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[DPC]Division Brabant
2002-11-05 09:04:44
I read this message this morning:

The FTP access on my website is currently being rather weird - I keep finding the stats-uploader script has frozen half-way through an upload or download.

To try and fix this, I've increased the frequency of FTP-pulls to one every 20 minutes and told Windows to quit the task if it runs for more than 15 minutes (so one session timing out doesn't affect the next).  Hopefully then at least _some_ of them will upload all the files.

I send about 80 Muons this morning about half past 8

There all lost!

Stephen can you do a re-run on the stats?!??

Username [DPC]Division Brabant
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 09:47:09
Your database file here was modified on November 1st and no results from you are cached on the server.  Yep, they're gone for good.  The only thing I can think of that made this happen is that FTP failed to send the file, but still retrieved the signal.dat file and hence Muon1 thought it had sent OK and deleted the file.

This has only shown up as a problem recently - it might be due to the increased number of users and for some reason my FTP server "can't cope", although I have to say it's a badly-programmed server if it lets things go missing in this rather messy way.  I would have expected a "Too many simultaneous sessions" error or something.
The other possibility is that InfoPop have screwed up in yet another way somehow.  If this continues I might have to implement the "distributed FTP server" part of the project a bit early...

Incidentally, I think you can make it easier on my server if you don't manualsend every 2 results that come out (and don't set a "proxy" to do this either).  But in that case try to backup your results.txt file and if it all goes missing and doesn't show up in the stats after a day, re-send that file.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 09:50:17
It could also be the case that other people have been going on there and deliberately deleting results.  Fairly chlidish behaviour - I'll try again to change the permissions on the Muon dirs so that they're write-only for users.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
[DPC]Division Brabant
2002-11-05 10:10:17
Thank you for your reaction.

I will make a backup next time so I don't be screwed again.


Greetz
SlipStream
2002-11-05 10:16:10
Hi Stephen,

it seems to be true that some fools deleted results from your ftp server.  Today I made an upload (ca.  360 K at 11.30 AM, but no results were counted.  Luckily
I made a backup of the results and I can try it again.

Greetings
SlipStream
dcDragon
2002-11-05 10:25:01
I too have apparently lost some uploads today...altho relatively small, of the last 6, only the last one was credited...

confused
SlipStream
2002-11-05 11:09:28
Really strange!

I uploaded the file again at 06:20 PM and it disappeard at 06:23 PM on the ftp server, but it didn't found the way in the stats.  frown
Is there some maintainance going on, or what ?

Greetings
SlipStream
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 11:37:27
Well 06:23pm might have been when my stats script was taking files off there.  Had it running every 20 minutes recently, but only got these new complaints since I recompiled it at one stage, while I was doing the duplicates check thing.  Maybe there's a bug in it - I'll go and check this.

Meanwhile I've asked Infopop to chmod those dirs for me so they'll be secure.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
smalltalker
2002-11-05 11:45:47
Stephen,

I have had exactly the same experience as SlipStream.  I reset my results.txt from results.dat (as discussed in a thread in the New Users Q&A forum) and reuploaded it at 18:40. The stats status updated at 19:00 (and now 19:40) but my new results were still not included.

I kept a close eye on the FTP status and both files (I am running the client on 2 machines) seemed to be sent without error.

I've kept a copy of the uploaded file but can't see anything in it that should cause a problem - none of my previous uploads have failed and I've changed nothing this end.  Would you like me to mail you a copy so you can check it?

Ian
SlipStream
2002-11-05 11:56:45
Thank you!
I uploaded the file once again.
We will see what happens.

Greetings
SlipStream
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 12:19:43
quote:
Originally posted by smalltalker:
I have had exactly the same experience as SlipStream.  I reset my results.txt from results.dat (as discussed in a thread in the New Users Q&A forum) and reuploaded it at 18:40. The stats status updated at 19:00 (and now 19:40) but my new results were still not included.


Your database file was updated at 20:09 TODAY.  I think it's now just a matter of persuading the updated stats files to get back onto the server.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
[DPC] Division Brabant
2002-11-05 13:10:36
Is there anyway to get my results back??

