Day: October 6, 2006

Recently it was announced the 5.6 BOINC has been canceled to concentrate on the 5.8 code (as 5.7 for the time being)
Why is this and why can you not release 5.6 as is now?

The BSG (BOINC Simple GUI) is nearing completion and the 5.6 release was nearing completion but wasn’t done baking yet.

After looking over the schedules it became pretty clear that managing two different test efforts was going to create a lot of confusion and management hassles.

We believe we have stabilized most, if not all of the 5.6 features, and the remaining testing work will be focused on the BSG and improved memory management support. We believe we are a few weeks out from having a stable BSG build ready for the public, so instead of asking the community at large to do two back-to-back upgrades within a month, we decided to bag 5.6 and focus on 5.8.

I personally believe this is for the best.

If the tech savvy people want to checkout 5.6 then by all means go ahead and play around with it. We won’t be releasing any bug fix releases for that version of the client though.

—– Rom

I was wondering if you could shed some light on DNS caching, and why the BOINC client apparently keeps records for days, which would seem to ignore the TTLs associated with the records? (the recent DNS changes for Leiden would indicate this; requiring a client restart)

Actually libCurl handles all the DNS stuff. We just pass the server name to libCurl and it handles all the OS details. I took a quick peek at the libCurl source and it looks like they have an internal DNS cache. It also appears that they have a way to expire the DNS cache entries. It isn’t clear to me at the moment if we are supposed to call an API to expire DNS cache entries or if that is handled automatically as part of the easy API set.

I’ll look into it a bit more to see if I can figure it out.

To submit questions for next week just click on the comments link below and submit your question.

Thanks in advance.

—– Rom