A few years ago I worked on a project that was "handed over" by IBM. The documentation was enormous, and so inaccurate as to be useless for doing any of the routine maintenance. We spent several months working through the code and writing our own documentation so that we could port the product onto another IBM system. Then we started working through the bugs and features, another few months before we had a system that was stable enough to be delivered to the end user. There were still a shed load of bugs and features that were resolved over the next few months. We were not happy bunnies, nor was our customer, and support from the source part of IBM???? Well they did say (eventually) that they knew there were a "few issues", but they weren't going to fix them as they'd spent their budget. And from the other part of IBM - they nearly gave up in despair trying to get correct information from the source part of IBM, but did manage to get some.
So what chance does a third party organisation stand?????

---

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

A few years ago I worked on a project that was "handed over" by IBM. The documentation was enormous, and so inaccurate as to be useless for doing any of the routine maintenance ...
So what chance does a third party organisation stand?????

Seeing that Krembil hasn't been successful in the resurrection of WCG after almost 4 months and IBM is known to terminate the "old timers" (senior staff) who have the most knowledge about their products and hire younger, less knowledgeable replacements, it would not be surprising if they take another 8 or more months to come back online.

And there finally was signs of life at WCG:
Website and forum are now online.

Published on: 21 Jun 2022
Dear Volunteers, we are thrilled to announce that our website and forums have finished rebuilding and testing, and are both available for public access.

The website and forums are back with full functionality. New to the layout of the website is the Links tab, which provides links to our help pages and social media accounts. By popular demand, a link to the forum is available under the Community tab for easier access. Newcomers to the World Community Grid are encouraged to sign up, read our About sections to learn about the inner workings of the software and our Current projects section to decide which projects they are interested in supporting.

The World Community Grid forum is online once again for discussions of research projects, constructive feedback and news. We remind you of the community guidelines, which can be read here. New volunteers are encouraged to read the guidelines and review existing forum conversations to understand proper forum etiquette before posting. As always, we ask that all users act civil towards the other users and admins, as well as refraining from discussing topics irrelevant to research and World Community Grid.

Thank you for reading, thank you for waiting, and be sure to stay tuned for some very exciting news soon!

The World Community Grid TEAM – Together Everyone Accomplishes More

Adding to that, someone subsequently claimed that by using a new ULR one would get work, but......
All I got was a new copy of the master file followed by a series of:

25/06/2022 08:03:30 | World Community Grid | [sched_op] Starting scheduler request
25/06/2022 08:03:30 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: Project initialization.
25/06/2022 08:03:30 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU and NVIDIA GPU
25/06/2022 08:03:30 | World Community Grid | [sched_op] CPU work request: 1.00 seconds; 0.00 devices
25/06/2022 08:03:30 | World Community Grid | [sched_op] NVIDIA GPU work request: 1.00 seconds; 0.00 devices
25/06/2022 08:03:31 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request failed: HTTP service unavailable
25/06/2022 08:03:31 | World Community Grid | [sched_op] Deferring communication for 00:02:51
25/06/2022 08:03:31 | World Community Grid | [sched_op] Reason: Scheduler request failed

Looks to me as if it's still on the operating table.

---

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

The gerbils at Krembil must have fallen asleep on the running wheel ... it has been 9 days since the last project status update on reactivation of the BOINC / science platform.

Lots of angry people posting on their forums and social media pages, most indicating they will not return to the project if it ever comes to life again.

Krembil has done a great job of offending the project users and doing a major disservice to BOINC and distributed computing.

I think IBM can be equally held to blame.

Probably take another 4 months just to sort that one.
Just in time for the 18th birthday bash. :-)

In the mean time, I wonder if one could crunch a WU on the Abacus? :-)

By now, the neighbors gerbils could had one OPN task per abacus completed and sent back.

If one could get hold of the algorithm one could try, but it might take some time to get to a result, and one's fingers may be a tad tender unless they had been hardened by long term us of said device.

---

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

i have received an OPN1 task from WCG.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

I agree with you Grumpy Sweede, the casual WCG users are already bailing out along with some hard core users also.

One of the first priorities Krembil needs to fix ASAP is the http/https error message that confuses the novice causing more problems by detach/reattach.

Next would be the intermittent upload/download issues.

#3 Would be much better communicating via NEWS posts what's going on.

I'll leave it at that for now.

I'd put "communicating with users via news posts" as the highest priority. Even a weekly update would be better than the weeks between news postings we are seeing.
Not everyone will want to, or can be bothered to, go off the project news page to one of the social media platforms where important news can often be buried by a whole host of posts of the "I've got this problem, what do I do" type.

---

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

I agree, more communication is needed and has sorely been lacking since the takeover.
Overnight I received a ARP task but it is stuck downloading on third retry.

