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Hosting Problems For distributed.net
Yoda2 writes "I've always found the distributed.net client to be a scientific, practical use for my spare CPU cycles. Unfortunately, it looks like they lost their hosting and need some help. The complete story is available on their main page but I've included a snippet with their needs below:
'Our typical bandwidth usage is 3Mb/s, and reliable uptime is of course essential.
Please e-mail dbaker@distributed.net if you think you may be able to help us in this area.'
As they are already having hosting problems, I hate to /. them, but their site is copyrighted so I didn't copy the entire story.
Please help if you can." Before there was SETI@Home, Distributed.net was around - hopefully you can still join the team.
Average is not so interesting as peak is.
Now we will find out peak bandwidth usage, won't we?
That would suck if they went out of business
Who run Barter Town?
Could they just move the project over to SourceForge?
Jouster
Maybe they should go in for distributed hosting, like say one machine that just houses the IP address and a few thousand mirrors that the requests can be directed to as they come in. Not only is it a project that is just ASKING to be performed by distributed.net, but if they make some catchy point and click (i.e. EASY to use) clients that anyone with a large following can use, we might see the end of such things as Slashdot subscriptions and a resurgence of the "community" feel of the web.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I ought to have left the Post Anonymously checkbox clear, huh?
D.S.
You've now got 10,000 readers hovering over the link, "Ooh, should I, shouldn't I?", then thinking f**k it and clicking anyway.
/.'ing ;o)
A slow, painful, prolonged,
The RC5-64 challenge is currently at 73%, moving fast. Can you imagine the project shutting down just now?
Straight off Distributed.net's main page:
"Unauthorized Worm: We have recently learned that an infectious worm has begun circulating around the Internet deploying copies of our dnetc client. If you are looking for information relating to this worm then visit our trojan page. "
As opposed to your "authorized" worms?!?
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
No, they can't shut down yet! I have to break 10,000 in the rankings!
:(
Good Lord, what shall I do?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
On a slightly off topic note, while browsing Amazon earlier today, I was recommended a book by Maarten Van Steen titled Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms. while not completely on topic, I believe this book is
Seriously, what is the current state of p2p-networking when serving common html-pages would be the thing to do?
The fact that such a big world-wide project is bound to be hosted near Austin shows that computing technology still has a long way to go...
Brain Tags |
I'm am awed by your feigned ignorance. Perhaps one day I can feign ignorance as well as you.
I just don't know...
What has it accomplished besides searching a keyspace with a known length and golumb rulers? Seti@home, cancer research, or that distributed raytracing screen saver is far more more useful.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Break out the blueberry flavored condoms we are going to be sucking the serious software bug trolls dick for days as has some sort of semen blood clot bloackage going on. Contribute the vacuum of your head good slashdot readers !!! Unite !
we need your help!
URGENT: We have recently learned that our long-standing arrangement with Texas.Net (formerly Insync) would end at noon, Friday, March 22. Through an agreement with Insync, we were hosted at no charge for many years. Though we have tried to make other arrangements with them or to continue our current service until we can make other arrangements, in the end we had no choice but to move.
Several of the Austin cows made a road trip Friday morning to retrieve our equipment from their colocation facility.
We have no reason to complain about Texas.Net or their current decision. As a business, they chose to donate to us for a long time, and have now decided that they must stop. In dbaker's words in a letter to Texas.Net: "Our experience with Insync has been excellent; I've never been happier with an Internet provider. I've recommended them (and indirectly, Texas.Net) to everyone and even this [situation] won't change that."
Though United Devices has kindly offered to colocate our primary servers for a short time at no expense, we find ourselves in the market for a new ISP. If any of our participants work for a major ISP in Texas (preferably within a few hours of Austin, but we're not picky), and would be willing to donate colocation space and connectivity, we would eagerly like to speak with you. Our typical bandwidth usage is 3Mb/s, and reliable uptime is of course essential.
Please e-mail dbaker@distributed.net if you think you may be able to help us in this area.
