I've started running Tiles At Home on my Centos 5 Linux machine. The instructions on the wiki are pretty much up-to-date and correct.

I was a little disappointed to find out that I'm not the bottleneck. Or rather, that there are plenty of TAH clients, and the bottleneck is in the server processing. Most of my renders in the last few days have had to wait 5 or 10 minutes to upload.

So I figured I should try something more challenging, like the lowzoom rendering. This is the widest view of the areas, between zoom level 1 and 11. I'm concentrating on 8 through 11 right now. I did some digging around the mailing list archives, and it took me a little time to realize that the wiki instructions were actually up-to-date, and that I do need to run both tilesGen.pl and lowzoom_composite.pl for the whole process. Now that I have that figured out, I'm updating some lowzoom areas in my region. There are some blank blocks along the Oregon coast that I am fixing now. The only frustrating part is waiting on the server for uploading and processing. Patience, young Skywalker.

The other interesting thing I found is some big chunks of empty "land" in the middle of the water. You can see this in the Strait of Georgia, the body of water between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland. It appears that these are artifacts of the blank tile handling optimization, where the tile type at zoom level 12 did not get set correctly. I'll guess it is because it is inside the country boundary and so did not get treated as ocean. I found that I can construct 69-byte sea tile files and upload them. I just got my first results out of the server and it is working to fix it. It should not be too hard to clean that up.