The recipe:

1. Compatible CPU with VT-x/AMD-V enabled in the BIOS
2. Innotek/Oracle/Sun VirtualBox (a current version) with hardware virtualization enabled
3. Profit!

The one downside to this? 64-bit VM’s running on 32-bit host OS can’t see multiple cpu’s. Boo. Hoo. I’ll just run more VM’s!

I’ve got a theme that doesn’t make me want to tear my eyes out, but it’s not what I want yet.

I’ve acknowledged all missing images that I noticed by tagging the post as ‘broken images’, and I’ll be going through them again later to see if I have any remaining local copies of the files in question.

I’ve installed a modern syntax hiliting plugin, so code should be readable again.

Sooo close.

Also, my company has recently had to make some dramatic changes that I’m still coping with. I am still employed, but I’m not much in the mood to continue with any of my previous article series at present.

On the bright side, this gives me an excuse upgrade to WP2.9 and dig through my 250+ post archive and clean things up.

Please excuse the mess while I unbork everything. Happy new year.

I am currently in the process of slowly exporting copies of relevant posts from this blog over there; and all future Walraven/SIMud blog posts will be made over there first and will probably be linked on here. Ideally, the dev blog will see at least one post a week.

New posts:

• communication ugprades – plan for mudmail/forums
• hunger system ideas – idea for cleaning up the way hunger and food buffs work
• standardized buffs – idea for normalizing +stat/+skill bonuses

That is all. Well, that, and I’m a complete and utter dork

I’ve been doing a lot of backup scripting recently. Yes, there are tons of commercial apps out there, but none of them that I’ve looked into are a perfect match for all of our needs. I’ll eventually settle on one and it will probably replace 80% of my scripts, but plenty will remain.

One problem that I’ve encountered while doing the whole backup juggling bit is the ferocious rate of change in the nature of the data we’re archiving. Code I’d written a year ago was obsoleted 6 months ago by code that was obsoleted 3 months ago by code that I replaced a few weeks back that is being replaced by the code I’m writing right now.

Another one of the problems is that the sheer quantity of data involved is growing in a very uncontrolled way. Early last May (the oldest archive I have easy access to), a full archive of the entire system was barely 3gb in size. Today, it is closer to 60gb. ~20x growth over the last 9 months.

It’s been fun, if somewhat frustrating, dealing with all of the growth.

On January 20th, I needed to perform a long-deprecated sort of snapshot. The code that generated this sort of file no longer worked because so many things had changed. I wound up digging out old scripts from SVN and updating them to run against the new environment.

Because of the amount of data involved, this took a very long time. It didn’t help that the scripts consumed an unfair amount of system resources – I couldn’t run them with any meaningful priority during the day without crippling everyone else.

Lots of low priority io later, I finally had a 54gb tar file… In one of the three places I needed it.

The first transfer was simple, the hosts are on the same gigabit switch as each other. Unfortunately, scping that much data between two hosts at that kind of speed has negative effects on the systems involved. I had to throttle the transfer way down to before it could run without visibly impacting performance.

rsync --partial --bwlimit=10000 -e "ssh -i ${RSA_KEYFILE}" ${LOCAL_FNAME} {REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:${REMOTE_FNAME}

The second transfer… wasn’t so easy. I needed to move the file to my office without negatively impacting everyone’s ability to work – and I couldn’t wait for the transfer to run at low enough speeds not to cripple the T1.

We have a backup 6mbit DSL link that I only use for emergencies and for testing. Even at a full 6mbit, the transfer would have taken more than 36 hours. Compressing the file took a while but brought the file size down to a much more manageable 24gb (~11 hours over the DSL).

The only remaining gotcha was that DSL link can’t actually SSH through the firewall into the colo So… I started the transfer over https last night and went home.

