Dear valued C@H Members,

The server problems that we have been encountering recently have clearly revealed the degree to which we are in need for a capable system administrator here at C@H. As Professor Wandelt has mentioned in a different post, Scott Kruger has accepted a different position, and he is no longer the system administrator for C@H. Finding someone as competent as Scott has not been easy, and besides his other responsibilities, Professor Wandelt has been dealing with the technical problems of the website himself with occasional technical support from the computing personal here at the University.

To overcome this problem, we have shifted looking for a system administrator to the TOP of our priorities here at C@H. We will PROACTIVELY search for a qualified individual who will be responsible for the daily running of the website. We will WIDELY publicise the position here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and do every thing we could to recruit someone AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. We will look wider than we have looked so far, using whatever resources we could get our hands on.

As you might have already read in this post, I was recruited by Professor Wandelt "to connect with our users and participants, to bring new content to the website that is useful for the user community and generally to create a much tighter connection between the citizen scientists and the scientist citizens of Cosmology@Home". I hope that the work I have contributed here has contributed to fulfilling this goal in some way. I am certainly open for suggestions and feedback. Please do not hesitate to communicate with me if you have any ideas, questions, or concerns.


We understand your frustration, and we sincerely appreciate your patience. I look forward to coming back with exciting news for all of us soon.

Sincerely,

Faik
---
Member of the C@H Team!

Hi Faik,

Thank you for this information and for your dedication to Cosmology@Home.
I wish you and Cosmology@Home all the success the world.

Best wishes
Byron

Dear Byron,

THANK YOU for you dedication to C@H and for your kind words.

Sincerely,

Faik
---
Member of the C@H Team!

Hi Faik,

Thank you for this information and for your dedication to Cosmology@Home.
I wish you and Cosmology@Home all the success the world.

Best wishes
Byron

Hello Falk,
I find it relatively easy to be patient while you folks at C@H resolve your technical difficulties. This is due largely to the fact that I have to chase gremlins in my own systems with more regularity than I care to mention.
I have invested thousands of dollars in my systems that I use on these science projects and yet it seems sometimes that as soon as I take my eyes off them some component fails (many times prematurely) or something else goes wrong.
Keep encouraged, the work we are doing is worth the effort.
Regards,
Mark W. Patton

Hello Mark,

Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging words!

You are right: it is worthwhile to keep up the good effort. I feel that we will overcome these problems and that C@H will emerge even stronger, thanks to the tireless commitment of our community members.

Best wishes,

Faik
---
Member of the C@H Team!

I am sorry to hear of your problems, and wish you good luck in the "search" and getting system operational again. I was a little concerned as have more than 20 files for some time, ready to upload and did not want to loose them.

It is great, and important that you all keep us abreast of the situation, in that it is not an error on the user side. A couple sites do not do this.

Bill in Brazil

Hello Bill,

Thank you very much for your words of support and encouragement. One of the major issues that we have been working here at C@H to overcome is that of communicating with our valued community members. I am glad to hear that our efforts are making a difference.

At this point one thing that will make a decisive difference in the running of C@H is finding a competent system administrator who will make sure that C@H is running smoothly. The search is a top priority for us right now, and we will do our best to find some one ASAP.

Best wishes,

Faik
---
Member of the C@H Team!

I am sorry to hear of your problems, and wish you good luck in the "search" and getting system operational again. I was a little concerned as have more than 20 files for some time, ready to upload and did not want to loose them.

It is great, and important that you all keep us abreast of the situation, in that it is not an error on the user side. A couple sites do not do this.

Bill in Brazil

I just gave BOINC 100 Gigs of hard drive space so the accumulating Cosmo files will not be a problem for me. I can give 500 if need be. This may become an issue for folks with smaller HDDs.
Regards,
Mark

Mark, not really sure what you did. Are you talking about your computers for what you process? Are you talking about increasing space on your computer for others? Or just storing yours?

I too have plenty of space, from 500 gb to 1,200 gb depending upon what drive. My system does not stay on 24x7 any more, more like 14 x7.

So if "cloud storage" is needed I can do some here also fairly easy.

Sorry for the dumb question!

Bill in Brazil

If you go to Advanced View > Tools > Computing Preferences
> disk and memory usage, you can set the amount of disk
space BOINC is allowed to use for the workunits you process.
No sign of any cloud storage being allowed. I currently
have it set to 30 GB, but could easily add a few hundred
more GB if I saw a reason for this.

If you want to provide cloud storage, I'd expect that
you'd need an internet connection much faster than the
3 MB I have, and also that you'd need to leave it on 24
hours a day.