Well, the game's afoot, and I have a few preliminary thoughts on the process. 1. We need some protection against massive allocation of keys - perhaps an upper limit of a few hundred segments. Piete had better be ready to loop the server - at this rate FFFF will be allocated sometime tommorrow. 2. It'd be nice if the NT Winsock client could loop, reporting results and getting new keys automatically each time it finished a block. As it is, it's not worth my running it overnight. For each of the P5/90 NT machines I'm using, I'm manually running brutessl with enough key to keep them busy till morning. I'd rather have something that reported results to the server as it went along. This is part of a more general problem. A lot of people are doing this on standalone machines at work, and have no way of checking them during the night. This is doubly true for weekends - theretically if someone hits jackpot at 6pm on Friday, we might not find out till 9am Monday. I will not be running on any work machines over the weekend. 3. Start time was a little ragged - 1800 GMT was named, but the server seemed to come up at 2PM east coast time, which is (I think) 1900 GMT. I think that if we selected 8AM west coast time (1600 GMT?) more people would come online more quickly. 4. There was a massive crush of people trying to get keys from the server at 2. If we ever do this again, we might think about preallocating chunks of keyspace to people according to their promised cpu power, and keeping the *challenge* a secret till the starting gun sounds. Passively serving a page with the challenge would load the server much less than the cgi-based key doler. 5. We needed more pre-publicity on the Net to attract participants - a week would have been better than 24 hours. just some random thoughts.... Peter Trei Senior Software Engineer Purveyor Development Team Process Software Corporation trei@process.com