Back up

In case you have not noticed, we are back online. Things got a little more tricky than my ISP anticipated, resulting in no connectivity until early today (local time). Of course this coinsided with other things I had to attend to, which is why I could not write this 10 hours ago when things started getting back up.

Blog

I have setup a blog at http://blog.esea2.dk which already contain something of interest for BOS users.

Homepage updates

On the homepage you will now be able to find 3rd party tools for BOS. Some of these are created by fans of BOS, some are made by BOS developers themselves (currently just me). First two have already been added: The BOINC Server Status by Gandalf, which is a Yahoo Widgets widget that enables you to have the BOS image on your desktop - and the BOS Google gadget that enables you to have the image on your Google personalized homepage. The homepage has also been updated with info on the XML version and the Account Creation Status XML. A further note, this RSS feed has been added to Google.

Reminder of down time

Remember: This weekend I will change the hard drive with the database. Just had some trouble getting it running yet again. So expect some down time.

Updated static images

Static images have not been enhanced since Chess960@home, so now I have added Leiden Classical, VTU@home, TANPAKU, Nano-Hive@home, Rectilinear Crossing Numbers, Riesel Sieve, Proteins@home, Spinhenge@home, Docking@home, Project Neuron, RenderFarm@home, BOINC Alpha, DepSpid, ABC@home Beta, BelgianBeer@home, climateprediction.net beta, WEP-M+2 Project, ABC@home and TheMinouche Research Laboratories Distributed Rainbow Table Generator to the full image and seperate images for each of these projects. Sorry for the wait.

Projects added to URL generator

The following projects was never added to the URL generator, but are now: Proteins@home, Docking@home, Project Neuron, RenderFarm@home, BOINC Alpha, DepSpid, ABC@home beta, BelgianBeer@home, climateprediction.net beta, WEP-M+2 Project, ABC@home and TheMinouche Research Laboratories Distributed Rainbow Table Generator. Sorry for the wait.

Ampersand corrected

Ampersand was not always output correctly. This has been corrected.

BBcode URL fully working

BBcode part of the URL generator did not work with the following projects: Leiden Classical, VTU@home, TANPAKU, Nano-Hive@home, Rectilinear Crossing Numbers, Riesel Sieve and Spinhenge@home. This has been corrected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

DepSpid display not accurate

Due to the IP for DepSpid changing once a day, BOS may display the project as Unreachable although it is online. The only way to correct this at my end would be to reboot the server every day. I am not going to do that, and I do not even know when to do this. They are working on a solution, as this also affects the BOINC core client, so until then, please bare with me. Once the scheduler is up three days in a row and BOS also displays that, you will know that re-starting/re-booting to fetch work/return work will no longer be needed.

Bug with Docking@home

Docking@home implementation had a bug that would influence the hight of the image, and thereby hight of text, for all projects when choosing either which projects not to show or choosing which projects to show. This has been corrected.

Three added projects

Added BelgianBeer@home, climateprediction.net beta and WEP-M+2 to the image and XML export today.

XML export available

XML export of BOS is available. I will add a page about this to the web site later, until then find more in the message boards.

Message boards support

I have promissed to add better support for message boards, but it seems I will have to delay this. My initial trials have failed with a big bang, and as far as I have researched this is due to my non-apache web server. I have already planned to change to apache, but this is a bit of a complex process, as I want to disturb people least possible and I do have lots of asp that would need to be re-written in php. So please bare with me on that delay. In the meantime I am contemplating a temporary alternative, that consists of registrering to the site, designing your image, which will then be created as a static image. This solution will include the possibility of designing multiple images if needed.

Site down today

The website was down today for unknown reasons. When I left for work this morning everything was ok. But as I got to work things was already off, and there was nothing I could do remotely (although a few thing were attempted, not knowing the cause). As I got home it was clear that my suspicions were wrong. It was not due to too many connections. Lots of error messages from boincview covered the screen, as well as error messages saying div. php modules could not be found. I suspect things just got overloaded due to repeated error messages from boincview filling up the memory - I have seen this before, but not nearly to this degree, and it has always been when I was home. Anyway, things should be up and running again.

Outage notice

This weekend there will be one or more down periods. I finaly got the cords and cables I ordered, so I will work on the RAID setup and drive imaging. Hopefully it will work as planned. I do see a possible problem, though: the Y-cords may be too short. But I will see if I can make things fit anyway.

Riesel Sieve unreachable

It displays unreachable, but it is up. Only they've changed some DNS making it impossible to reach them for a brief period, unless you make some changes. I will keep things as they are at my end on purpose - not many would make the changes needed, and those changes would only be needed for a brief period - this way you will be able to see when things are back to normal.

Server down tomorrow

Server will be down tomorrow while I install the new network adapter.

Downtime

While the site hasn't been up consistently the past few weeks, I'm getting closer to get there.This weekend I can promise some downtime, as I'll install the new IDE/RAID controller, and some new harddrives - hopefully the new network adapter will have arrived as well, so I can install that one too.During installation of new harddrives I'll try to do some back-up and restore to set up some RAID 1 for the system/boot drive and/or the database drive - or at least make the replacement of the old drives with the new ones.I don't expect this to be hassle free, so longer downtime periods are to be expected.