Distributed net?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the outfit which is concerned with breaking low-grade crypto? How's that going to improve my daily life? I'd much sooner donate my CPU cycles to the evil international pharmaceutic corps which does benefit cancer study. If you get a rash from commercial ventures, there's the folding@home. It's more like basic research, so it won't produce any miracle cures, but it might eventually lead to research that could.
But breaking crypto? Why?
I have always found distributed.net to be a relative structured organization. Their software with personal proxies made joining much easier than the Seti project, esp for people behind corporate firewalls. Small unobtrusive clients (esp for the des/rc5 projects) for a LOT of platforms.
It would be a shame to see them disappear. They've had/has a lot of cumulative computing power, and it ought to be put to real use.
Ah, the days of installing the res/rc5-42 clients on lots of 386 and 486 machines and actually having them do some real computing....
//TheToon
There are numerous things you just couldn't "distribute." The keys have to be served from somewhere, they must be tracked in real-time from somewhere, and they must be accepted/processed somewhere. Stats must be compiled and then put into a single database. To distribute this to multiple computers would cause the amount of bandwidth used to rise to an extreme level, far beyond what it is now. (ie. send out the info, let each node process it, receive the data from each node, hope to Christ it's right)
:)
Next, the integrity of the project gets called into question the moment you begin allowing clients to check processed blocks. The number of fals positives could easily shoot through the roof. Also, a computer with bad memory or simply running a faulty OS (such as Win9x/ME) could overlook a true positive, thereby virtually obliterating the project (ie. "we're at 100% completion with no result, guess we start over?")
As stated above, stats would be impossible to do in this manner, and the same applies for key distrobution. One could argue that the total keys be distributed amoung thousands of nodes and handed out from there, but you create more problems then you solve. You still need a centralized management location to keep track of keys that have or have not been tested. Imagine a node going offline permanently or simply losing the keys it was handed. Suddenly, a large block of keys is missing. As it stands now, the keymaster simply re-issues the keys to someone else after a couple of weeks of no response from the client it sent the original blocks to. Under a distributed format, the keymaster would have to keep track of which keys went to which key distributor, which of those came back, which of those need to be redistributed, where they... (you get the message.)
Next you run into another problem of integrity. What's to stop each distributed keymaster from claiming it's own client is the one that completed all blocks submitted to it. Consider this example, central keymaster sends out 200,000 blocks of keys to keymaster node 101. Keymaster node 101 distributes these keys to a bunch of clients which process the blocks, then send them back to keymaster node 101. Keymaster node 101, which has been modded slightly, then modifies each data block, changing the user id to that of the keymaster's owner, thereby making it appear that any block coming back from keymaster 101 was processed by keymaster 101. It might be easy to spot, but then how to you find out who to give credit to?
The webpage doesn't attract the majority of the bandwidth; the projects do. Distributing the projects would be disasterous, as many have already tried taking advantage of the current system to increase their block yields through modded clients. Luckily, this is easy to spot for now. Under a distributed system, this would be next to impossible. All this, and I've yet to make mention of the fact that the code would have to be completely re-written to work alongside a custom P2P application, which would add months of development to a project that probably only has weeks or months left in it.
In short, someone host the damn thing, k?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I assert that this post is a troll. I also assert that YHBT.
.test community. Cherish our balls.
This message has been brought to you by the troll committee of the
Google is currently researching distributed networking through their google bar - couldn't they cooperate on this with distributed.net?
I find this an excercise in futility; if the protocols used to transmit the data are not available to /.ers, we cannot suggest a scheme that would be meaningful. If the blocks are indexed, and all that's returned is an "index <X> complete" message, then a system of proxies sending message like "indexes 1217-1250 completed by my subnodes" to the main server once every hour makes sense. If, on the other hand, the bulk of the data is used to verify that processing actually occured, and that it occured with the official client (which I suspect is the case), we would need to know details of the data being passed back and forth in order to help.
