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All 3.01 and earlier officially dead
From a post in alt.sci.seti/sci.astro.seti:
By Matt Lebofsky:
"Mandatory: 3.03:"
"Hi, SETI@homers,
Short story: Version 3.03 is now officially "mandatory."
Yes, all earlier versions are obsolete, including 3.0, even though you may have only installed it as little as a month ago. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have been warning this time would come for months, and have been issuing warning messages to most clients over the past couple of weeks, and within a week or so we will shut off all old clients at the router (via a DNS switch).
Long story:
We've been screwing around with the server for the past month trying to get it to respond politely to all versions on varying platforms. Due to outdated client/server communication protocols, unpredictable
behavior of third-party caching software, people running their clients in while(1) loops, and plain old bugs, this has been proving difficult but at least almost
completely solveable. However there are some cases, like the windows 3.00 CLI whirring away on their compute farms, where we can't do anything about it except the hard shutoff via the DNS switch.
We never had these problems before, or at least at this scale, because we made very few versions above 1.x mandatory. However, lessons learned and new logic in place should make any future transitions *much* easier for us (and therefore you, the users).
In other words, we do try to make transitions as polite and seamless as possible. Please bear with us.
Once we get everyone on an even playing field with version 3.03, there's going to be a huge sigh of relief in SETI@home-land, and we can continue working on more interesting things (for both you and us).
Thanks for your time, interest, and effort!
- Matt - SETI@home"
By Matt Lebofsky:
"Mandatory: 3.03:"
"Hi, SETI@homers,
Short story: Version 3.03 is now officially "mandatory."
Yes, all earlier versions are obsolete, including 3.0, even though you may have only installed it as little as a month ago. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have been warning this time would come for months, and have been issuing warning messages to most clients over the past couple of weeks, and within a week or so we will shut off all old clients at the router (via a DNS switch).
Long story:
We've been screwing around with the server for the past month trying to get it to respond politely to all versions on varying platforms. Due to outdated client/server communication protocols, unpredictable
behavior of third-party caching software, people running their clients in while(1) loops, and plain old bugs, this has been proving difficult but at least almost
completely solveable. However there are some cases, like the windows 3.00 CLI whirring away on their compute farms, where we can't do anything about it except the hard shutoff via the DNS switch.
We never had these problems before, or at least at this scale, because we made very few versions above 1.x mandatory. However, lessons learned and new logic in place should make any future transitions *much* easier for us (and therefore you, the users).
In other words, we do try to make transitions as polite and seamless as possible. Please bear with us.
Once we get everyone on an even playing field with version 3.03, there's going to be a huge sigh of relief in SETI@home-land, and we can continue working on more interesting things (for both you and us).
Thanks for your time, interest, and effort!
- Matt - SETI@home"