Added projects

Some projects have been added to the BOS image for a while, but have not been added to the URL generator. Those have now been added to the URL generator. Those projects are: Leiden Classical, VTU@home and TANPAKU. Recently added projects are: Rectilinear Crossing Numbers (called RCN on the image), Riesel Sieve and Spinhenge@home. A special thanks to bryan of Riesel Sieve and Thomas Hilbig of Spinhenge@home for providing me with the needed URLs for those projects as I do not yet participate in those projects myself.

Boards online

Message boards are now online at http://www.esea.dk/bos/forum/index.php - link is available from the site (opens in new window).

Current developments

Thought I would give you an update on what is comming. Thanks to Niel Munday I may be able to finally make the dynamic image compatible with all those boards that block php-images. An XML export of the BOS status messages is on the way - when it is ready I will make the final touches to another XML export which gives you info on projects account creation status. I have been informed that some projects official names are a bit different from that mentioned in the BOS image - I will go through every one of them to make sure it is as correct as possible (long project names will continue to be shortened one way or another). And finally I will setup some message boards on the BOS web site.

Downtime

You may have wondered what had happened to the site the last few days. I tried to make another attempt to add more memory to the computer, which wasn't really a scheduled thing. I was going to replace the monitor and thought I might try as the computer was shut down anyway. Somehow things went a bit wrong - making the computer unable to boot. It turned out to be the graphics board that was dislodged during the process. But we're up and running again - and the memory addition was yet again a failure.

Additions/changes

Static images have been added - well, they are updated automatically, but they are compatible with sites and forums that block .php. Inspired by a request there is an image for each project as well as the full BOS image. And UBT - Halifax--lad requested BBcode tags to be available as well, so I have added this, as well as the other request for English style date format for the time stamp.

Chess960@home Alpha added

The new project, Chess960@home Alpha, was added today.

Outages

Sorry for all the outages today. They were too many and too long lasting. I was doing a software upgrade and expected a few short outages, but for some reason my mail server gave errors. I have tried to find the error, but still unsuccessful. The diagnostics tool suggested a few things but I was able to rule those out. I even uninstalled the softwae that was being upgraded with no effect. So, temporarily all mail addresses at esea.dk are out. Shortly you will be able to contact me through bruno@greenholt.dk.

False status

I apologize for the false status messages lately for SETI@home and SETI@home BETA. I have been late in discovering that the scheduler reply from those projects has changed. This has been fixed. In the next couple of days I'll make sure a similar change at other projects will not give these false messages.

Seasonal Attribution and HashClash added

The spin-off project of climateprediction.net, Seasonal Attribution has been added along with another new project called HashClash.

Malaria Control . Net added

Malaria Control has been public alpha for a while, but I was not able to add it at the time as I did not have an account at the project. Now the project is beta, and I am finally able to add it - and here it is.

XtremLab re-activated

As XtremLab is back it has been re-activated.

QMC@home added

The new project, QMC@home, was added today.

Added projects and a bug fix

Some of you have noticed that whenever uFluids@home was unreachable BOS displayed nothing (except percentage for those who have chosen to display that). This bug has been fixed. I have added two new projects to BOS: BBC Climate Change Experiment (called Climate Change on the image) and RALPH@home. This brings us very close to 20 projects - and it is clear to me that I have to consider adding a feature to split the list automatically into two coloumns - this would then be a choice you make, by clicking a checkbox at the URL generator. Already brewing as an upcoming feature is an XML export so you will be able to place the status information as you like on your website. Basic PHP code to fetch and import the data to a database will be available.

URL more HTML compliant

Thanks to Lee Carre who brought this to my attention. The URL generator now produces a more HTML standards compliant code.

Two additions

TAs Pirates@home has re-opened it is now re-added to BOS - and a new addition, SETI@home BETA has been made.

LHC@home ALPHA added

The alpha test scheduler of LHC@home has been added.

Four weddings and a funeral

The four weddings: Rosetta@home is finally fully added - World Community Grid was added, thanks to the good people of the project who had made a nice change I was not aware of before, although I had to shorten the name a bit - uFluids@home has been added - SIMAP@home has been added. The funeral: XtremLab seems to have disappeared from Earth, and although they might return they have been gone so long that I have decided to, at least temporary, remove that project. Oh, and a small note to those who have used the full URL generated by the URL generator: Please remove the height and width part of the URL - the project list is increasing at an ever faster rate at the moment, so I have removed that part from the URL generator as well.

