CASP5 - inform us IMMEDIATELY

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Hi Howard,
I understand that you guys from DF are bound to deadlines with CASP5. However, you should be aware, that we are the driving force behind your (possible) success with (not only) CASP5. By investing electricity that we have to pay for along with making our hardware available to you guys, we also fund your project to a significant if not the major part.
Therefore, I think it is by far not asked too much, if we suggest to you to inform us IMMEDIATELY as soon as a protein change is coming up and to plan your project at least 3 weeks in advance with appropriate announcements made public in the news section of your website.
Right now, our team - and therefore your project - will most likely loose several millions of structures just because some of our computers are not accessible before end of thursday. We have experienced this for several times now and now it is enough. I think you should be aware, that a lot of boxes are running offline and people have other things to do than baby-sitting those boxes for you all around the day.

If something like this is going to happen only one more time, I fear you will loose most if not all of our support.

In general, I do not understand, why the DF server does not accept and credit the upload of valid protein structures even after a new protein has been set up. This really is an unprofessional issue with this project. Also, the "autoupdate" does not automatically stop the running client, take over the remaining structures generated for the previous protein and then start to crunch on the new protein. It always needs client restart (and therefore human interference) due to this "server maintainance period". I think it is high time for a satisfying correction of these issues.

Sorry for being "a little" upset tonight, but this really appears as a waste of our time and money
Michael.

[Jodie]

Who's this "we", kemosabe? Gots a mouse in your pocket?

You know, maybe I'm just in a b**chy mood, too, but I don't see where you have the room to order the DF folks around. I know your requirements don't reflect my opinion in any way shape or form. And a quickie browse-through of the stats suggests that unless there's another 'Team Germany' - I return every hour what your entire combined team returns in a week. And I'm still doubling my farm.

I can update my entire farm by hand in about an hour if every single machine fails to update. How bad could it POSSIBLY be for you?

Where's the "several million" units of loss coming from? You're team "Germany" Team # 156, right? If that's the case - your entire contribution to date has been 1379530 - about what I do myself in a day.

If you're not "Germany #156" than my apologies ahead of time for that mistake on your production. But it still bugs the living #$%@ out of me that you believe you 1) speak for anyone else and 2) think to order the DF folks around.

Maybe try: "Hi! I'm really nervous about the next update - do you know when it might be or even how much notice we might get?"

[Brian the Fist]

Updates will continue to be roughly on a weekly basis throughout CASP. If you have many machine that are running OFFLINE, then they may not be suitable for this project at this time. If your machines are ONLINE, you need only ensure you have the autoupdate.cfg in place (as per the README) and they will update and restart themselves, so no human intervention is needed. If you find that intervention is needed, you have either not followed the instructions or there is a bug which I am unaware of. All protein switches will be announced several days in advance, as we have done today, in the News section and probably on this message forum as well (and on the optional mailing list we will be setting up in a week or two).

I am not going to discuss again why we do not accept old structures as this has been brought up before in this forum, so please see the previous discussion. This may or may not change when we put our new more robust back end in place shortly.
I understand that this might be 'wasting' your electricity and so on if your machines are offline so consider using them for some other purpose in the mean time if you are unable to set them to auto-connect once every few days or so (which depends on your network topology of course). You could perhaps devise some scripts to gather the generated data from teh offline machines once a day and upload it or something like that, it probably wouldnt be difficult - someone may have alreayd even done it.

[xj10bt]

Originally posted by Michael H.W. Weber
Sorry for being "a little" upset tonight, but this really appears as a waste of our time and money
Michael.

Bye bye then. Enjoy F@H/G@H.

[MAD-ness]

Rechenkraft.de, a significant DC team, having top 20 teams in several projects (this one and eccp for example) and they have submitted 178385473 structures so far in this project.

That doesn't really have anything to do with the topic of this thread....protein change-overs, the handling of 'out-dated' results, etc.

