Back in the day when I was working at Sun, a script was set up that people were running on their workstations all over the world. It set up the Seti at Home client and link it to a single account. It was very popular, and some people were running it on the most powerful lab servers they had. Sun was trading places with SGI for the number one spot for a while.

18 years ago I ran it for months in the off hours on all the companies servers in one datacenter (about 500 which was quite a lot at that time). Fun times.

Impressive that they survived for so long!

Yeah. You wouldn't believe the number of idiots that went around covertly attempting to run this (and similar) on the production Unix servers of their employer.

Saying that as the lead Solaris SysAdmin for a large telco project a few decades ago, with one manager in particular who repeatedly kept on firing it up on the main (high end SunFire) billing cluster servers. Even when expressly told not to. That guy was a f*cking moron. :(

Prolly he really wanted to find out that we’re not alone in the universe.

Sucks to know we’re alone and no one has reached out.

SETI was probably only ever going to catch an intentional transmission it's far from proof we're alone.

Nice attitude buddy, maybe the problem was you. Companies regularly waste 1000x more on executive salaries.

Heh Heh Heh. I knew someone would take that approach.

Put it this way. Explaining to the customer higher ups why that crap was running on their central billing cluster servers when an outage occurs and the place loses revenue ($mil's).

"Job ending" for the manager in question is a good description. ;)

This has little to do with seti.

This guy was literally running SETI@Home on the production billing cluster servers for a multi billion $ telco, and would not stop doing so.

He didn't even work directly for the Telco, but for a consulting place (Accen...). Think of the liability factor for that, when there was a production outage on the cluster. Try proving the software (maxing out cpu, screwing up instruction cache + context switching, etc) wasn't part of the cause. :(

Your employee’s lack of discipline and/or proper systems job control is the root issue here. Trying to associate it with seti is unfortunate.

Oh yeah, fully agree about that.

It just seems the SETI@Home (and other BIONC) projects seemed to attract people that do that kind of thing. Haven't seen it with anything else before, though I'd kind of expect cryptocurrency miners would have been similar. ;)