DES-II-2 starts: Mon Jul 13 09:00:00 1998 PST
There are now 16 days left until DES-II-2 starts
It's VERY important that you upgrade as many clients as
possible as soon as these new clients are available. It's even more
important that you read the upgrade instructions in the readme file
as several important changes have been made.
The new clients have several big improvements:
1. New cores for all platforms yielding higher DES rates on all
clients, with improvements ranging from 50 kkeys/second to
8 megakeys/second, depending on the processor.
2. Automated contest switching. Older clients will not automatically
switch from rc5 to des; to ensure that your clients start on
DES-II-2 ASAP without human intervention, an upgrade is required.
If you are running a personal proxy you MUST upgrade it _before_ you
upgrade any of your clients. Older personal proxies will not let
blocks from the new clients pass through. Proxy 279b is available.
Clients can be found at http://www.distributed.net/clients.html
P.S. The sbox client project is now done (for this round).
Please kill off your sbox clients when you install 2.7100
*** The 2.7100 README.TXT file ***
Distributed.Net RC5-64/DES Client version 2.7100 updates.
Thank you for downloading the Distributed.Net version 2.7100 rc5/des
client. By installing this client, you will ensure that you obtain the
most optimal performance you can obtain for the DES-II-2 contest on
July 13th, 1998, as well as the most optimal performance for the
ongoing RC5-64 contest. Please read this file in its entirety, as many
noteworthy changes have been made, which may or may not affect you.
Also, please check for any platform specific readme files that may
have
accompanied this client.
There are many changes in version 2.7100 over 2.70x that you should be
aware of. They are as follows:
* Buffer file formats have NOT changed. You may use the exact same
buffer files you have been using with your 2.70x clients. However,
buffer files from 2.64x clients should be deleted before installing
the 2.7100 client, as the format is different.
* New contest switching logic has been implemented. 2.7100 clients
will
query the status of the ongoing contests during each connect to a
keyserver, ensuring that your clients will switch to DES the first
time they connect to a keyserver after DES has begun. Also, 2.7100
clients will recognize which blocks were from DES-II-1 (some may
still
be sitting around in your buffer files), and skip them so that you
do
not waste time. With a 2.7100 client installed, all you need to do
for
DES-II-2 is to cause your client to do an update, flush, or fetch
on July 13th, 1998, and it will start working on DES-II-2.
* New DES cores have been implemented on all platforms. You will see
speedups ranging from 50 kkeys/sec (on ppros) to 8 megakeys/second
(on ultrasparcs). As a result, it is in the best interest of your
keyrate for you to install new clients whereever possible!
* A completely new config menu has been implemented. It now includes
many more options that previously required .ini file editing to
activate. The menu has been arranged so that in most situations, you
will never have to configure any options besides the ones on the
Required Options menu.
* Two .ini / command line options have changed
* Firemode. This option has been removed. All the functionality of
firemode is in uuehttpmode. If you were using a configuration with
firemode 0 or 5, you need to make no changes to you configuration.
However, if you were using firemode 1 through 4, you should go
into
the configuration menu Communications Options and ensure that the
firewall mode is set as you need it.
* Preferredcontest. This option has been changed. The new option
replacing it is processdes. Processdes is a 1/0 option. When it is
set to 1, the client will participate in DES contests. When it is
set to 0, the client will NOT participate in DES contests. The
primary reason for changing this option was so that if you're
upgrading over an old client (which may have changed
preferredcontest back to rc5), you will not have to worry about it
accidently not working on DES.
* You may also notice two new .ini settings, contestdone and
contestdone2. These options are set automatically by the client to
tell it which contests are currently ongoing. Please do not change
these options.
To maximize your DES performance, you should do two things:
1. Set your preferred block size to 2^31, instead of the default 2^30.
Using 2^31 blocks will ensure that our master keyserver does not
become overloaded, and will help make the contest smoother for all
participants.
2. Make sure you keep a small amount of blocks in your buffers. We
expect DES-II-2 to be a short contest, hopefully lasting less than
two weeks. To ensure that your work is counted, and we make
constant
progress, please buffer only ONE DAY'S worth of blocks at any time.
If your clients are on constant Internet connections, you should
set
them to buffer as few blocks as possible (1 sounds like a good
number) so that there is as little latency as possible.
*** Upgrade procedure(s) ***
If you are currently running a 2.70x client:
1. Shut down the currently running 2.70x client.
2. Move the new executible from the 2.7100 client into the place of
the
2.70x client.
3. If you are using a firewall, please read the note about the removal
of firemode= and ensure that you are not adversely affected by it.
4. Start the new client up, you're ready to roll!
If you are currently running a 2.64x client:
1. Make sure to flush any finished blocks out of your current client
(rc564 -flush)
2. Shut down the 2.64x client.
3. Delete the 2.64 client, and its buffer files (buff-in.rc5, buff-
out.rc5)
4. Move the new 2.7100 client into the directory the old client was
in.
5. Start rc5des -config, and ensure that the required options are set
properly. If you are using firewall support, see the section on the
removal of firemode= and its consequences.
6. Start the new client up, you're ready to roll!
Adam L. Beberg
beberg@distributed.net
distributed.net founder
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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