My position on this is that there should be atleast a week grace period. We are donating time and resources here and while we do not and should not expect monetary rewards for our donations, I DO think it is fair for participants to expect that thier donations are utilized in an efficient fashion and that they not have to go to great efforts to have thier donations accepted.

If you help your neighbor build a barn, it seems fair to expect him to have things organized and to have the proper tools for the job. It is also customary for the host (recipient of volunteered services) to provide food and drink or other bits of host services.

In a DC project these things are analogous to good stats, a stable full-featured client and an active and aware project management.

We have all of those and I have faith in Howard and the guys at SLRI, but I think that it is important that we let Howard know about things that are important to us and about things which could help the project become more efficient or attract greater resources.

I am hoping that as time and resources allow, Howard will take a look at client issues/complaints and request features. The community can supply some of these things (this forum for example, or KDFold or DFGUI or Dyy's stats or Statsman's great stats), but some things we simply do not have access to.

We all want the same thing and I think that with patience we will turn DF into one of the best, if not THE best, DC project available. We are already well on our way.

PS, don't brag Jodie, when you toss out numbers like that it makes me roll up in a fetal position and cry.

[Digital Parasite]

Howard,

Since we have only done 259 million structures so far on this protein, if we have gone through all the proteins for CASP and still have time left, will we go back and do more calculations on previous ones we have worked on or not?

Jeff.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Hey - my first "pseudo-rant" posting and what a feedback! First of all my apologies if my tone was not chosen properly.

@Jodie: Please forgive me when I simply ignore your remarks. I have read your messages in the FAH & GAH forums before and they never were of help to anybody since most if not all of them were mainly based on insults (in contrast to my posting above, by the way). Here we have a fine example of what I am talking about. So, don't YOU tell me how to behave, okay?! And for your information, we - that is team Rechenkraft.de - have been folding here when you were still busy with your unnecessary mails in the FAH/GAH forums and had not even realized that this project existed.
And no - I am not "nervous about the next update". The only thing I am nervous about is the electricity bill that in such "waste-of-effort-cases" is really disencouraging. This is why I posted this. It is the only way to keep people folding for this project. Finally, let me tell you that it is not me who has rigs folding offline, so I could hardly say "I" when mailing this.

@Howard: Please don't expect everybody folding for DF to take the time to search through this huge discussion board. Instead, I suggest to place remarks like "Updates will continue to be roughly on a weekly basis throughout CASP" (this I hear for the first time now) in the news section of your website. There we would have seen it and this in turn would have allowed us to organize our team better to continue to make our contribution to your project. Also, it would have saved me the time to write the post above.
As far as "autoupdate" is concerned, it is definetely set up properly. However, clients are trying to send results, the server is "down for maintainance" during protein change and the client stops and requires to press ENTER and has to be restarted. If you do so after the server is up with the new protein, it works just fine. So in conclusion, there is no "autoupdate" without human intervention. Maybe it works when running DF as a service, but it doesn't when you run it as a simpe application.
Announcements made on friday (evenings) that apply for upcoming tuesday are not sufficient for us to react in time - please understand that! We need at least a full week of time to deal with several of the boxes. Using scripts to collect the data is not possible, also.

MAD-ness
We have all of those and I have faith in Howard and the guys at SLRI, but I think that it is important that we let Howard know about things that are important to us and about things which could help the project become more efficient or attract greater resources.

My suggestions:
1) accept "old" protein structures
2) reconfigure autoupdate
3) make announcements in time using the NEWS section

Originally posted by Digital Parasite Since we have only done 259 million structures so far on this protein, if we have gone through all the proteins for CASP and still have time left, will we go back and do more calculations on previous ones we have worked on or not?

This is another issue. It was said that we will NOT return to the last pre-CASP5 (76 amino acids) protein but instead continue with the next one. Nice. Me and other team members had stored the structures that were "over-generated" during the protein change to the first CASP5 protein to upload them later (aren't we cute?). Now they have been wasted... again time & money down the drain...

Michael.