I know that I, for one, have boxen and bandwidth to pull off 3 Mb/s of CPU-intensive network traffic 24/7, but I'm not about to devote my precious resources to something that I don't understand, especially when I haven't even had the chance to ascertain that a solution that utilized my donated resources was, in fact, the best one.
Jouster
For some time the only one around was seti@home which analyzes noise from space, I think, in search for alien lifeforms, then there's distributed.net doing crypto and math stuff, (correct me if I'm wrong). And then there's people like Intel running medical research in areas like cancer and alzheimer.
I don't know about you, but to me medical research feels a somewhat more beneficial to humanity than search for aliens. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the work done by seti and distributed isn't important or shouldn't be done, just that there's other research that might be more worthwhile supporting.
That's just my opinion, but if you feel the same way, checkout this site.
hmm ?
A beowulf cluster of Distributed.net?
A continuous three Megabits per second works out to somewhere just under a Terabyte a month. Not going to be cheap.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
How much does reliable 3Mb/s really cost? Their project is already so popular, that it should not be a problem to find ways to make money with it.
:)
When we run the Cyberian RC5-56 challenge we got all kinds of offers from all kinds of companies willing to ship us something, a monster Digital machine for example. And our popularity was minimal compared to them - we had like 1 percent of the amount of clients that they run now.
Why is it a problem in this case? I think that the help that they really need is the services of 1 (one) marketing oriented individual (that's not me)
...by VAPORIZING us!! YEEAAARRGGHH!!!
Has anyone done the math? A fully utilized CPU costs me around $0.05/hour here in California. That's $30 per CPU. Not exactly "free cycles".
more than 160000 PII 266MHz computers
This is a present? For me?
Cool, but they should have presenting me with 10000 Athlons 2000+ plus 10000 Geforce4's and 10000 Game Tits XP instead. I mean, does anybody know why they use PII's 266 MHz as a reference?
The only reason you "submit" blocks is to get stats. If all the clients just did random blocks of keys you'd expect the key to be found equally as fast.
To top if off the finder of the key gets the *full* 10,000$ if they don't go thru d.net.
What incentive is there for d.net now?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Just think of how many cpu cycles will be wasted if they are forced to shut down... boggles the mind!
I get about 2.0 Mbps from my "2.2 Mbps" SDSL connection. If two other folks such as me were to pitch in, I think we could handle it. Not sure if this would classify as business use, if so I would have to hand over another $25/month to my ISP.
If we all ask them really nicely, maybe Speakeasy would take them on. I mean, they're one hell of an ISP and mirror RPMfind too...
Why would anyone want to run such ditributed programs. A better potential virus vehicle I have never seen. Why would anyone entrust such code to run on their computers? How secure is the main site against attack (where the client program is downloaded from)?
Distributed.net has gotten to be a more or less pointless project by now.
Originally, the point they wanted to make was that 64-bit RC5 was not strong enough to protect privacy.
They started, what, 4-5 years ago? About 30 000 computers running for 4 years can't break 64-bit encryption. Geez, I'd say that, if anything, the conclusion would be that 64-bits is plenty for shopping etc. unless you've got some really _big_ secrets. Certainly plenty for day-to-day mail. More or less the opposite of what they wanted to prove.
Nowadays they've added the OGR stuff to appear at least a bit more usefull, but in reality, the applications of those results are very limited.
Really, the right thing to do is not to waste power on such pointless projects.
--
GCP (Moderation suggestion: -1 Disagree)
In most areas of the country, a single rack in a colo / exchange facility costs $ 1500 per month or less, and 3 Mbps would cost ~ $ 1200 per month. They didn't say how many racks they need, but at that bandwidth, my guess is no more than one or two.
So, they have been getting $ 3000 per month or more of free bandwidth and rack space.
IMHO, if their work is really important, they should be able to raise $ 36K per year from the crypto community.
It's just a suggestion, but wouldn't it make sense just to link to the Google mirror, rather than the site itself?
Of course, don't bother trying if Google hasn't had time to cache the site yet...
What's this Submit thingy do?
There are lots of better uses for spare cpu cycles than solving a puzzle of arbitrary difficulty. What happens when you get a solution? Just throw in another handful of bits, and start again? And this is science _how_?
The only science here is proving once again that humans can be lured into competing on any basis. This is really no different than the SUV gap.
Client downloads are PGP signed http://http.distributed.net/pub/dcti/v2.8015/ and are served by machines that mirror it (via rsync over ssh) from a tightly controlled host, which is not one of the servers that actually publicly serve the files. Although the binaries are pre-compiled, the original source code is open for review at http://www.distributed.net/source/
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
I was interested in what you said about Intel & their distributed cancer research, so I checked it out. Unfortunately, their site is a little scarce on the details of who this research benefits.
However it does mention that finding drugs to combat various diseases is a first priority. So I assume that a particular pharmecutical company would benefit from this, as would a small percentage of people with cancer who also have private health insurance.
I would want my CPU time going in open-source medicine, and not someone else's patent that will be abused to make the most money possible.
I'm not saying that this is the case with Intel's distributed cancer-curing client, but it kinda looks like that given the lack of details of beneficiaries.
Anyone know for sure?
I might email them...
Do people running their own keyservers for their teams help with the bandwidth at all? If they requested (required?) that each time over a certain size run their own keyserver, might it help?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
I run the Folding @ Home client on Linux, and it runs quite well!
I prefer to use my spare cycles for Medical research.
http://folding.stanford.edu
Also available for OS X.
(same URL)
Folding at Home
I just saw this statement at the bottom of their front page:
distributed.net and United Devices join forces: distributed.net and United Devices have announced a partnership which will combine the skills and experience of distributed.net with the commercial backing of United Devices. Several distributed.net volunteers are leaving their old day jobs and joining United Devices full time. United Devices will be providing distributed.net with new hardware and hosting services, as well as sponsoring a donation program that will help support distributed.net's charitable activities."
I guess they are okay for the time being?
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
mod this post up
Very few people actually check the PGP signature - and even fewer people compile the program from source. They generally just download the pre-built binary and run it. If a server that serves the file is compromised, all binaries on it can also be compromised. Availability of source code means very little in this case.
Since the distributed.net projects are very research oriented, it seems like a well connected university could provide the hosting and if the university was already into encryption research, the distributed.net projects would mesh quite well.
Since it's a "contest" with cash prizes, why not charge people to enter.
d.net can't do that because under the regulations of many U.S. states, that would be considered "gambling."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Internet connectivity in Japan (home of Imode
among other things) is way ahead of the states/
europe, so why not move the server there..
NTT sells business connections via fiber to
the internet (10mbps and 100mbps/sec), for
something like around $200 or $300 month
depending which you choose, including
the ISP fee. Connectivity to the US and Europe
is pretty good (low ping times), generally.
[BTW, You can get residential (ie. dynamic IP)
for about $75/month, which is what I have here in
my house..
..its very cool, the hardest thing was actually
finding a router that could route that fast,
(linksys..etc, are too slow, max out at 5mbps or
so), but some Japanese companies make them
now.. it connects to an 100mhz PC I got for
free from the bin, which now runs as a linux
webserver (and linux, being so cpu efficient,
has no trouble keeping up..as well as more modern
machines I use for my desktop), but the server
does a great job serving web pages & the like,
running video conferences to the US..etc..
So if you need bandwidth, come here..
Very cool..
Thier site is popular enoug that it would seem to be a good time to experiment with moving the http stuff to freenet, since it's only updated once per day. The people willing to download the dnet client are would seem to be some of the most willing people to download the freenet client. Freenet is designed so that the slashdot effect actually increases reliability and speed of acess for the commonly requested data. Distributed.net would seem to have reached a critical mass of readership in order to have reasonable reliability for its freenet page. Your could have the client get your team and individual scores sent to it as part of the block submission cinfirmation.
