SetiAtWork

I got my hands on a nice Intel 64bit Quad-Core Dual-CPU Dell Poweredge the other day - not for keeps unfortunately! It is one of two new servers for work. The first one is being tested by the SysAdmin and I asked if I could play with the second. If I can get virtualisation working properly, then I may be able to administer it for it's final use (migrating a few old servers onto it), we'll see.

So what better way to burn it in, than to run SETI or something similar. It's been a while since I last ran SETI. In fact, there was no boinc way back then, and my old 2GHz Pentium 4 got me into the 2nd percentile in just a few months.

After struggling with various issues with the new boinc client not connecting, and not downloading anything, I finally got it all working. One trick was to use the full account key, not the limited key. I also had some problems with the amd64 binary. Apparently there's an even faster one out there, but I haven't looked into that yet.

I was suprised to learn that SETI now provides the source code - when I first used it they kept the source code closed so that they could verify the results were genuine.

I migrated my account from the "classic" to the new style and joined the Gentoo Linux Users Everywhere team. I was dismayed by my apparently slow "recent average credit" total, but after a few weeks, this gradually improved, culminating in todays effort: I'm now at the top of the ranking for this group, based on recent average credit :) I have a long way to go until my total credit gets me noticed however!

I wonder whether I should join another group, or even try out a different project. While SETI holds my favourite spot for being one of the originals, there are possibly more humanitarian efforts! We'll see.