[pointwood]

@Howard: Please don't expect everybody folding for DF to take the time to search through this huge discussion board. Instead, I suggest to place remarks like "Updates will continue to be roughly on a weekly basis throughout CASP" (this I hear for the first time now) in the news section of your website.

He doesn't expects everyone to do that either - he just says that maybe it would be a good idea to do that before posting a rant like yours. If you did that, you would find most if not all of your questions answered. This thread add absolutely nothing good or new to the community.

In regards to your suggestions, read this thread: http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...=&threadid=953

You have to remember that this is still a young project and a project with very limited ressources. AFAIK, basically it's mroe or less Howard that does all the work and I think he has done an excellent job.
Yes, it would be nice to get a warning earlier about when a protein change happens and it would be really cool if it was possible to upload old structures after a change. That just isn't possible right now. It may become possible later. I'm sure Howard would have made it possible if it was possible for him to make it possible. Right now I believe Howard is working on setting up a mailinglist to be able to get news about protein changes out to people as early as possible.

Howard: My suggestion in regards to the mailinglist is that all the news you post on the DF site, should be sent to that mailinglist too.

Ps. Maybe you and Jodie have had a flamewar going on, on the F@H board, but please don't continue it here!

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Maybe one more important thing (sorry, I wasn't allowed to append it to the previous message):

I like this project as I like FAH & GAH (which both are good projects regardless of what Jodie will comment again). It is available for a lot of OS and the client runs really smoothly.

It is just annoying to see millions of structures being wasted over and over again. If this cannot be resolved by simply accepting more generously the work that is carried out by our team members, then PLEASE make announcements relevant to protein changes earlier.
As has been stated by another participant above, Rechenkraft.de participates in MANY dc projects and if with DF our cycles are in large parts wasted, we have to consider to switch somewhere else - even though I personally would be sorry for that.

All the best,
Michael.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Originally posted by pointwood
In regards to your suggestions, read this thread: http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...=&threadid=953

Ps. Maybe you and Jodie have had a flamewar going on, on the F@H board, but please don't continue it here! [/B]

Thank you for giving me the link to the other thread. I quickly read through it and I see that apparently it is physically not possible to accept the "out-dated" structures. That's indeed a pity, but this makes it even more important to announce changes early.
As far as a flamewar between Jodie and myself is concerned - so far, there has never been one. And this is how it will stay - at least from my end. I have better things to do.

Michael.

[ulv]

Hello mr. Weber: If you read the news section on DF's home page, you would see that yesterday Howard posted the time and date for the next change.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Yeah, I have seen that. But again - please understand that this is too late for us. There is a weekend in between. We also have several hours of time delay between Canada and Germany (Friday was almost over when the message reached us). Our offline boxes are not accessible all the time and some don't even have a network connection. That's the problem over here. I still think it is not asked too much to give people at least 5 working days of time before significant changes are made, is it?
We have this problem. Either a compromise is gong to be made or we have to take those boxes off from the project - as sad as it is.

Michael.

[Jodie]

Originally posted by Michael H.W. Weber
[more worthless rant snipped] Either a compromise is gong to be made or we have to take those boxes off from the project - as sad as it is.

Michael.

I think that has been answered by Howard, hasn't it -

If you have many machine that are running OFFLINE, then they may not be suitable for this project at this time.

[Scoofy12]

Originally posted by Michael H.W. Weber
I still think it is not asked too much to give people at least 5 working days of time before significant changes are made, is it?

Well maybe, maybe not. The problems here are several. First Howard and company have no control over when CASP releases proteins and the date they are due. If they need to switch to a new protein with a short deadline, they may have to change as soon as possible to get enough structures to make it worth doing. Also, I imagine that they are actively scrutinizing the good returns from the proteins as they crunch to find potential CASP submissions, applying various scoring functions that may not have been added to the client, etc.... they may not know how long itwill take them to get structures good enough to submit. i expect with these constraints, it makes project planning more than a few days out very difficult.

