Afternoon Team, what a gloriously sunny day

Good evening all,

My mid-day results are looking good:

05/07/2013 0:039:14:27:12 164,818 233

Unfortunately my performance will start to drop due to my idle only machines being in use.

	7 days to May 2					4 days from May 3								
	RunTime		Results			RunTime		Results			RunTime		Results	
	Global	UK Team	Global	UK Team		Global	UK Team	Global	UK Team		Global	UK Team	Global	UK Team
SN2S	14.3%	 9.9%	 6.0%	 2.7%		11.3%	 9.6%	 6.9%	 4.3%		 -3.0%	 -0.3%	  0.8%	  1.5%
GFAM	14.0%	10.9%	 6.8%	 3.3%		17.9%	23.5%	12.7%	13.3%		  3.9%	 12.7%	  5.9%	 10.0%
DSFL	 9.8%	10.1%	 4.5%	 2.8%		13.2%	13.5%	 8.0%	 5.5%		  3.3%	  3.3%	  3.5%	  2.8%
CEP2	 5.4%	11.0%	 1.4%	 2.0%		 5.5%	 8.0%	 2.1%	 2.3%		  0.1%	 -3.0%	  0.7%	  0.3%
HCC	20.3%	35.8%	67.9%	83.3%		 8.3%	13.4%	46.4%	61.1%		-12.0%	-22.4%	-21.5%	-22.2%
HPF2	16.7%	 8.9%	 6.5%	 2.6%		19.7%	17.2%	11.4%	 7.7%		  3.0%	  8.3%	  4.9%	  5.1%
FAAH	19.5%	13.4%	 6.9%	 3.2%		24.1%	14.9%	12.6%	 5.8%		  4.6%	  1.4%	  5.7%	  2.5%

Before and After - the distribution of RunTime and Results before the HCC slowdown started and since.

Unfortunately some people will always try and cheat for bragging rights, just as those did in the recent PrimeGrid scandal.

A "round-robin DNS entry" basically means there's more than one IP address that a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) points at, ie. www.worldcommunitygrid.org might point to 1.2.3.4 and 5.6.7.8, for reliability purposes (two servers are more resilient - one can go down and the website will still work, of sorts).

Any queries made against www.worldcommunitygrid.org will cycle between the two (or more, in some cases) IP addresses when asked to resolve against www.worldcommunitygrid.org - so, if there are two entries, one server going down will result in 50% reliability (as opposed to 0% in the case of just having one server).

When you try to browse to a website, or send an email, or do anything that involves internet-connectivity, your computer will query your ISP's DNS servers to convert that request from the form "www.worldcommunitygrid.org" into an IP address.

What your ISP's DNS server then does is find out what the authoritative DNS servers are for that domain-name (ie. who controls it). If the DNS-entry your ISP servers have is more recent than the setting on the authoritative DNS server says it can be (referred to as the time-to-live, or TTL), then it will give you that DNS-entry and your request is fulfilled.

If your ISP server's DNS entry is older than the authoritative server says it can be, then it will update itself with a new entry from the authoritative server (which can be the same IP address it already has) and resets the timer on its local record.

All of this happens in milliseconds, so you won't notice too much of it happening, but there's a lot going on in the background when you press return to browse to this website, or send an email, etc!

So, what knreed is saying is that they've updated the TTL to 2 hours (meaning all other DNS servers around the world will only keep a record for the CEP2 upload-server for 2 hours before expiring it), and they've removed the .147 address from the list of IP addresses that any queries will return when you try to upload a finished WU. As a result, when you go to upload a CEP2 WU from a maximum of 6 hours from now (you generally multiply the TTL by 2-3 to ensure worldwide coverage), it should only return the .157 address and hence be 100% reliable.

Hopefully that helps clarify what knreed posted a little bit...