January 2, 2007 – 18:30 UTC
Happy new year ! It’s been a hec­tic holi­day season.
The air con­di­tio­ner in our ser­ver clo­set fai­led a few weeks ago. The tem­pe­ra­tures of all the sys­tems imme­dia­tely rose about 10 degrees (Celsius).

Of course, this hap­pened over a weekend, and the hig­her tem­pe­ra­ture values were just below war­ning thres­holds so we did­n’t get alert e‑mails, etc. The fail­ure was cau­sed by the unu­sual low tem­pe­ra­tures around the Bay. Pipes froze and the air con­di­tio­ner shut its­elf off in self-defense. We thought this was just a fluke, but a few days later it fai­led again. A leak in one of the pipes was dis­co­vered and fixed. We adjus­ted our alert system.
We had to reboot our upload ser­ver a cou­ple times during the holi­days. It ran­domly loses important mounts – a pro­blem that was more chro­nic before SETI@home Enhanced was released (which vastly redu­ced the entire load on our ser­ver backend). With increased users and fas­ter com­pu­ters this is beco­ming a pro­blem again. We’re brain­stor­ming about why this is hap­pe­ning and how to fix it.

The pro­blems we’ve been having with slow queries to the result table were infre­quent and tem­po­rary, but during the last few days it seems to have finally went „over the edge.“ We tried redu­cing load by remo­ving ser­vices, restart­ing ser­vers and reboot­ing MySQL to no avail. We’re doing a table check now (during the usual weekly data­base backup outage). Perhaps we have a bro­ken index. More to come as we find out what’s up.

Mit ande­ren Worten : ?Nichts geht mehr!?
Schlechte Nachricht f?r das SETI-Team und alle, die f?r SETI aktiv sind (Hoddel).
Infos zum Stand der Dinge gibt es bei den Technical News von SETI.