[Eaglechild]

Originally posted by Scoofy12


Well maybe, maybe not. The problems here are several. First Howard and company have no control over when CASP releases proteins and the date they are due. If they need to switch to a new protein with a short deadline, they may have to change as soon as possible to get enough structures to make it worth doing. Also, I imagine that they are actively scrutinizing the good returns from the proteins as they crunch to find potential CASP submissions, applying various scoring functions that may not have been added to the client, etc.... they may not know how long itwill take them to get structures good enough to submit. i expect with these constraints, it makes project planning more than a few days out very difficult.

Good points all, Scoofy. I think we all need to cool down a little here. -- Howard has stated that the current system cannot support the return of old proteins, but that the issue will be reexamined when a new more robust backend is put in place. Until such takes place, further discussion is fruitless, and "demands or threats" accomplish nothing. --The demands of CASP 5 make more timely notifications difficult if not impossible. While I can acknowledge the difficulty this places some people in, understand that it is difficult for the Distributed Folding project staff as well.

Michael, I do not know if you realize how harsh your post sounded to many. It came across as "meet our demands or else you will lose all of us". I don't think that is what you intended, at least I hope not. Life is not perfect. From what I can see Howard and crew are doing their best to meet all reasonable requests, within the constraints of the system that they have to work with. I don't like it when I lose time and effort (and yes expense) on a project either. However, I have yet to find "any" project where that doesn't happen sometimes. Like the rest of us, you need to make decisions about whether or not a project is "currently" ideal for some machines. If it is not, then you need to examine other alternatives.

I have yet to find a a group of people more accomodating than all the folks at Distributed Folding. Please everyone understand that they have limitations they have to live with as well. I am sure there are a lot of things they wish they had the resources to correct or change. Let's all try to cooperate to maximize everyone's return.

Would it be possible to setup a special announcement thread where the News posts could be mirrored (announcments only - no discussion, moderators only to post)? This may be helpful in getting word of changes out on a little more timely basis, since we may not all be able to monitor both constantly.

[Jodie]

How much risk do you all think there is in the following sneaky plan -

The instant the change-over is announced - run a script to hit every machine and remove the .lock file.

I wonder how long it will retry to connect before failing out - last time the servers were down for a period of time before the changeover was complete.

It seems like this would minimize the time my hundred plus processors were crunching worthless datasets. . .

Any thoughts on this, anyone?

[MAD-ness]

On the scale you are talking about, setting the script to execute 15 minutes after whatever time cut-off you are looking at would probably be worthwhile. Sure, 100 machines x 15 minutes = my daily production, but running around configuring that many headless and/or remote boxen is even MORE of a loss, in time, etc. or atleast I imagine that it would be.

Also, could you not set up cron to run a script or something to manually close and re-execute the client on somewhat frequent basis? For example, once every hour? Set the cron to start the morning of the switch over and execute the script once an hour or at whatever interval your network resources, etc. makes ideal?

You could get fancy and stagger it, to avoid hammering your own network or the DF network.

[KWSN_Millennium2001Guy]

This is exactly what I do. I have scripts that stop the farm, start the farm, push out new clients to the farm. A changeover takes me about 15 minutes to rollout to (unofficially, over 100 machines) my "two P4 1.4 Ghz machines".

Ni!

[MAD-ness]

Oops, while I was editing MilleniumGuy2k1 beat me to it.

Is there any chance of you releasing that script or something? Obviously it wouldn't be of much use to someone unless they modified it for thier own situation, but I would love to just have a look at how you do it and some people might get some usage out of it (some people being *nix gurus with large farms).

[Jodie]

I can do that for you - but it's worth noting that mine are Mosix dependant. I can do it all from a master node - as well as monitor loads and migrate the jobs out. If you don't have Mosix, it's not going to be helpful.

I think MG2k is Winblows based, right?

[Jodie]

2k -

When after the change over have you found that it's safe to do that? 15mins? an hour?

Thanks!!!

[1fast6]

hmmmm...

