Thanks.
Now crunching MCM.

I'm paying 93 euros for 2 months of electricity. The TV rate is no longer included. I have 4 computers running 24/7.
Tullio

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+1
Stephen

WCG predicted an April 22 return, but I do hope they manage it sooner.

So, who here believes that WCG will be back, and working, as promised on April 22?
I have my doubts.

I think there's a fair chance - even if there are a few hiccups on day 1.

For Krembil, this is bright, shiny, new, prestigious. They're taking over an established project with all the reputation of IBM behind it. The experienced IBM staff will be hovering in the background to help if needed - in a way, their reputation depends on a smooth and successful transfer, too.

The real test will come in a year or two's time, the first time they try to onboard a new research project. That first one will be slow and difficult, as they get to grips with things they haven't had to do this time - integrate the researchers' app with the BOINC libraries, get all the metrics right for sensible runtime estimates, decide on proper credit awards, etc. And deal with the resultant flak on the message boards.

But they'll get the hang of it, eventually. Then we move ten or fifteen years down the line. Technology is changing, research needs are changing, the first intake of staff are being promoted upstairs according to the Peter Principle. THEN we can make a full evaluation.

From the BOINC message board:

WCG delayed until May 9th, 2022 - Facebook, Twitter
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"With a heavy heart we must announce to volunteers our intent to delay restarting the WCG until May 9th, 2022. Several issues discovered in our production environment remain unresolved, making it impossible to meet the April 22, 2022 deadline at this time.

Unexpected issues continue to delay the full validation of the QA environment, meaning there is no path yet to a responsible restart of the Production system even if all outstanding issues were resolved today. Several obstacles that proved difficult to resolve due to inexperience with specific components in the WCG software stack, contribute to our need for yet more time to bring the Grid back online.

Notably, the website build broke due to a dependency that brought React version 18.0.2 into the build, whereas the site was developed against React version 17. The lack of experience with React and modern web development practices within our team resulted in what now seems a simple fix, pinning React to the previously working version 17 for all dependencies that permitted a change in major versions when resolving required packages at build time. Volunteers may have noticed this issue, as it coincided with a long silence at www.worldcommunitygrid.org, which could not be updated. In addition, we overlooked a misconfiguration in the messaging/queueing middleware (IBM MQ), and a missing root certificate took far too long to discover as the reason Apache could not talk to IBM Websphere. The last few public IPs to be assigned were not routable due to a misconfigured VLAN. While these issues were all resolved, we now need more time to ensure there are no more surprises.

As a rule, this level of detail should be omitted from updates and has been omitted from previous updates. From our perspective, the specifics of the technical obstacles that hinder us are immaterial, as what we owe to volunteers is a working backend for the World Community Grid. The Grid is far too valuable to let go - and despite challenges, we are committed to supporting open science on the Grid. Given the already overlong timeframe of the migration, and to assuage concerns as to whether we are progressing towards the goal at all, we thought to make an exception given that we are asking for your patience just a while longer before we are fully ready to restart the WCG. We must and we will succeed.

Thank you to all who have contributed feedback and words of encouragement during the downtime. We do see your posts even if we cannot always reply at this stage. Your understanding and patience is truly appreciated. We will prepare a proper team introduction and answer the questions and address the comments once the Grid is back on.

WCG Tech team"

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As a rule, this level of detail should be omitted from updates and has been omitted from previous updates. From our perspective, the specifics of the technical obstacles that hinder us are immaterial

WTF do so many projects think people aren't interested in why their project is having issues and that they are actually happy with nothing but silence from the project???

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Grant
Darwin NT

2 concerns.
1: Did IBM hand it over due to cost cutting?
2: A research institute inexperienced in modern research technology?

2 concerns.
1: Did IBM hand it over due to cost cutting?
2: A research institute inexperienced in modern research technology?

My S.W.A.G. to that: Yes & Yes.
Me thinking is BOINC got to be a expensive side project for BIGBLUE. They probably did not hand over to Krembel the vast BOINC infrastructure knowledge and customized code they have assembled over the years.

