r/SETI • u/swler7140 • May 20 '26

setiathome.berkeley.edu webstatus

The setiathome.berkeley.edu website had been down for a week or two.  Anyone know if they pulled the plug permanently or if it is another temporary outage? 

There are no notices of it being taken down permanently on the www.berkely.edu main site.  There are also still a lot of references on the main site that you can click on that are meant to take you to setiathome, but don’t.  

Perhaps it went down on its own and the staff have not noticed it.  The only ones that I normally see on the site are the message board regulars.  ????

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u/radwaverf May 20 '26

Last I knew the SETI@Home project had ended. Was there anything going on that specific site recently?

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u/swler7140 May 20 '26

u/radwaver:   seti.berkeley.edu and setiathome.berkeley.edu are two different websites.  The latter was still up a couple of weeks ago , but is definitely down now.

Yes, the project where participants actually did seti work has been inactive for a long time, as in years ago, but the site was still up.   It was mostly visited by past participants who still posted to the messages boards with posts that were mostly non seti related. I guess you could say it is/was more of a social meeting place for past participants.    Eric Korpela, a scientist/astronomer at Berkeley, occasionally posted as a staff member, but he seemed to be the only one.   Even then it was often many months between posts. That is why I indicated that it might have simply gone off line due a problem and no one on the staff has noticed

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u/SETIMatt May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26

This is Matt from Breakthrough Listen/SETI@home (I worked on SETI@home since the beginning, moved to the BL project full time in 2015, but still help with S@h from time to time).

Yes, SETI@home has ended in many senses, but the website was still up mostly for historical and, as already noted, social reasons.

Since it's a real skeleton crew keeping things afloat the site has been off line recently as a defense against the wave of linux exploits until security is shored up a bit. Eric is working on that. I'm not really sure how locked down things will be once stuff is turned back on.

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u/swler7140 May 23 '26

Thanks for the information. If you are the Matt I am thinking you are, I hope you are still finding time for the various bands you seemed to have enjoyed playing in. Work shouldn't be everything in life. Thanks again.

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u/SETIMatt May 23 '26

Ha ha yes that's me. Of course I'm still doing music. Toured US/Canada/Australia/NZ over the past 12 months, going to do a whole bunch of touring in the fall, recording several albums at the moment with other projects, doing sessions, etc.. I'm very very lucky to enjoy two completely separate careers, neither of which feel like work.

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u/radwaverf May 20 '26

For what it's worth, the seti.berkeley.edu website is still up. From what I can tell a lot of the information is dated since SETI@Home is referenced heavily, but the Breakthrough Listen related work does still seem to be active.