Some of you probably know about the recent bandwith problems that SETI has been having. Some of you don't. Either way, please read this.
Recently SETI lost a lot of bandwith during the day. Instead of a 30Mbit/sec limit, they are set to a lower priority then the rest of the campus. This means that they don't have very much bandwith during the day, but they have a ton at night. However, as we all know, it's tough to buffer on the Mac, and impossible to tell it when to connect.
The team has a proxy program that I run on one of my boxes that acts as an intermediary between the seti servers, and you, the end users. I have the bandwith to buffer for the whole team, so no user will have to worry about me running out of bandwith
The proxy buffers between 4 and 7 days worth of work units, which is enough to get past short outages, or even a longer one. It also means that you will always have a work unit ready, regardless of the bandwith situation at berkeley.
If you wish to use the proxy, here's how.
Set your GUI client to use a http proxy, and put in seti.macnn.com, port 5517.
For CLI people, the line you run would look like this: './setiathome -proxy seti.macnn.com:5517'
Keep in mind that when you tell your client to connect to the proxy for the first time it needs to download a work unit from the seti server to give to you, and I've been noticing that that is taking as much as a day to happen. So when you connect to the proxy for the first time and it times out getting a work unit, don't worry about it. It will have a work unit within a day.
Some of you may be wondering, what is the point of using the proxy?
Well, the answer is simple. Every client is affected by this slowdown. When your client doesn't have work, it's not crunching. So our goal is to keep your clients crunching, instead of waiting for work units. Since this slowdown started reader and I noticed a large drop in production, and we believe that most, if not all of that is related to the inability to get work units. The loss looks to be between 100 and 200 WU/day!
Something you need to be aware of before you use the proxy is that there is currently a problem with it, due to my network setup. How my network is setup the proxy thinks that every connection is coming from one box, which is my gateway. As a result, it gets confused when multiple OSs on the same username connect to it. This problem *should* be fixed this weekend, but until then you can only have one operating system/client type using the proxy. You can have as many computers on it, they just must all be the same operating system/client.
Edit: If you also buffer locally, please do not buffer more then one day's worth of work units.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them here.
--Scott
[ 01-31-2002: Message edited by: Scotttheking ]
[ 02-01-2002: Message edited by: Scotttheking ]
[ 02-01-2002: Message edited by: Scotttheking ]
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