It would seem to me that they could arbitrarily reduce their bandwidth requirements by increasing the minimum size of keyspace portions they're handing out. It would seem that thier project traffic would be (or could be made) the same for each work unit, regardless of the size of the work units. Bigger work units are really only a problem for clients that are turned off and on regularly. They client still only needs to keep track of current state (current key in the case of RC5), the final state of the work unit (last key to check for RC5) and the current checksum for the work unit. None of these change in memory requirements as you increase work unit sizes. 99% of the people don't know the work unit size anyway, so changing the work unit size won't cause many people to complain, particularly if it's necessary to keep dnet hosted.
Unless I'm mistaken, the server really only needs to send the client a brief prefix identifying the message as a work unit, followed by "start" and "stop" points for the computation. For RC5, this would mean a 64-bit starting key and a 64-bit ending key. I haven't sat down and worked out the cannocalization scheme for GRs, but it seems that they are countable (in the combinatorics sense, not the kindergarten sense) and could be represented fairly compactly. The current minimum ruler length need not be sent, snce you'd probably always want the client to send back the minimum ruler length in it' work unit anyway. The client would need to send back a work unit identifier (this could be left out, but it's not strictly safe) and an MD5 sum of all of the computational results or some other way to compare results when they duplicate work units. (A certain percentage of the work units are actually sent tomultiple clients in order to check that everyone is playing fairly.)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
By proving that RC5-56 can be broken by simple home PCs (with an algorithm as simple as you call it "counting to a million by ones", they IMHO did a large part to educate lawmakers that the age old U.S. export restrictions have to be overturned.
And they succeeded in this.
What I however don't understand is why they kept doing their cryptography projects afterwards. Proving that RC5-64 is breakable while you can buy 256 bit encryption freely is indeed just a stupid waste of CPU cycles and bandwidth.
I'd like to see them discontinue RC5-64, and concentrate their work on OGR and maybe on other, new projects.
Honestly.
We all know that eventually, the key is going to be found, and some stupid message will be deciphered ("Congratulations on solving the 64 bit challenge. blablabla")
Why waste trillions of CPU cycles and thousands of $ in bandwidth to find something out that we already know is true?
You know, I would help out with all this distributed computing stuff, but my spare CPU cycles are all taken up running multiple instances of Progress Quest.
Seems to me like this story makes distributed.net obsolete.
The original idea of distributed.net dates back to when the government was conspiring to restrict the number of bits in encryption and students protested that 64 bits wasn't enough. Well it may be technically breakable but economics made it unbreakable in the end.
I agree that the medical research might be more worthwhile to support, but AFAIK there are only Wintel clients available. (Case in point, United Devices and even your own link to Intel.)
That leaves an awful lot of non-intel boxes, and even non-windows intel boxes with spare cycles that can't participate. Until they have the option to do so, I anticipate a lot of cycles going to 'less worthy' causes...
Because d.net uses a 100% non-random criterion to select a winner (namely, whether they found The Key), it's not a contest, it's a competition.
What's so "100% non-random" about how RSA Labs selected the key?
Will I retire or break 10K?
these things with sites loosing their hosting, things are removed from the net... it makes me feel that a p2p solution would be great! Don't ask me how... I just feel that could solve some of these problems...
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
I dont understand how can this be a problem, I can get a dedicated server with a 3 mbit/s capped for less than $500 a month. If you want to pay per gig and get fully burstable link it's going to cost a little more, but still it's going to be less than $1k month...
Icq 9482144
Each project has it's own benefits. I completed 5000 SETI units and now I am looking for prime numbers. If you feel that strongly about medical research, then good for you. I did not like the bandwidth problems SETI kept running into. I decided my spare cpu cycles would be better spent elsewhere. I share the same concern others have expressed about how the medical research data will be used. Some companies think they can patent my genes :(
I recommend that people look at all of the distributed projects. I suggest that you can support more than one. We can learn from all of them.
BTW, the EFF supports GIMPS. Maybe I will get back that money I have been donating for the last few years ;-)
Yes, it's true.
:o)
The Knights of Xenu are currently ranked 45th...
