New host Updates and current game servers

[driz 2626]

New Host Updates:

 

Community, let me apologize for the lack of correspondence in what's been going on and catch you up. 

As you know, we began moving some services over to the new host. Teamspeak has been running on the new host for about 2 days now. You may have also noticed that the website seems much snappier and shouts are instant. this is because we also moved the web server. We lost about 45 minutes of data at 9pm central last night but i think the performance gain was worth it. 

 

With that there is some not-so-good news. We took the servers down for maintenance to sync the database to the new server, NO INFORMATION HAS BEEN LOST, but the passwords are causing issues. Ctark and I worked for about 12 hours on everything last night and we both had to bail for sleep before work. Klark and jason are aware of the current status and will also be assisting. Once we correct the permissions your levels and such will work again. 

 

Currently all servers are running on the new box except ttt while i copy over maps. zach pointed out that maps were stored in a different location and they are now being synced. csgo persistent favorites should have updated for those so you may not have even noticed. css and gmod do NOT have persistent favorites at this time so they are a manual update. Tonight we will move css servers back over to limestone until persistent favorites are fixed. 

 

Let me reiterate that we have NOT reset levels or any other items.

 

I will try to continue providing relevant updates as they come. we do apologize for the issues, but part of our goal in this host change is to clean up items that haven't been used for years. we did this with the website and you can definitely see a speed increase in the responsiveness. We want this same quality for all the game servers and I'm sure you can all agree it's worth it. While we try to do things late at night when the population is low, we have jobs/lives too and must sleep. We hope to avoid cutting into play time in the future but until the transition is 100% it may occur. We expect to be fully on the new host within 1 week at which time things should stabilize.

 

Approximately 2 weeks after that we will have another outage while the host upgrades our CPU in the new box to the newest best performing single threaded processor existing. they will also double our bandwidth, our hard drive space, our ssd space, and our memory. this outage can be up to 24 hours, but very clearly worth it.

 

Here are the new IPs:

 

• MC - 173.234.61.205
• War3 - 173.234.237.51
• JB - 173.234.237.52
• TTT - 173.234.237.53
• ZE - 173.234.237.54
• MG - 173.234.237.55
• Bhop - 173.234.237.56
• Surf - 173.234.237.57
• Cinema - 173.234.237.58
• WCS - 173.234.237.59

 

[driz 2626]

Alright guys, the plan was to turn css (bhop) on back on limestone to setup persistent favorites, but it appears as most of the population is already playing. it was the first populated server on the new host in fact. that being said, i see no reason to move anything back to limestone at this point. Everything will stay as is with minor performance tweaks as we evaluate things.

 

We will enable persistent favorites on our css servers (and gmod once the ability exists) in the case we ever move IPs again, but we do not expect this anytime in the near future.

 

that all being said, the last items to transition are fastdl, currently you are still pulling maps from limestone. ctark took the time to rewrite his sync script and completely redo fastdl from scratch, removing a lot of the trash. it should see a responsiveness increase much like the "cleaned" forums did. Once we move that, i will build a vm for some internal staff stuff to be moved which includes our development box where we test things before throwing it on the real servers. at that point, our business with limestone will be completed. I will begin the process of shutting all services down on limestone and moving DNS off their servers. on the 21st, we will solely be on the new host. 

 

I will be discussing a timeline with jason to complete the upgrade. I assume everyone has been pleased (minus the bugs with databases and such) with the new host. that being the case (if it's not please speak up) we will have the cpu upgraded and get our 2nd 1Gbps link. I will put a poll up in pub  for you to vote on if you like the new host thus far. I'm not looking for a lot of commentary unless you feel the need to explain your vote. thanks everyone for being patient with the hiccups and unexpected parts of the move. we had a plan and.. we were unable to follow it as some bad things happened and we just completed the move a little early.