A little update

A little update to keep you informed. I am working on completely adding the latest projects: Rosetta@home, World Community Grid and uFluids@home. Rosetta was only added to the BOS image but not to the URL generator, this will be done. However, WCG is giving me a few problems, so I am trying to figure this out while working on a couple of my other projects. I may end up adding WCG without status indicator for starters. As you may know, I am working on a new version of BOS. This is a total re-write of every bit of code as well as extending and adding a bunch of things. When this version is ready, the URL will change as well as BOS will go Open Source. But as I still have not figured out how to make the image itself multilinguiable, making it display for example chinese chars, I may create an intermediate version, disposing of the word indicators and replacing them with coloured filled circles. This version may be on a new temporary URL so it will not cause any trouble at sites already using BOS - but more on this later. Malaria Control will be added to BOS at a later date, as it seems to be relatively closed to the public at the moment. All for now.

XtremLab added

This new project has been added. As Pirates have been removed there is no change in the full image height.

Pirates removed

After a longer period where Pirates@home has been listed as Closed, the final step of removing Pirates@home has been done.

Bug on Message@home fixed

A small bug would sometimes display SZTAKI data and not Message@home data. This was fixed.

SZTAKI Desktop Grid added

I have just added SZTAKI Desktop Grid to BOS. This means an increase of full image size by 11 pixels.

Pirates@home to be removed

Pirates@home has closed down permanently. This means Pirates@home will be removed from BOS, but to give people a heads up first, I have introduced a new status message: Closed. Pirates@home will remain on BOS with this status for a week or so, after which it will be removed. This way people will be informed about what is happening, and website owners displaying BOS with Pirates@home activated will get a chance to make changes if needed. Hight of the BOS image will be reduced by 11 pixels when Pirates@home is removed (if your BOS image displays Pirates@home status). Later I will make the needed ajustments to the BOS website to enable translations of the new status message.

Three languages added

While still having trouble with many charsets (did another test today, unsuccessful), I added three more languages today: Hungarian, Portuguese and Polish. I apologize if any chars are not displayed correctly, both in these new languages and the ones already supported, but for now that is the best I can do.

Orbit@home added

Orbit@home has been added. As it has been a while since I last did anything on BOS there might be some oversights - please let me know if anything is out of the ordinary.

Another fix

It seems the checking of the last fix was just a little off, but it was easy to fix. This also means I could use the same code for all projects schedulers regardless of them using the old or the new reporting, so when the remaining projects change to the new reporting scheme BOS would be unaffected. With the mix of old and new reporting being analysed correctly by the same code right now, I am confident that this latest fix should do the trick. I cannot be sure, however, that a third version of reporting does not affect BOS if one turns up.

Report fix fixed (maybe)

I discovered two errors with the last fix. First of all the fix wasn't properly added to all projects. Secondly the fix it self wasn't correct which I was not able to discover at the time. Now that all project schedulers are up and running it seems things are working, but I cannot tell if it really is so until one of them goes down for maintainance. So right now I am both hoping and not hoping that will happen.

Report fix

As BURP went down for maintaince it was wrongly reported as Unreachable. I did not anticipate a switch in this case to the old report type, so I have fixed all projects that have switched to the new report type for BOS to be able to handle both the old and the new report type.

Version 0.99

A small update before the 1.0 release. Added the possibility to add a timestamp to the image. It displays the date and time of the last update.

BURP status fixed

BURP made the same change in reporting as Einstein and SETI has made. BOS now reads the report from BURP correctly.

Upgrade status

The upgrade took alot longer than expected, and was not all that successful. RAM expansion made the OS unable to boot. I'll make another try next month. I have not tested the charset changes all through but it looks like this was unsuccessful as well.

Version 0.97

Made some multi language changes:- Changed the font from build in font to true type Arial. This eliminates alot of character problems- The image now has dynamic width. It changes if states in a variety of languages are longer then the standard width.- Added four languages. I will wait adding chinese and russian untill I have conquered a charset problem. I will look into this saturday when the server is offline anyway. Naturally the URL generator is changed accordingly.

Server upgrade schedule

The server will be down April 2nd from 11:00 UTC to perform the upgrades mentioned earlier.

Network connection lost

For some unknown reason internet connection was lost. It has been re-established, but for a short period the BOS image and the URL generator site was unreachable. Ironic, actually.

Fixed wrong Unreachable status for SETI@home

The backend script getting SETI@home scheduler online status was changed to deal with the new reporting from SETI@home. This new reporting mix XML and HTML so the parser believed that there was nothing to parse i.e. no connection. I'll change the rest of the scripts today to be sure this will not happen for the rest of the projects if they decide to make the same change.

Added RSS news feed

I wanted to do some more work in BOS but as I knew there might be a need for a news feed, in light of the message I posted on the front page, I decided to create an RSS feed. I hope this will be useful.

Web server upgrades

I've just ordered some more RAM, another harddrive and more cooling for the web server. This means down time for a couple of ours while installing. It will propably happen this weekend, but I'll post the date and time here when I get the parts.

Version 0.93

Added background transparency. As the image is .png this might not work in all Internet Explorer versions. Fixed a bug that made the image display the uptime percentage of Pirates@home as the uptime percentage for BURP in some cases. Added links page to URL generator site. Added background image to URL generator so that you can see how transparency works.