This morning, it was finally time to decompress the monstrosity locally, but I noticed a hiccup in dsl traffic overnight and figured I’d run a check on things first – just to make sure that http resume had worked correctly.

ammon@scruffy:~$ gunzip --test archive_2009_01_20.tar.gz
gunzip: archive_2009_01_20.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--format violated

This was not good. I had a 24gb file that was somehow corrupted… somewhere.

Since re-downloading the whole thing would cost me another whole day… I had to find out a way to repair the file in a reasonable amount of time. Some research and suggestion gathering later, it was confirmed that rsync would probably handle the task.

Assuming that I wouldn’t be using an unfair amount of bandwidth for this, I switched back to the T1 link so I could tunnel through SSH again.

ammon@scruffy:~$ rsync --checksum --inplace -e "ssh" wernstrom:/tmp/archive_2009_01_20.tar.gz archive_2009_01_20.tar.gz 

sent 1280578 bytes  received 1440757 bytes  2622.97 bytes/sec
total size is 25619572576  speedup is 9414.34

ammon@scruffy:~$ gunzip --test archive_2009_01_20.tar.gz
ammon@scruffy:~$

(remember, this is unix, no output implies success)

So, yeah. Rsync, I love it when you work.

It took some time and generated a lot of disk activity when the process started, but it worked almost painlessly and only transferred the data I needed – thus leaving the shared network resource free for everyone else

A few minutes ago, I just closed out the first milestone I’d ever created with the system (just fixing some sqlite-handling code as you may guess from the screenshot) and was rewarded with this little temporal paradox:

Heh… what an auspicious first post of the year…

The fact that the quest exists isn’t wrong. The fact that you don’t really have much of a choice in the matter is. You can’t tell the quest-giver “no”. You either have to torture the prisoner or you have to bypass the remainder of the quest chain (which is fairly important if you want anything to do with the Kirin Tor mages).

I did the quest once – on my warlock, the character whose job it is to be a little dynamo of concentrated evil – and I remember standing there for 5 minutes debating before I finally decided to actually zap the guy. I’m not planning on doing the quest chain again on any other characters. Normally, my criteria for adding a quest to my blacklist is that it is boring or a terrible waste of time vs the reward. This is the first quest I’ve ever had to swear off on moral grounds.

So why has this particular quest been singled out? Why wait until now? By every definition in the book, we (players of WoW and numerous other MMORPG’s) have clearly been engaged in innumerable unsavory activities – including torture – for years now.

This is hardly the first time a quest in WoW expects you to use violence to extract information. There are quite a few quests that expect you to beat on people until they talk. There are several quests that ask you to kill couriers for information they are carrying. There are quests where you poison people and quests where you perform horrible experiments on people and quests where you don’t actually have to beat on the source of the information, you just have to prove that you’re willing to do so. It is, after all, a game whose fundamental action is killing.

We play a game where we are asked to role-play as soulless mercenaries who’ll kill anyone/anything for a few bucks – or more likely a shirt that we’re just going to turn around and pawn because it breaks our set bonus. We’ll dig through pig droppings and harvest organs and collect on debts owed to thieves and steal apples if we accept every job offer that comes our way.

The circumstances behind this particular quest, however, are much more obvious. This particular quest NPC says:

You see, the Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these.

You, however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.

He then hands you a “Neural Needler”, which “Inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no permanent damage.” You then have to walk 3 feet to a man chained into a chair and use the needler on him five times. The ‘conversation’ goes something like this:

1. Pathetic fool! A servant of Malygos would sooner die than aid an emeny…
2. Aargh! Do your worst, {class}! I’ll tell you NOTHING!
3. Aahhhh! Release me! I am of no use to you. I swear it!
4. Stop! I beg you, pleae stop. Please….
5. Alright! I am beaten. {information you wanted goes here} Your mission is folly!

But you can keep zapping him a few times before turning in the quest…

6. I’ve given you the information, {race}! You’re wasting your time….
7. Noooo! This tortue is inhumane! You have what you want… why don’t you just kill me?