The WCG website went down, so I thought I'd pop over here and say Hi.

Hi !!

I've been happy to crunch some ARP WUs again and I haven't gotten the transit errors on the last few. I hope the server being down is a good sign... like they are fixing something major.

edit to add: hmmm. boinc can connect to WCG, so it is just the website that is down.

- Unixchick

seems to be hit or miss for me...

Mon Jul 25 16:11:36 2022 | World Community Grid | update requested by user
Mon Jul 25 16:11:45 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: Requested by user.
Mon Jul 25 16:11:45 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Mon Jul 25 16:11:50 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Mon Jul 25 16:11:50 2022 | World Community Grid | Project has no tasks available
Mon Jul 25 16:11:50 2022 | World Community Grid | Project requested delay of 121 seconds
Mon Jul 25 16:13:56 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Mon Jul 25 16:13:56 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Mon Jul 25 16:14:00 2022 | | Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
Mon Jul 25 16:14:00 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request failed: Couldn't resolve host name
Mon Jul 25 16:14:01 2022 | | Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down.
Mon Jul 25 16:15:31 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Mon Jul 25 16:15:31 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Mon Jul 25 16:15:36 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Mon Jul 25 16:15:36 2022 | World Community Grid | Project has no tasks available
Mon Jul 25 16:15:36 2022 | World Community Grid | Project requested delay of 121 seconds

Since about 23:00 UTC on 25th, all my BOINC clients have been reporting the "Couldn't resolve host name" message on every contact attempt, and now Firefox reports with its usual

Hmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server at www.worldcommunitygrid.org.

which is consistent with being unable to resolve the name. So I'm not even graced with the [really valuable] suggestion to consult Facebook/Twitter...

And an attempt to ping the site solicits

ping: www.worldcommunitygrid.org: Temporary failure in name resolution

DNS issues again? :-( -- I can't be bothered switching DNS servers in my router to see if it makes a difference -- I doubt that it would...

Cheers - Al.

---

Since about 23:00 UTC on 25th, all my BOINC clients have been reporting
...
-- snip --

DNS issues again? :-( -- I can't be bothered switching DNS servers in my router to see if it makes a difference -- I doubt that it would...

Cheers - Al.

Don't waste time switching DNS settings.

I use OPENDNS.COM as primary and it can't even locate the WCG server DNS INFO.

According to https://whois.domaintools.com/worldcommunitygrid.org
The IP address [199.241.167.118] pointed to the domain worldcommunitygrid.org is unreachable.

My guess is that Krembil has pulled the whole kit off the ether to 'fix' something big.

As with everything Krembil, NO COMMUNICATION IN ADVANCE.

I'm still getting through sometimes and others not... very strange behavior

Mon Jul 25 21:26:28 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Mon Jul 25 21:26:28 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Mon Jul 25 21:26:32 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Mon Jul 25 21:26:32 2022 | World Community Grid | Project has no tasks available
Mon Jul 25 21:26:32 2022 | World Community Grid | Project requested delay of 121 seconds

Mon Jul 25 21:44:25 2022 | World Community Grid | update requested by user
Mon Jul 25 21:44:33 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: Requested by user.
Mon Jul 25 21:44:33 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Mon Jul 25 21:44:38 2022 | | Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
Mon Jul 25 21:44:38 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request failed: Couldn't resolve host name
Mon Jul 25 21:44:39 2022 | | Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down.

could they have multiple machines in a pool and good percentage are down... but one in the pool will periodically answer me?

I'm way to optimistic for this world. I read your post Grumpy Swede, and it was getting to me... you are right... the lack of communication is a very telling sign, and not a good one. I sent them a tweet, and I was hoping to get a response, but nothing. They have a communications person, so it isn't like they would have to stop the fixing to tweet.

Then surprise surprise...
Tue Jul 26 06:55:15 2022 | World Community Grid | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Tue Jul 26 06:55:15 2022 | World Community Grid | Requesting new tasks for CPU
Tue Jul 26 06:55:18 2022 | World Community Grid | Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
Tue Jul 26 06:55:18 2022 | World Community Grid | Project requested delay of 121 seconds
Tue Jul 26 06:55:20 2022 | World Community Grid | Started download of ARP1_0028245_126_ARP1_0028245_126.input
Tue Jul 26 06:55:20 2022 | World Community Grid | Started download of 34a8b09bb1cbdacbb5afdb8fa5773a0e.

of course the download is a mess, and will take many tries as the machine only answers now and then, but it is there...faintly... trying to send me WUs.
I'm hoping they made a mistake and are trying to fix it.

the website and forums are loading fine here, maybe you got shadow banned like all the other critics?

edit, the problem is definitely DNS related. website loads fine via my work VPN (which manages their own DNS server), but wont load from my personal network using using Cloudflare/Google DNS.

---

Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours