Given how things have changed on the Internet in the past 10 years, the next version of the primenet server should be written by a paranoid genius checking for buffer overflows & illegal input at every turn.
Ken Kriesel At 09:22 PM 1/2/2006 -0500, you wrote: >At 01:51 PM 1/2/2006, you wrote: >>I believe you when you say that you guys spend >> > a lot of effort on the server, but I can't help wondering why it needs so >> > much attention in the first place. None of my web apps need much >> > intervention at all (and I have several high traffic ones under my care), >> > and I don't even consider myself that much of a wizard sysadmin. Do you >> > have any idea why your server is falling off the net so often? And why has >> > it gotten so much worse in the past few months, compared to a couple of >> > years back? > >Restarting the server when it goes dead is a minimum amount of effort. > >My best guess is it seems to die for three reasons. > >1) Bad data sent by client that isn't rigorously checked by >server. Buffer overruns >on user names or passwords or some other field are probably getting >the primenet server application in a funny hung state. > >2) The backend database goes down. An upgrade to SQLServer 2005 might help. >If the primenet server application handled errors better, that would >help too. This is >the infamous ERROR 3 problem. > >3) The manual web pages provide an opportunity to flood the server >with arbitrary >text results. Buffer overruns or mis-parsing this text might have led to some >outages. > >4) This isn't really an outage, but at the top of each hour building >the hourly >reports takes about ten minutes. When the stats reports were first brought >online, the server was managing far, far fewer exponents. > >> > I >> > would like to see some information on what's wrong, and what you guys are >> > doing to fix it. The primenet server appears to be a neglected box stuffed >> > away somewhere out of sight because I never saw any news about the ongoing >> > work. > >That's a pretty accurate account of the current state of >affairs. Nothing is being >done to track down these bugs and fix them. > >>Perhaps what we really need to do at this stage is to publish a formal spec >>for the server and its interaction with the client. > >For the curious, a spec for the next client-server interface is at >http://v5.mersenne.org/v5design/v5webAPI_0.96.html > >>At that stage it just >>might be possible that someone would invest time in rewriting the server code >>so that it can be implemented in a distributed, hardware/OS independent >>method so that reliance on a single box and effectively a single sysadmin can >>be removed from this project. > >All efforts have been directed toward replacing the primenet server >application >with a new from scratch more robust and bulletproof application. Scott and I >have been working on it for about 4 months, but at nowhere near the 40 hours >a week required to make this happen quickly. > >Sorry for the problems, >George > >_______________________________________________ >Prime mailing list >[email protected] >http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime > _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