[Brian the Fist]

Scoofy has summed it up well - we are at the mercy of CASP targets, which are released somewhat sporadically and with various due dates. Between now and the end of August we expect to do 10-20 of them, so that works out to one every week or two. Giving 5 days notice is simply not possible during CASP and we hope you can understand that. Sorry.

Re Weber's comment that you need to hit return because the server is down for maintenance, please elaborate for me. Can you tell me EXACTLY what happened in order to receive this press 'enter' message - this should not happen. If the server is 'down' it should keep on folding until it is back up again, unless the buffer is full so you are doing something wrong. The auto-update DOES work properly.

[Sven for rechenkraft.de]

Hi Folks!

At first i had to say that the auto-update is one of the most discussed DF-problems of www.rechenkraft.net

Michael is right when he told you about the necessity of manual restarting the client.

And a special information for the north american df-members - multiply your electricity bill by ten or more, then you got an idea what we had to pay for our enthusiasm to this projekt.

Changing over to other projects? - No, in my opinion, only g@h & f@h can mess with df in the value of scientific research. But only df hasn´t any financial interests like the us-projekts.

Last note: We are "modern germans" (and austrians and ... too), i mean, we are not germans you may be aspect when you only see germans in hogans heros.

Michael, I do not know if you realize how harsh your post sounded to many. It came across as "meet our demands or else you will lose all of us". I don't think that is what you intended, at least I hope not.

Michael is our "brainbug" in the team, a spokesman, not a Führer-leader! - I hope this will explain Michaels point of view when he wrote about leaving df.

FOLD ON!

Sven.

[Eaglechild]

Sven, Welcome and thanks for your comments. I don't think you need to worry about us North Americans confusing modern Germans with the "Germans of Old". We do understand the difference. http://www.rechenkraft.net/ ranks as one of the most respected teams in Distributed Computing. Your teams contributions in many different projects are immense and highly appreciated. Also thanks for pointing out the dramatic difference in energy costs between Europe and the United States. That is something that I think many North Americans are not aware of.

Michael contributes many good and thought provoking comments to the forums, and is respected for that. This one post came across a bit "heavy-handed", but otherwise I for one find much of what he writes generates positive commentary that is educational for many of us.

I think we can except that he was just having "a bad day". While I cannot speak for them, I think the Distributed Folding staff is aware of the problem and how it affects many different individuals, and when they have the resources to correct it, I am confident that they will consider all their options and the needs of all the teams and the project, and seek out the best possible solution.

As you said... Fold on!

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Originally posted by Eaglechild Michael contributes many good and thought provoking comments to the forums, and is respected for that. This one post came across a bit "heavy-handed"

Sorry guys - the stuff above is usually not my style of writing and I would like to apologize for the rather harsh words I had chosen. I never really meant to offend anybody personally - I was and still I am concerned about the future DF-participation of some people in our team who really have "serious fire power" available (citation "Serious Sam" ).
As stated above, I like this project a lot (!) and in a series of letters and also a small article that will be submitted to some German computer & popular science magazines during the next few months we will also mention it in hope that this will result in a further increase in participant numbers helping out at DF.

@Howard: Maybe in the future there is a possibility to modify the whole system towards being a little more generous when it comes to the upload of "old" structures. On Tuesday I will watch my client closely and then report the details of autoupdate here (I do not remember every single detail now). Keep up the good work - I appreciate what you are doing here.

Hey - and at least with the details concerning scripting of the machines this thread was useful.


Michael.

P.S.: The team "Germany" at Folding@Home / Genome@Home IS the team officially representing Rechenkraft.net.

[KWSN_Millennium2001Guy]

Originally posted by Jodie
I can do that for you - but it's worth noting that mine are Mosix dependant. I can do it all from a master node - as well as monitor loads and migrate the jobs out. If you don't have Mosix, it's not going to be helpful.

I think MG2k is Winblows based, right?

Yes, I run my farm on the OS that comes for "free" on every box. Of course I have to pay the Microsoft tax that is built in when you buy pre-configured hardware.