I have 324 Muon in my results.dat now and the latetst 40 are not in the stats

My results.txt is empty now....
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 13:31:27
Copy the last 40 into a new results.txt and re-send.  Don't make a habit of doing things like this with the files, but in this case it's not so bad.

BTW, I just got InfoPop to change the directory permissions - can you guys still send results?


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Bill[Romulus2]
2002-11-05 13:32:59
I'm not sure if this will apply in this instance but I sent in many results myself and they did not show for quite some time.  Several hours in fact.  This does not bother me as they did pop up (or at least my stats look about right).  Perhaps this is occuring to others as well?  Maybe these "lost muons" will still show up like mine did. 

I'm off to see what the next word is for the word association post.
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 13:42:02
Okay, the chmod'ing went fine, but for some reason the muon1 user's FTP password has changed and I don't know what the hell it is.  I'm going to ask... then change it back to what it should be.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
SlipStream
2002-11-05 13:47:59
Hi Stephen,

it is now impossible to upload any results, because of an invalid password
problem reported by the ftp server red face
Now it's a little bit to secure.  roll eyes

Greetings SlipStream
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 14:09:50
Yep, as I said above, for some completely unknown reason, they decided it was a good idea to change the password.  I've now requested that they change it BACK.

This isn't such a serious error though because for now your results are just being stored on your machines.  I'll post again when the password thing is sorted.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
John Campbell
2002-11-05 15:15:21
I just tried a manualsend... it got past the ftp login this time, which I presume means the password issue's straightened out, but failed with an "FTP-Error : remote chdir failed."
[DPC]Division Brabant
2002-11-05 15:36:06
Same here confused
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-05 16:17:56
Well this has been a waste of time.  I apparently can't make it more secure because FTP needs read as well as write permission to be able to put a file in a directory.  So in other words, it's now back how it was before.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
ZeonX[OCAU]
2002-11-05 22:14:20
What a load of foamy parrots.  They should be able to make it writeable but not deletable.  Its a major sercurity hole if people can delete other peoples results.  If this ever happends to me i'll be surely leaving this project.

Can't you do some other sort of uploading method thru like http or some custom port/protocol??  I know this project is still in the beginning still but alot of people are joining and I think this is a real problem atm.

[This message was edited by Stephen Brooks on 2002-Nov-06 at 14:56.]
[DPC]Scorpion
2002-11-06 03:38:21
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
Well this has been a waste of time.  I apparently can't make it more secure because FTP needs read as well as write permission to be able to put a file in a directory.  So in other words, it's now back how it was before.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a _spiral space-time whirly thing_, AND an interesting plotline"


Well we indeed need read and write rights on your directory on file level... this means we upload our results .... but where it goes wrong is on directory level we got "full control" on the dir
Name Date T/Y Owner Group Permission
v4.21b 6.Nov 10:34 muon1 stephenbrooks drwxrwxrwx

so you just have to change the permissions on directory level

pvs
2002-11-06 07:25:18
Uploaded 60k results.txt threetimes but the particles are not shown in the Stats.  So I looked at the FTP-Server and found 2 of the three.  Deleted 1 of these two by my self.

First Upload was at 11:xx h some stats where updated at 12:00h....

There are a lot of sources to get results cruncht by other people.  One is the FTP-Server others are the best-results-files some teams offering on their website.

If someone wants to be a "Highscorer" he only has to take these results and send them in.

In my opinion Stephen has no chance to change this, sas long this project is OS.

The only thing I know to change this is a unique Number generated by every result and to check this number when it is sent, but if you can read the source, you are able to generate your own number.

It's the same problem as seti has, this does not affect the sience, but it affects me and i think most of the crunchers here in the project.

I hope my english was not to bad and everyone could understand what i mean.
Perhaps we will have a few cheaters more, because they know now how to do it.
Sorry about that, but it has to be said.

