I'm embarrassed to admit that I have the same situation. Given my past, I'm concerned about this...
Suffice to say that the machine I used to use when working at a *totally different* telecom (not US WEST, oddly) had Prime95 running happily on it. When I left, I didn't get a chance to wipe the machine, so every once in a blue moon I see it check in a result. My mistake, for assuming this company wiped and reloaded machines that were reassigned to someone. It's a lowly Pentium 180, but I had checked it to do LL tests regardless of server preference. Meaning that nowadays, it's taking nearly a year to complete one. I haven't actually seen it in a while, maybe 6 months or more, so maybe they finally retired it (a P180 running NT4 with about 128MB of RAM). It was just odd... 2-3 years after I last saw that machine, and then to see it report in every 6 months or so. The odd part was, the machine must not get used all that much because I thought I had it set to check in every week or so, but it was months between check-ins. In that time, the exponent would expire, but then the machine would come up and start working on it again... meaning someone else had probably got the assignment and may have even finished it for all I know. Very peculiar. I guess I should count my blessings that it's been absent for a long while now, lest the FBI accuse me of hacking in and breaking another telecom's network. :) I think I shared the story about how even for the next year, every now and then a US WEST machine was reporting a result. I just hope that US WEST was checking that status page and used the reports to find the machine still running it and wipe it. Fortunately, last activity on that (just re-checked, to make sure... hehe) was Jul. 31, 1999. Aaron > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:mersenne-invalid- > [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Gordon Bower > Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 12:10 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Mersenne: On v18 factoring > > > An odd thing happened to me a little while back. > > The machine which I used at a previous job, up to April 1999, started > doing trail-factoring again a couple months ago! It's nice to see it > working, and apparently not bothering its new owner by working -- but the > machine is now out of my control, indeed I don't even know where the > machine IS now. > > It is running version 18, which was, of course, the latest version out at > the time the machine was last under my control. It's beginning to > experience difficult getting assignments below the the 20.x-million > limit. Most of the time everything is fine .. but over the weekend it tied > up some 100 exponents in the 20.7-20.9 range, then immediately abandoned > them. (It is set to report every day, and reported progress on lower > exponents, and, mysteriously, on two higher exponents, yesterday, but has > not checked in a report on the other 100 or so exponents since checking > them out.) > > I manually released the abandoned exponents today. This time. But I'd > rather not have to do this on a daily basis -- and would rather not cause > a meltdown when the server finally runs out of assignments within v18's > range altogether. > > Does anyone have any suggestions for how to stop a runaway copy of > v18? Perhaps in a few weeks the server can be updated to return an "out of > exponents" error to v18 instead of offering it an assignment it can't > handle? > > GRB > > > ________________________________________________________________________ _ > Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm > Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
