Change Over Less Than Smooth

[Dyyryath]

Well, this whole change over to the new proteins has been less than stellar, let me tell you.

Fortunately, I shutdown all of my work clients ahead of time. They won't get upgraded or brought back online for sometime, either.

The rest of my systems are *attempting* to run, but all is not well with them, either. First, not a single one could update automatically. In every single case (on three different operating systems) I had to completely delete the old client and reinstall from scratch with the new clients. This took about 2 hours that I didn't have to spend tonight. :(

Then, after taking off and going like crazy, they started dying. It seems that they aren't able to connect and upload their results. I *could* extend the caching to allow them to keep running, but I just don't have the time (nor, at this point, the patience) to do so. At this point, if they die, they just stay dead until the guys at Distributed Folding get this all straightened out.

Up until today, I've been overwhelmingly impressed with this project. While it doesn't have a slick website like some, or the super stats package like others, what it did have was a GREAT client.

Unfortunately, I'd say they need to come up with a better way of handling changes in work. Allowing the client to download just the work, rather than having to update itself seems to be a much better way to go.

This changeover has been an absolute fiasco. I sure hope they manage to get it straightened out.

Just out of curiosity...did ANYBODY manage to get their client(s) to auto-update?

[ColinT]

No, None of mine updated without messing with it and then they all stopped like yours.

I'm back on Ubero for the duration

[ColinT]

Two posts by Howard on the DF forum:

> Seems like your poor little server is going to need an upgrade if
> you're going to run with the big dogs. :)It's not keeping up with
a
> few hundred user accounts at the moment.
>
> TEC

Actually there's almost 5000 users. And yes, unfortunately we do
not have sufficient funding for a powerful server right now, so
we'll have to make do. At least all this influx of requests hasn't
brought down the machine (knock on wood).

Howard

ANd the next one:

Since the updated protein builds much faster (as you probably
noticed..) we are getting uploads much faster than before, so our
little Dual P3-450 server can only handle so much load.

Most work seems to be getting through but if you get "Unable to
contact server" messages, please just accept it and let it Fold
away. The software will buffer and try again later.

If you constantly get this error EVERY time then it may be a bug of
some sort, otherwise it is just due to the server being busy.
Please keep this in mind before e-mailing and reporting this as an
error.

Thanks.





5000 users running on a dual P3-450. Not a chance in hell THAT's gonna work.

[Paratima]

A Big Fat Nope! From the posts I've seen, NOBODY came thru unscathed. From personal experience, neither Win98, nor NT, nor W2K made it automatically.

Nice product, needs work. (Right now, needs a server!)

But Hell, there's ALWAYS a bright side! This sure takes the rush offa building new boxen! :rolleyes:

[EGhAd]

Had to unistall the old client also on WinMe on both comps.....

Then my DSL bit the bullet due to technical problems somewhere in cyberspace

all is well now....

[magnav0x]

I was at work when the update occured and my work computer had to have distributed folding completely reinstalled from scratch. However my WinXP box at home updated beautifully. I called my girlfriend and walked her through closing the program and bring it back up to auto update and that all went good.....when I got home later tonight I checked to see if it was able to upload any of the units, to my suprise it had. So at least we have one succesfull report to go on.

[xj10bt]

Exactly the same experience as Dyyryath, not one client updated itself. I spent 2 hours nuking the existing clients and reinstalling, then can't upload.

Now I'm supposed to do it again. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

And Howard says he's "shocked" that everyone's upset. :mad:

[Dyyryath]

Yeah, I'm with xj on this. I think I'll take a 'wait and see' approach to any quick fixes. It's simply too time consuming for people with lots of systems to keep changing the client.

I completely understand that Howard's doing the best he can, but I think I'll just wait and see how things pan out over the next couple of days before I do anymore mass client upgrades.

I tend to think the problem needs to be fixed on the server end. If Howard wants help, I'd be more than willing to see if there's anything I or Free-DC can do from him. Of course, if he'd rather not get volunteers (especially ones not in his immediate geographical area) involved, I completely understand.

[Paratima]

WELL! This is all WAY too intense for me! Going to go count genomes or something soothing like that. ;)

[Dyyryath]

LOL! :D

I've considered it, but I really like this project. Howard appears to be working hard to fix these things and he's been great about getting the word out on what's happening.

I'm willing to cut him some slack and give him time to work on these things. This is, after all, a new project.

[FoBoT]

keep in mind, howard said the auto-update hadn't really been tested, this is still beta and there will be bumps, if people want no problems, then try RC5 , well ok , sometimes there stats servers crarp out, so try g@h
oh, wait, sometimes they "adjust" the stats and people lose thousands of WU
ok , so try f@h, well, if you have a permanent internet connection, if you lose the connection, it doesn't cache so you will lose cpu cycles,
so maybe you should try seti, but then there servers might not be available


;)

hang in there dudes! same old, same old :rolleyes:

[IronBits]

Amen to that brother FoBot! :D

[pointwood]

Yearh, hang in there guys!

This project is very new - it's obvious there will be problems. All projects have problems however but what I really like about this project until now is that Howard has been very responsive (just read his posts here in this and other forums) and been fixing the bugs that has been found, very quickly.
Furthermore, let's not misunderstand what Howard wrote in his post about people being upset about this. It was probably just a quick post to let people know what is happening (it's great that he takes time to do that IMHO!) - it was most likely NOT a carefully worded statement he made ;)
When writing it, he was probably not thinking about the fact that some people have lots of systems running that needs to updated. That is a PITA, but if you only have 1 system, then it's not that big a problem.

Howard is working hard to get the problems solved (and, if I understand correctly with help from Dyyryath that has a lot of expertise in this area) and I fully believe Howard will have these problems solved pretty fast. That has been the case until now if you look back in the short history of this project.

[MAD-ness]

Just wanted to say "hi" as I finally got my forum account 'activated.'

Hopefully the current problems are quickly and elegantly resolved, as the DF is a small, versatile and fun client to run. Between the time we got that new version that fixed service issues and the time we switched to the second protein I didn't have a single client stop running for any reason, this includes reboots, idiot users, 'net outages, etc. Hopefully it will return to a similar level of reliability soon. :)