Boy, go away for a weeks holidays and every-one else has all the fun :-). Just a few quick ramble about my searching of the top half of the key space in the first SSL challenge, please ignore if you are sick of this thread. All these estimates of the cost in CPU time are a bit silly. I started out using a few of our bigger machines at work but when people noticed I just stoped using them. My main workhorse machines became desktop boxes that nobody used at night. Quite a bit of my %50 keyspace was done by 5 dual processor sparc 20's that people around me had on their desktops. Most of the rest was done by about 50 486's that I rsh'ed to each night (I just tried to rsh to every Solaris/x86 box in the company :-). Out of a company of about 300 people, about 2 (who did not know about my attempt on the challenge) asked me about this processing and what was I actually doing, no-one else really noticed :-). I was making no particular effort to use every machine I could but I was still able to do about %2.5 of the key space each 12 hour night and %12.5 each weekend. If I made a real effort to harness the compute power at my work I would have probably been able to run at twice this rate but that would have required work on my part, alot more people would have noticed and it would have had an impact on people doing real work. The way I was seaching had no impact. I will also say that screen-savers running on the above mentioned 486's were a real pain, perhaps we will change xlock so they can only run the blank screen :-). I personally feel that using mas-pars is cheating a bit :-). People are aware that something is going on when a machine that big is grunting away all weekend :-). There is so much CPU sitting on people's desktops that is just unused that there is very little need to use the big central boxes. The relative speed on some of the machines I used is as follows (per CPU is in brackets) 6 CPU SGI challenge 37 (6.1) 5 (1.6) 2 CPU sparc 20 7 (3.5) 1 1 CPU 486 DX50 1 I could never realy get more that 1/2 the SGI but I could always get 5 sparc 20's and 50+ 486's without anyone noticing. So I was getting the 2.5 6CPU SGI challenge's from idle machines on people desks. eric -- Eric Young | Signature removed since it was generating AARNet: eay@mincom.oz.au | more followups that the message contents :-)