They're team 3504, so if you aren't yet affiliated with the team, or are new to the distributed.net effort, please feel free to join that team and help bring more exposure to the insanity that is Scientology
Wouldn't the hosting problem be fairly minimal if they distributed the key generation/distribution/whatever using peer2peer tech? It's not as though it doesn't have the infrastructure there yet. People have already been willing to give up their cpu time, and I suspect that 10-25% would be more than willing to give up a small chunk of their bandwidth as well.
Google
Why do care? Why are so many organizations begging for money, bandwidth, or something else on /.? This is pathetic!!
I think the use of spare fart cycles is an excellent way to support science, but...
:(
;-)
Each project has it's own benefits. I completed 5000 [www.farts.com] fart units and now I am looking for prime farts [www.farts.net]. If you feel that strongly about medical fart research, then good for you. I did not like the bandwidth problems [www.fartfarm.com] kept running into. I decided my spare fart cycles would be better spent elsewhere. I share the same concern others have expressed about how the medical fart research data will be used. Some companies think they can patent my farts
I recommend that people look at all of the distributed farting projects. I suggest that you can support more than one. We can learn from all of them.
BTW, Breaking Wind: Legendary Farts [http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/fart.html] supports Literacy. Maybe I will get back those beans I have been donating for the last few years
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
You win money if you find the winning key.
That's worth your spare cycles, even if you're not interested in the crypto application.
Please feel free to email sales@tiernetworking.com for more information.
Shipping several boxes from Texas to Tokyo in a few days is gonna be a real dog, cost-wise.
3Mbps is puny and **could** not cost a thing network-wise in the right place given the right schedule. Most bandwidth is priced on the 95th percentile of usage, and is based on the highest of the inbound and outbound traffic. Here are a few things to note:
a) a large company or website with localtime 9-5 employee or website traffic greater than 10Mbps peak could do almost anything any time between 5-9. Limit the upload and download client activity to this timeframe and you have it solved for 2/3rds the day. Not a 100% effective, but not too significant if the workload pieces are multi-day. If you're concerned, you could somehow chain two of these companies around the globe and you have free bandwidth 24hrs a day.
b) a mainly outbound company (e.g.- large website) could receive data at any time of the day.
c) a mainly in-bound (corporate) company could send data at any time of the day.
Cheerio!
I've found that maximum uptime is easily attained when I'm holding my satchel (within which I store and transport nuts). When my satchel, or "nutsack" is firmly in my left hand, my uptime is tremendous. In fact, I've been known to have uptime of days or weeks.
This is easily measurable, as I've set up an snmp-based physical uptime monitoring system, to monitor my equipment. I have numerous charts and graphs for your perusal, if there's interest.
-I have nutsack
-------------------
I am a highly intelligent squirrel
I sent an e-mail to my guys at pair.net and they said they would look into it. They also said thanks for pointing the site out. Maybe some of you guys can try some other hosting sites? Worth a shot!
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Our present crypto in for instance browsers is WAY too weak. You can build with couple million $ a machine that can crunch open everything in for instance the competitor company's intranet. 64 bit encryption is a joke. As is the "high" encryption 128bit. 512? Bah. 1024? Bah.
We need way more strong cryptography. They won't let us until we break the current ones. Distributed.net can prove that breaking the current crypto is feasible. Dnet is a lot more useful than for instance seti@home which is completely irrevelant and useless.
At least *I* don't like the current situation where people can see my credit cards numbers on the 'Net. I don't know about you...
I am sure that there are mechanisms in place to verify the PGP signature at regular intervals. All it would take is to run a friggen cron job to download the binary, PGP test it and return a result. Hell, i'll do it on one of my boxen at home, i'm sure the momentary interuption won't inconvenience the machine's real work of rc5 cracking. :)
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
all this talk about distributed computing
and NOONE seems to have mentioned
the MersennePrime project
http://www.mersenne.org/
..AND theres a big financial prize!
That was quite a tangent ;-)