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.

And the machine is down-down as far as I can tell. Binky can’t ping her (normally can), so it’s not just a case of apache and the mud going down at once. At the very least, networking is down, at the most… well, we’ve probably lost a great deal of work if that’s the case.

It’s funny, really. I killed myself this weekend working to get the mud back online – restoring from a 10-month-old backup I’d found. I started discussing mud-related topics with our playtesters again. I started cleaning up my todo list. I was all fired up to revitalize the project.

Then the mud goes down at 2pm yesterday afternoon. We had a newbie online at the time. Chalk up another player lost to faulty hardware.

The really fun part about the crash is that nobody knows why it happened. Nobody was doing anything on the machine. The mud was all but idle, just with the one newbie playing and me afking in my cave. I guess the web forums might have been seeing some activity, Sora gave me that impression. But… otherwise, nothing.

Sigh.

Maybe the machine heard our plans to decommission her in favor of moving services over to Binky and Tiff? Shrug.

Either way, this downtime confirms my intentions to move absolutely everything off of Esme as soon as humanly possible. While I’m decommissioning Esme, A’tuin is also coming down and some migration from the pair account will begin. All ancillary sites will be moving to Binky. Hopefully, I’ll finally even be able to bring Hedwig back online and make people’s old data available to them again.

DNS master, the mud, and the mud site will probably be moving to Tiff. I’d make her the DNS slave, but Binky’s already filling the role so nicely. The main simud.org mud site will be the only page hosted off of Tiffany… with the possibility of SIMud accounts allowing people some personal ~username style web hosting off of the machine. Yes, simud.org, not mud.simud.org. I’ll be attempting to eliminate that ugly splash page we’ve had up for the last several years…

Binky will be making regular backups of data to Tiff. Tiff will be making regular backups of some data back to Binky. I will be downloading some of each of these and burning them to DVD every month or so.

Tiff comes online Saturday. I hope to have some of these changes in place by Monday evening.

To make a long story short, I succeeded in telling the server to stop listening to the network. (I had committed some half-completed changes to the routing tables.) This makes remote administration… difficult. Thankfully, we should be a bit more protected from that sort of problem with the services that we will be running from Matt’s colo rack.

Since I was the one who broke things, the response on my end was immediate. I informed Harkins of the downtime, submitted a trouble ticket to the hosting provider, set my IM status message to let people know that I was aware of the outage, and then started hunting for a phone number to get in contact with the service techs directly (since the autoresponse I got from the trouble ticket said 12-24 hours).

The phone number thing didn’t work, I was able to find their billing line, but no number for tech support. There is only email. Not too pleased about that – and it makes me feel more justified in decommissioning Esme (who is also hosted by the same company).

Anyhow, after I’d given up on the phone issue, I finally got an email from a real live person. Five emails and 20 minutes later, the information was finally in the hands of the right tech. He followed my instructions for the fix and had the machine back up in 5 minutes. So, while not terribly accessible, their tech staff is at least competent.

When we came back up, Apache, Bind, and SVN were not running… but Mongrel was. This confuses me, since all four are started by the same script. I will have to look into that further.

Regardless, services are all back and I’m not going to mess with things like this again for a good long while (and not w/o verifying that I know what I’m doing on Hedwig or Vimes first).

Now, Rincewind has this habit. Every few months, he crashes catastrophically. He’s uncontested in the race for my most expensive computer ever.

My initial cost was something like $1,400 but after hardware failures during the first week (which waranties I was not able to redeem because the seller was based in Manhattan), my total cost to get the machine running was closer to $1,700. And those are 2001 dollars, back when I was earning $7/hr as a care provider for disabled folks.

Hedwig by comparrison was something just under $1,000 to get running if I remember correctly. Replacement parts over the last few years have only added up to $100 or $200 total.

Anyhow. Rincewind has acquired a new motherboard ($75) since then. And a new hard drive (300gb, 7200rpm, $150). And more ram (a gig, $100). And a better video card (radeon 9200, 128mb, $100) which I just replaced ($100). Total pricetag so far? $2,225 if my estimates are adding up correctly.

And that’s for a machine with a 1.4ghz processor. I’ve finally capped the AGP slot’s capacity with monday’s upgrade. The mobo can handle an Athlon XP 3200+ and up to 4 gigs of DDR400 ram… But a new processor to cap out the machine’s speed would run me $185 at Newegg right now and the memory would run $260 minimum for name brand stuff…

For the money I’ve spent on Rincewind so far, I could have built an Alienware… sigh.

Anyhow. We’re hoping that it’s hard drive issues (which the machine’s been plagued with in the past) and not the new video card that caused the problem. I’ll swap out drives and reinstall windows tonight to see what happens.

• The game & associated web page must be running off of Esme. A’tuin is fired.

Yup. Long list. I’ve compiled the latest driver on Esme already and am copying the lib dir over right now. Whenever that’s copied, I’ll hammer on it until the game runs – at which point I’ll prolly make a cleaner copy (shut down game and forums for a bit in order to guarantee a clean shift).