Krembel is probably trying to make the back-end and website all nice/shiny with that "modern design interface" called React and then they found out that they needed to update to latest version of software and some custom code got broken in process.

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I've just read that WCG is postponing its restart until May 9. They got more bite than they could chew.
Tullio

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Twitt from WCG

We are currently facing unexpected issues with the load balancer - a small but critical component that ensures science servers will cope with increased workloads. If not resolved on time, it would prevent us from restarting on May 9th. We will provide an update tomorrow evening.

Typical...

... they haven't posted that on https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

They have now, and promised a further update this evening (Sunday).

I am usually an optimistic person, but as a former admin I knew there would be a bit of delay, but I truly thought they would just be a day or two off. I don't think they are getting much help in the transition from IBM. They have invested alot of time and effort to take WCG, so I expect more issues to come, but hopeful (overly optimistic?) for long term continuity.

I tried to go to Milky Way for my backup project, and then that project had major issues for a while, a couple of weeks?, so I suspect that we will get more down time on WCG going forward as the resources needed are never allocated to Boinc projects.

oh well. I hope to see the conclusion of the ARP project. Then I might go to Milky Way if WCG doesn't have a new project that catches my eye. It is a shame though that they are coming back online just as summer heat will be hitting me, and I'll probably shut my machine off during the middle of the day.

Late with the reopening and late with the statement of when they will reopen. Technically they have until midnight their time, so I hope we will get an announcement soon, but it isn't going to be good news, or they would have already said something.

I'm staying off twitter today as I haven't finished watching the Eurovision semifinal 2 (no spoilers, please), so hopefully they post the announcement to their website quickly. I've been checking in here hoping that if it pops up on FB or Twitter first that someone will post it.

WCG Facebook posting

The revised date for launch will be May 24th, 2022, after Victoria day.
We were able to solve a redirection loop that caused much of the website to be unusable due to incorrect rewrite rules in Apache and their interaction with self-hosted DNS. Additional issues were then resolved that had resulted from the previously discussed necessary changes to the configuration of HAProxy, internal server certificates and thus domains, and IBM WebSphere.

We are now updating the content on the production website to include the updates that were published during downtime, porting the React dependency pin to version 17 from the current website hosted at www.worldcommunitygrid.org to the full-featured production website which was also affected. We then need to ensure functionality on all major browsers manually. Once finished, the website and forums will be good to go.
Finally, we were able to test BOINC client connections to our servers from newly created/registered accounts. While we were able to contact the BOINC scheduler and check for available workunits, we are now diagnosing a failure to validate the project key that occured in some cases.

On the server side, we were able to verify the flow of data from our research partners into the workunit management layer in our stack. Thus, this part is fully validated, and will proceed smoothly upon restart. We continue to assess readiness of the workunit management stack for launch together with the website.

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Yeah, you nailed it with
... one might wonder what the he** they've been doing since February 28...

My S.W.A.G. on this mess is total incompetence on 'gerbils' part.

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It's as if IBM just threw the "ball" over to Krembil, without giving them much support at all, and probably not much of the documentation IBM should have created over the years. There's probably hundreds of undocumented "features" that will come up and bite Krembil when/if they manage to get WCG going again.

Yup - that would be IBM's approach to things. Loads of undocumented "features", inadequate change tracking, but at the same time claiming "everything you need is there"....

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It's as if IBM just threw the "ball" over to Krembil, without giving them much support at all, and probably not much of the documentation IBM should have created over the years. There's probably hundreds of undocumented "features" that will come up and bite Krembil when/if they manage to get WCG going again.

Yup - that would be IBM's approach to things. Loads of undocumented "features", inadequate change tracking, but at the same time claiming "everything you need is there"....

Those are the cloud in the sky claims of too many IT clouds...

Sounds like rather than a simple turnkey migration, the group has had to debug and fix the cloud system itself...

Good luck!

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Do we have faith in that the 24th, will be the day WCG restarts?

No. That's like asking if the Pope is Catholic!

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