Hi all,

Just to let you know that we're having router problems with the APS@Home server system. A colleague should be in the office to fix it tomorrow (Monday), but there's not much I can do with this fault from an airfield in Germany.

Normal service should be resumed soon - thanks for your patience.

Thanks for the news.
I wondered what was the problem.

Thanks James.

Sharing the server the PS3GRID?

Apparently my head of group is at a meeting in Cambridge today, and he is the only person other than me with access to my office. No doubt my colleague will try again tomorrow, but it'll now be Tuesday at the earliest.

Again, thanks for your patience.

Hi again all,

The server is still down, and I'm now not sure when it's up. Our department has started moving into new buildings, so there's nobody about to gain physical access to the server and router. At this point, I can't promise that the system will be back up before I return from Germany on Monday the 30th of July. If you want to detach the project until then to avoid the error messages, I understand. I'll post again when the server is up.

It is still possible that someone may be able to get in to power cycle the system, but it's beyond my control. I'm sorry about this, and I hope you all understand...

Please could you distribute this to your team colleagues? It's not very good news, but there's still a glimmer of hope that it'll be fixed this week.

If APS members just go to their boinc manager Projects tab, hightlight APS and click 'No new tasks', this should stop the error messages. And it won't be necessary to detach from the project.

Don't worry about it, James - I'm sure everybody's computers have other work to be getting on with in the meantime. Thanks for keeping us informed.

It appears someone power-cycled the server 2 days ago,got my work uploaded and reported with some getting zero credit because the server re-sent the units and got them back before I could catch that it was back up to manually resend(my hosts were on a 1 day time delay due to master-file fetch failures) and then poof it was gone again.

I assume the server needs more than a power cycle to get it going again and stay going and will not be back up again til James gets back on the 30th.

Any new info anyone?

Quite right. There's a problem with the virtual hosts settings on the router. Ports 80 and 22 are being directed to the wrong hosts on my network, which means that the web server is offline and I can't get ssh access to anything. Unfortunately, I need ssh access to fix the problem, due to some rather strict security policies I have set.

It's a chicken and egg problem. I could fix it if I could log in, but I can't log in until it's fixed.

It requires physical access to fix. Expect the server back on Monday 30th July. Sorry. :-(

Any news on this? It was up briefly on Monday (30th), but has disappeared since then.

It was back up again earlier today, but it's gone again now...

I got word from James about the ongoing server issues. He's normally on holiday all week, but he will go to work and try and get the problem fixed today.

Today at least he isn't missing any good weather. James needs a helper.

I once asked Carl who used to be the chief programmer at cpdn in Oxford, where they've always been short-staffed, whether some of the ordinary university programmers and IT support staff could help with cpdn in an emergency. He just laughed and said these people won't even walk near the cpdn servers because distributed computing is so different from everything else they've ever done.

The site is again online.
Thanks to him.

edit :
Ehm, fingers crossed, we need.

APS is back crunching again with new apps etc. - see their front page.