If you wait until the official letter shows up from Howard that the next client is available, I have been able to connect immediately after the notice and get the farm up and running again.

In winblows, you use to remotely start the client:
netsvc /start ComputerName "Distributed Folding Project Service"

To stop the service:
netsvc /stop ComputerName "Distributed Folding Project Service"

To install the new distribution files, unzip and place them in some folder somewhere, lets call it "c:\SourceDir". Be sure to put your handle.txt and proxy.cfg files in that folder. Then run the following commands to push the files out:
delete \\ComputerName\ShareName\DFFolderName\*.*
copy c:\SourceDir\*.* \\ComputerName\ShareName\DFFolderName

Follow that with the startup commands and you are good to go.

Ni!

[randreh_toeht]

Originally posted by Jodie
Who's this "we", kemosabe? Gots a mouse in your pocket?

You know, maybe I'm just in a b**chy mood, too, but I don't see where you have the room to order the DF folks around. I know your requirements don't reflect my opinion in any way shape or form. And a quickie browse-through of the stats suggests that unless there's another 'Team Germany' - I return every hour what your entire combined team returns in a week. And I'm still doubling my farm.

I can update my entire farm by hand in about an hour if every single machine fails to update. How bad could it POSSIBLY be for you?

Where's the "several million" units of loss coming from? You're team "Germany" Team # 156, right? If that's the case - your entire contribution to date has been 1379530 - about what I do myself in a day.

If you're not "Germany #156" than my apologies ahead of time for that mistake on your production. But it still bugs the living #$%@ out of me that you believe you 1) speak for anyone else and 2) think to order the DF folks around.

Maybe try: "Hi! I'm really nervous about the next update - do you know when it might be or even how much notice we might get?"

You definately appear to have a screw loose young girl. I have read your childish posts on other forums in the past, including the old G@H Yahoo forum. You just dont give up do you. My current image is of a pimple faced 13 year old brat-pack girl with numerous issues relating back to early childhood.

My readings of the Overclockers Network forum in the past has been amusing, you are a classic nut case with serious self image and security issues. May I suggest a little professional help before you make more of a fool of yourself online?

Personal issues aside, does your daddy know you are running DC project on his work systems?

Please dont take this post personally Jodie, I think you have the potential to be cured and develop into a wonderfull human, its just that your current MO is just not working. I truley hope you get help.

Regards,

Randreh.

[Jodie]

What's that annoying buzzing noise? Must be another worthless loser beneath my notice... [shrug]

[pointwood]

randreh_toeht
I'm not a moderator or anything on this board, just a normal user, but please stop posting shit like that. It contributes absolutely nothing good to this community.

We don't want a flamewar here, so if that is all you can contribute with, then please leave.

Otherwise, you are more than welcome.

[randreh_toeht]

Originally posted by pointwood
randreh_toeht
I'm not a moderator or anything on this board, just a normal user, but please stop posting shit like that. It contributes absolutely nothing good to this community.

We don't want a flamewar here, so if that is all you can contribute with, then please leave.

Otherwise, you are more than welcome.

I appologise if my post offended you pointwood, perhaps a PM to her may have been more appropriate.

I am just sick of seeing her "my tonka truck is bigger than yours" BS all over the DC community. She appears to thrive on abusive posts herself, I thought a calm, post offering constructive critisism would be tollerated here, in light of the 2nd post in this thread. I have lurked this forum since the spilt from ARS, I wished I had stayed in the woodwork...

Thankyou for answering my other post here

I feel perhaps Distributed Folding is worth my attention for at least a short try. I have several systems running Solaris here in my study, and looking at the DF site, they have a client supporting this system.

Thankyou for your assistance and farewell.

[pointwood]

I personally haven't seen posts from her that where full of BS or anything like that. Actually I've only seen a lot of informative and helpfull posts in this forum. I don't know her from other places but here so I will not comment on that.