Peter
DukeBox
2002-11-06 08:07:55
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Brooks:
...because FTP needs read as well as write permission to be able to put a file in a directory...
Why do you need 'read' rights ?  Only for the signal.dat.. The poblem is that it's difficult to change rights cause everyone is using the same user account.  Normally the FTP server has some functionality's like only give write rights and no change/read etc. Maybe infopop can help you with that ?
Or an other idea.. just explain infopop what's the problem.  maybe they can give you a complete 'solution'.
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-06 08:13:03
quote:
Originally posted by ZeonX:
They should be able to make it writeable but not deletable.  Its a major sercurity hole if people can delete other peoples results.  If this ever happends to me i'll be surely leaving this project.


Well this was what I thought: if I said that muon1 could write but not read at the directory level, then I'd expect you could deposit results without being able to read or delete others.  However, it appears that when I set the permissions like that, FTP gets "access denied" when it tries to change to that directory.  For an hour or so I got people's results files appearing the level above the version directories because of this problem.

quote:
Can't you do some other sort of uploading method thru like http or some custom port/protocol??  I know this project is still in the beginning still but alot of people are joining and I think this is a real problem atm.


Certainly this is how other projects do it.  I think it may be possible to use PHP scripting to upload files (odd though it sounds), and if I did that they would be stored somewhere on the server that is not viewable by others.

quote:
Originally by [DPC]Scorpion:
Well we indeed need read and write rights on your directory on file level... this means we upload our results .... but where it goes wrong is on directory level we got "full control" on the dir
Name Date T/Y Owner Group Permission
v4.21b 6.Nov 10:34 muon1 stephenbrooks drwxrwxrwx

so you just have to change the permissions on directory level


I'm pretty sure what you're talking about is actually what I tried.  How exactly can I change "file level" permissions in the current system?  I mean, new files keep being uploaded and FTP appears to have no chmod command to secure them.  It seems that the default permission is to have muon1 being able to read/write/delete results, because it is the user who uploaded them.

If you _can_ get such a system to work (check it with Windows FTP) I'd be interested, because it only takes a message to my webhost to get the permissions changed (I don't know why I can't change them myself - it seems that I am not 'root').


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-06 08:17:32
quote:
Originally posted by DukeBox:
Why do you need 'read' rights ?


Good question!  I have no idea why it needs read rights to do the 'cd v4.21b' command, but using Windows FTP I get 'access denied' and it fails.  If you can figure out a way around this I'd be interested to hear it.

I could try talking in Infopop some more - I did explain which users I wanted to do what (muon1 and myself are the 2 users I can control), and they changed the permissions as you'd expect, but FTP didn't like it.  The guy I was talking to didn't understand why either.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
Bluumi [SwissTeam.NET]
2002-11-06 11:12:37
Why you don't make a script, that copy every x second the uploaded Results to a other directory where teh script has read/write access, but the muon1 User not?!?

confused
SlipStream
2002-11-06 11:12:41
Hi Stephen,

because of a disappeard file I uploaded some results twice and now I have
190 Millions of particle to much.  Could you run your Dupchecker or should
we wait for the next planed check?

Greetings
SlipStream
Stephen Brooks
2002-11-06 11:28:59
quote:
Originally posted by Bluumi [SwissTeam.NET]:
Why you don't make a script, that copy every x second the uploaded Results to a other directory where teh script has read/write access, but the muon1 User not?!?


The only problem with that is that PHP scripts are limited to last for 60 seconds.  I can get a page to refresh every 10 seconds with JavaScript or an HTTP tag though.  I might try this.

SlipStream, I've just run the duplicate checker and the results from it are here. It will be at least a week before I run it again.


"As every 11-year-old kid knows, if you concentrate enough Van-der-Graff generators and expensive special effects in one place, you create a spiral space-time whirly thing, AND an interesting plotline"
SlipStream
2002-11-06 13:07:51
Hello Stephen,

everything seems to be O.K. now.

Thank you.

SlipStream
Herb[Romulus2]
2002-11-06 23:27:47
Thanks for the cleanup smile

I thaught, I must have been the worst this time eek but I wasn't big grin

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