Even “better”… you can apparently get a fresh needler (I have not confirmed this) and continue frying the guy, just for fun…

8. What more can you possibly want, {race}?
9. Stop! Please…
10. How can you possibly bring me lower?
11. What more can you take away from me?
12. You aren’t even asking me questions…
13. Are you trying to meet the real me?
14. You’ve got a darkness in you, {race}.

So, whether this is some kind of weird statement on current events or not, several people at Blizzard apparently think that torture can be useful and want to spread that opinion to their audience of millions. I mean, c’mon, it’s not like children play this game, right? …

Regardless of why the quest was written, why it was included in the game, and why it’s standing out above all of the other heinous things players have been asked to do in the game… it was a mistake and needs to be revised to avoid railroading players into a choice between being evil sadists and quitting the game. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

• Allaryin – 70 dwarf hunter (52/8/1)
• Chokuretsu – 71 gnome warlock (0/54/8)
• Kikichikki – 70 draenei priest (0/61/0)
• Juvu – 70 orc death knight (55/0/5)

Most of the reason I don’t have anyone in the mid-high 70’s yet is because of time spent getting Choku and Juvu up to speed.

Choku was 67 when the expansion came out, so after a very bad Utgarde Keep attempt, I took her back to Netherstorm until 68, when I moved to Borean Tundra – which is completely soloable in crummy outland greens. Choku is planned to be my main in Wrath (just as Kiki was my main for most of BC, and Al was my main in classic). I dropped tailoring for inscription and am slowly leveling that up, just buying flowers whenever I feel the urge. I won’t obsess about inscription until Choku’s approaching 80.

Juvu is my big experiment in death knights… and in high level horde content… and in playing on a different server without my normal support structure (created on Terenas and then payed-transfered to Malfurion to join coworkers). On the road from 55 to 70, he’s respecced 5 times now, and I’ve got some very strong opinions on what works for “low” level solo grinding as a DK. /played from rolling char to dinging 70 = 32 hours (spread out over 14 days RL time, so mostly unrested).

Kiki hasn’t done anything since the expansion landed. I’m waiting for dual specs to start leveling her – It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in any serious face melting

Al… has gone fishing, and exploring, and pet collecting. The only quests I’ve done with him so far have been the gem perfection quest, Dalaran cooking dailies and stuff for Kalu’ak rep. I think this is Al’s new calling in life. I’ve become so rusty at grouping with a hunter that I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that he’ll never really group again.

The remainder of the reason why I haven’t done any Dragonblight quests yet is because I’m doing the recruit-a-friend thing with a new account for my wife. At the end of our first 1-hour play session, we were level 8. After our second, we were lvl 12. If she retains sufficient interest to play a few hours a week for the duration of the bonus xp period, I fully expect that I’ll finally have lvl 60’s in every class as a result

The reason I’ve not written anything in over a month should be fairly obvious. Mind, it wasn’t all WoW. Leading up to Wrath’s release, I passed the time by playing a good bit of EVE (and have since canceled my account again).

I’m planning on writing some reviews of the viability of the new hunter pets in a pve solo environment as well as a few posts on death knight specs and spell rotations. I’ve also got a big technical (very unrelated) post in the works that might be out this weekend, we’ll see.

I never really cared about networking much beyond that needed to make sure clients on a lan can talk to their dns server… but we’ve been growing enough here at work that the needs quickly outpaced my prior skillset. And since I was the closest thing we had to a network admin, I got signed up for classes

It’s been fun and profoundly enlightening. I didn’t expect to have my way of thinking so radically altered, but I’m hardly complaining.

I’ll be starting up the second class in a week or two. This’ll include such topics as VLANs, IPv6, and fancy routing protocols. I’m stoked.

It’s funny. I never finished college (though I took classes for roughly 10 years), so this is actually the first certificate of education I’ve received since highschool.

The comment was made at work that I’d dinged as a sysadmin. I haven’t. I’m just cherry picking my next few levels in netadmin