climateathome.info
PING climateathome.info (34.224.84.98) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- climateathome.info ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 13999ms

---

http://ithaqua.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/

I've downloaded 6 WU's, finished them, uploaded all trickles. I've also had 5 that didn't download all the way and had to abort them.

The only "work" available is old and useless.
As I said in the thread below this one, (Downloads Failing), set the project to No New Tasks and wait.

Does not seem to do any good.

Not sure why, I am able to connect to project using either http://www.climateathome.info or http://www.climateathome.infor/climateathome Just tested this. I did note the site while coming up in a browser for me is not currently responding to pings.

No work available once connected and even if there was, I probably wouldn't be able to run it on the BOINC version that is finishing off my last few tasks as it is the 32 bit version of BOINC which regularly tells me it is unable to detect virtual box. (To actually run tasks when available I would revert to my preferred native Linux operation of BOINC. Not sure how well it would interact with virtual box through WINE anyway.

Dave,

Your reply was definitely not too aggressive. You made a large number of valid points and I admit that I was too broad in some of my statements.

That said taking your lead that Oxford has a fine IT Department which supports a broad number of higher learning schools is probably true, but unless you have inside information that this volunteer community would love to hear something is wrong.

My concerns now might be that the extraordinary IT Department at Oxford is either over worked or possibly under staffed or incorrectly supervised.

I make the above based on the length and severity of this outage and the length of the last total outage. I have just stated two apparently observable facts.

I also have to admit I have no inside information on the priorities that have set for the Oxford IT Department. They may be supporting another Nobel quality project and for that reason they are unable to support the Climate Prediction project as they might want to.

So I will patiently continue to monitor Climate Prediction for life in the future as I believe that their goals are great. I will also use my systems to support other worth while science related projects while waiting.

Respectfully
Bill F
Dallas TX

---

In October 1969 I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
There was no expiration date.

I have just posted an update in the News section, which is at the very top of this board.

Thanks Les, your post, http://ithaqua.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/forum_thread.php?id=8255
makes things a lot clearer and understandable to someone like me who had little understanding of the infrastructure at Oxford.

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your response, I do understand where you're coming from.

Below is an excerpt from Les' post which helps explain the current difficulty, which I follow with some info about OeRC.

There isn't one 'simple' Oxford University IT centre.

The OeRC is simply one research centre at the Uni, others having their own computing facilities for their own purposes, although OeRC does have coordinational links with these others. It isn't "the" Oxford IT centre.

Perhaps the difficulties they are having are 'unintended (unforeseen) consequences' of 'cloud computing"! (Personal opinion) It isn't just CPDN that is having problems.

The funding question is always one for discussion. There will always be someone fighting to get funds for the CPDN project. Unfortunately, we don't yet have 'big guns'on our side.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Les.
"The CPDN computing infrastructure is based in the department of OeRC (Oxford eResearch Centre), 90% of it is running in a cloud computing environment that is shared by a number of non-CPDN projects. This cloud computing environment can be divided into two parts: a virtual machine side where the servers run, and a file system. Since the beginning of April there has been a major problem with the virtual machine side of this cloud computing environment, this problem has been progressively corrupting each one of the servers of the project. What this means is that each one of the project servers will need to be rebuilt from scratch, 7 or 8 servers will need to be rebuilt. It is anticipated that it will possibly take some weeks to setup the whole CPDN infrastructure again, in the meantime the project will continue to run from the backup project server that is outside of the cloud computing environment."

OeRC details
"The University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre is a multidisciplinary applied research department, developing and applying innovative computational and information technology in both academic research and industrial applications.

The Centre acts as a hub for interdisciplinary collaborations within and outside of the University nationally and internationally. Expertise in digital methods enables the Centre to work across traditional academic boundaries.

Our funding comes from a broad range of sources including UK Research Councils, Innovate UK, the European Commission, charitable foundations and industrial collaborators."

Sorry for what's likely either a duplication or off-topic for this thread, but I just signed into the discussion board because there no longer appears to be an e-mail address outside of Facebook, which I don't use, for support. Also, the site seems to ignore the dropdown selections for "newest post first" and "newest first", making it hard to see what's the most current thread.

I've been checking Server Status to see when my long-completed WUs with a status of "Ready to Report" would be accepted and new WUs sent out. Today, all the servers are listed as "Running", including "Transitioner" which had been down for most of this month. However, attempting the Update button in Boinc Manager is still producing "project servers may be temporarily down".

Are the servers running, or down?

There IS an email address, but it's not for technical discussions.

The answer to your other question is the quote in the middle of the post just before yours.
This comes from the post in the News thread, (at the very top of this board, here.

The post order may be due to which address you used to log in.
The backup server's url for the Main page is: http://ithaqua.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/


And from way back somewhere:
Zips from tasks from earlier in the year that go to Oxford won't be able to be uploaded now, as there's no server(s) for them.
Zips going to research centers (and their servers), in other countries Will still be able to upload
Trickle_ups can be sent back, as they have their own server.
Old tasks can't be "Reported" as having finished because there's no server for that at present either.


And there is NO new work at present, and it's unlikely that there will be for a number of weeks.

Does anyone have any idea when the rebuilding of the servers might be finished and the project back to normal? I understand from the latest post in the “News” thread that the virtual servers need to be completely rebuilt, and that it will take “several weeks”. The project has been down for 2 months already. Any idea how many more weeks is “several”? Just a rough estimate will do. One month, 2 months?

---

I suspect that no one knows, and the people stuck with all the repairs / rebuilding would "bite your head off" if you could ask them.

I'm not counting on any thing working until Spring (Tra La), which would be your Autumn. (Doom and gloom, and wild, cold weather, I guess.)

Hi Les,

Do you think these (post failure) message board posts will be moved to the production server once the problems are finally resolved??

Art Masson

Do you think these (post failure) message board posts will be moved to the production server once the problems are finally resolved??

Pretty certain they will all be moved over, just as those on the boards still show here.

Until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought of it.
But I agree with Dave - no reason for the entire Message board to not be whatevered (moved? copied? imaged?).

My philosophy for future events has long been: Wait until the future arrives, then look around to see what it looks like.

4 tasks attempting to download but not getting very far
Batches are all old, 2x564 and one each from 385 and 461 As these are all old batches and not from, "only the most important batches of workunits." I will abort. Actually, I am not going to get any of the most important tasks as I have reverted to running BOINC natively under Linux until the current problems are more resolved than they are now.

Latest update from Andy

The CPDN project has been taken offline. We are currently performing a database dump from the backup project. This is being performed in order to construct a new dedicated main database server.


Best regards,

Andy

Hopefully, this is the start of the return to normal. With the many terrabytes of data involved, assuming the dump worked fine while the project was off line, the building of the dedicated database server will take several days after which some testing will be in order before we stand a chance of getting back on it but as Churchill might have said of it, this may be the end of the beginning.

When the CPDN project comes back online will it still be using the same web site address? I have seen post that seem to indicate that some others have been able to connect at least on and off. I haven't been able to connect for at least 4 months. I've also added some new computers and can't add CPDN and I would really like to. I am looking forward to CPDN coming back up. Thanks.

---