Complaints should be mailed to the moderators, which means I've made a mistake too - I shouldn't have posted here either I should have notified the moderator.

I'm sorry about that and this will be my last post about this issue.

[DATA]

Hi Folks

on a lighter note regarding running costs - it costs me personally (am not a business or anything other than an individual with an interest in helping mankind) the following to support DC Projects

electricity per month approx £ 116.42 to run 50 boxes
Inet connection 24/7 £ 48.70 and i cant get ADSL
and with an air conditioning unit about ot be installed add another £ 120.00 per month for electricity alone

round figures it cost me £ 290 per month or £3.5K per year

and this is without all the other associated costs to maintain the S-MDC

must be

[MAD-ness]

Data: I thought your network was work based?

[DATA]

Originally posted by MAD-ness
Data: I thought your network was work based?

Hi m8

sure is DC work based - just trying to help those that know how to help mankind - some terrible diseases going around out there that need

[MAD-ness]

'tis cool, I am with you on that one. I just always thought it was a corporate type farm.

Props then, massive investment of time/money to run a farm like that.

[dnar]

Originally posted by DATA
Hi Folks

on a lighter note regarding running costs - it costs me personally (am not a business or anything other than an individual with an interest in helping mankind) the following to support DC Projects

electricity per month approx £ 116.42 to run 50 boxes
Inet connection 24/7 £ 48.70 and i cant get ADSL
and with an air conditioning unit about ot be installed add another £ 120.00 per month for electricity alone

round figures it cost me £ 290 per month or £3.5K per year

and this is without all the other associated costs to maintain the S-MDC

must be

Hi Data

Man, you have the MOST awesome DC farm I know of, and invest so much of your personal time and money into this. Well done I say, I think the Queen should Knight you!

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Okay, I have noticed that soon old structures will still be accepted for a few days after a change to a new protein! That is really great and actually resolves most issues with the autoupdate.

However - as promised - here is the report on what happened during the last protein change:

Most people over here have no access to their computers during protein changes since at the usual change over time (6 pm, local german time), they are off work. Since another good fraction of these computers do not even have an internet connection, autroupdate is completely ineffective for those and there will be as many structures lost as time passes by until the next possible visit of the computer owner. If however - as announced in the "coming soon" section of your DF website - upload of "expired" structures will be possible for a few more DAYS (I suggest the period of at least a weekend) after protein change, this issue will be resolved.

The other boxes which 1) have permanent internet connection, 2) are running as a service, 3) are properly configured for autoupdate and 4) do not attempt to upload during server-down-for-maintainance-period, do change over to the new protein without significant problems - although these machines produce excess "expired" structures that (until now) are not being accepted by the DF server. Over time this leads to an accumulation of non-sent structures in the DF directory. However, with accepting old structures for a while in the future this problem will be resolved, also.

Another fraction of people with permanent internet connection are baby-sitting their boxes during protein change in order to loose as little production time as possible. Those people upload their structures approx. 1 minute before official protein change over and then restart the client and upload every 5 minutes or so (by pressing Q). These people end up with a message saying "You seem to be experiencing network problems... Please correct and try again later". After you manually restart the client, it reports "...Server down for maintainance... Press ENTER". After some time they retry and then - if autoupdate is configured properly - it downloads the new client and automatically restarts folding of the new protein.
The same senario occurs if you let the protein change over pass by and then try to upload (the old structures) by pressing Q. Same messages, same procedure with autoupdate.

As sorry as it is - and this was actually the stuff I wanted to test out in detail - the other machine I set up to "naturally" upload the structures DURING THE SERVER-DOWN-FOR-MAINTAINANCE-PERIOD (that is, without pressing Q) crashed during SERVER-DOWN-FOR-MAINTAINANCE-PERIOD. I cannot tell what the reason for this was, could also be non-DF -related.

Michael.

[pointwood]

In regards to the old structures that remains in the dir, it was a bug:
http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...=&threadid=943

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Thanks for the information.

Michael.