So, hopefully very soon not only will Walraven be back in active production… it will be in production on a much sturdier machine. Yay!

update

Well, it’s the 22nd and I’ve still not finished migrating the mud… typical. Worst case scenareo is that we make it happen on the 28th – when Acius arrives in town for a week

I installed Cyrus SASL today from an official package off of OpenBSD’s site. The package installation apparently didn’t even issue the correct ldconfig command. So, in order to use the library, I had to issue another command – so it could find 8 more libraries that were missed the first time around.

After that, I yelled at OpenLDAP until it finally compiled with SASL support and then repeated the same sort of yelling and screaming fit at Exim before it learned how to play nice with LDAP, SASL, and MySQL.

This took me all of 3 or so hours to accomplish. That’s just plain wrong. Normally, on a machine with this much horsepower, I’d be done with this kind of installation in well under one. I’m beat for the day, so am not gonna play with more stuff at the moment, but tomorrow’s schedule is BIND, SpamAssassin, and amavisd-new (including their supporting libraries and applications). Oh, and Mailman as well, of course

Yeah. The ML is actually gonna be coming back in the forseeable future

The three of us are grabbing the machine for different purposes. Nathan wants another off-site storage solution. Adam wants somewhere to post little toys. I want to extend the SIMud empire’s network presence and reliability. There’s a lot of joint stuff between these purposes, of course.

I’ve been doing most of the setup work right now… I guess since I’m most experienced when it comes to this sort of stuff? Shrug. I’ve been having some – shall we say – issues with OpenBSD so far, but I think I’m over all of the ugliness for now. I hope.

PHP was a nightmare to get running for some reason. I compiled MySQL and Apache by hand. Individually, they ran just fine. Once I threw PHP into the mix, however, it borked something fierce. However, it looks like I am not alone when it comes to problems getting MySQL and PHP to play nice on OpenBSD. Following his advice, I have everything working quite happily now.

My general plan for the machine’s integration into the network is that it will become our master DNS and LDAP server. It will host the mud (taking the burden from A’tuin), and will be where everyone’s email lands. A’tuin will become a slave DNS server, will continue to use LDAP for user accounts, and will probably continue to offer generic web and database services to people. Falku (the pair server – whose name we didn’t choose, of course) is going to drop any associations with the simud.org domain, but will continue to host this site and the comic.

Should be a good deal for everyone involved. Mud gets reliable again, usage drops on A’tuin – thus freeing up cpu and memory for those people who’ll continue using it, and my monthly hosting bill still only lands at around $60

Bleepitty bleep BLEEP!
Again, with the crashing
Amused, I am not

This crash didn’t last as long as the previous one. And, also unlike the previous crash, only Pinnacle was affected this time. We think it was our fault, somehow. We. I was in a strikeforce who had only just attacked Bat’zul.

The fight was literally only seconds old when the server went down. I took a picture, but was most dissapointed to discover that the HUD was removed by default. Thus, the big “CONNECTION LOST” message isn’t hovering over the middle of the screen. I’d also have liked to have the party roster in the picture, just to verify who all helped crash the server

So… after a few minutes, when the server came back up, we had to do the entire last mission all over again. The bright side of all of this is that we got to kill the mini-boss a second time. He drops lvl 23 single origin enhancements. So, we each got two off of him from that Then the final boss seemed to drop between 2 and 4 more SO’s for people. So even though the entire run took us something like 3 hours to complete, it was muchly worth the trouble.

I went from barely into lvl 16 to just under 19 from all of that. I have FOUR zombies at a time now

*Muahahahahaaaahaa..ha…haha* *cough* *sputter* HA!

like rivers of ice
my connection timed out
the server has crashed

Last week, I finally picked up City of Villains when I noticed that the price had dropped to $30. Happy deal since I already have an active City of Heroes account and the expansion just plugs right in w/o increasing subscription costs or anything.

In the grand tradition of all things of this nature, I was compelled to see what could be done about raising an undead army. Several hours of play later, I have a 14th level mastermind (necromancy/poison spec). He’s neato. While his individual attacks don’t do a terrible amount of damage, he currently has three zombies who are also attacking at the same time. I can generally drop a single yellow mob before he has time to react. I don’t handle additional mobs as quickly, since I generally burnt everything on the first kill and have to wait for everything to cool down, but that’s ok.

I have hit points. Lots and lots and lots of hit points. Granted, my character himself isn’t all that impressive. He has no defensive abilities and is one of the squishier archetypes in the game. But, when you take into account the three literal meat shields he has in constant attendance, the amount of damage required to take me down becomes significantly increased.

Matt (friend from TAMS, works hacking perl for NCSoft’s billing system) finally got around to playing CoV. For some reason, he never really did CoH. It was actually his fault I got started in the first place, and then discovered that he wasn’t playing Hooray for consternation. Well, early this week, we actually managed to party together in CoV. It’s great, our chars were not only the same level with similar power sets (he’s a dark blast/miasma corruptor), we were actually working on the exact same quest arc.

This must be a new CoV feature, because I certainly don’t remember it happening in CoH. But when we completed his first mission, a dialog popped up on my screen, asking if I wanted to receive credit for having completed the quest as well. There was much rejoicing. In CoH, I have very strong memories of doing the same handfull of missions multiple times in rapid succession in order to complete it for each of our individual party members who had it.

What was also fun is because he’s so inexperienced at the game this week was really only his second time in a party. It was great We’ll learn him better next time, eh?