Scheduled Maintenance 2017/09/29

Woo upgrades.

 

Dont want to over step my boundaries but would this have anything to do with the extra ip's or something because of the ddos attacks. I knew you talked about it but if you dont wanna say anything about it idc i just wanted to know if this had anything to do with it or the sizeable change to the infrastructure had to do with what i just said.

 

I'm sure Teddi can explain it better, but it's mostly rounding up changes that were started in the summer including better reduancy and better performance in general.

Sadly DDoSes have always been a hindrance of any server we've ran, and thankfully we got through the summer holidays without experiencing many at all, and only when schools were starting to return did we get hit by a spate (which have since stopped thankfully). On that topic, I expect someone was paying hefty amounts to launch gigabyte attacks against us, which isn't feesible to maintain forever.

 

It's primarily to do with our own internal security and redundancy really. At the moment the OS we're running; whilst isn't out of date will hit EOL (end of life) by 2022 and is Windows based. Now whilst Windows Server isn't particuarly bad to run, it has some certain problems that make it quite annoying to run at times; including but not limited to Core 0 dependancies, lack of (easy) SSH authentication and lack of proper / decent firewall management. Instead we'll be moving over to a *nix based OS and we'll be virtualising the servers instead as opposed to making them run directly on the bare metal. It gives us the best of both worlds (*nix server management) while still maintaining a Windows environment which we can make image backups of on a regular basis.

Adding extra IPs wouldn't require a complete reinstallation, however with going the *nix route it does allow us to use NAT internally meaning that if the primary Surf server IP is unavailable, we can broadcast it without a Surf reboot across as many IPs as we so desire.

 

Thank you for that info. I just wanted to know if that had anything to do with it. Thank you guys!

 

Due to unforeseen consequences there have been substantial delays. There is currently no ETA as of yet as to when the servers will be available.

 

Bare metal installation alongside security tightening is now complete, so overall we're about 60% of the way there.

 

Current status is as follows: IPs are now correctly set up and broadcasting on all correct ports. What's left is some container set-up and then putting all the gameservers back together.

Apologies for the hefty delay in all of this, when it turns out the datacentre cannot guarantee a stable connection to their collection of .isos, it makes for a very rough, bad time.

 

Current progress is the Windows ISO has been uploaded and is in the process of being installed.

 

We're all installed and the networking has been redone to unfuck it. Shouldnt be too long before we're back up and running.

 

All user data has been succesfully restored. Reinstallation of game servers is now inbound.

 

Currently pending some final licensing requirements from one of the vendors we use and we should be live.

 

Oh ok

 

Server is now available for some preliminary testing. The license owners are taken so long so I'm putting up some temporary stuff to get the server online.

 

Hard server is now available on a more permanent basis, using all the previous systems.

Systems that are currently not working correctly

- Lottery
- Crate resetting
- CSC

Please note that crates will continue to drop as normal until you hit your maximum, and the system to reset that isn't yet active again. However that should be sorted by tomorrow.

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Easy Server is back up and running, but if it goes down it may stay down until it's back live on the standard systems.

 

Please note that although most things are up and working, there's still a few creases to iron out. Note that if you have any funny characters in your name (e.g. Emoji's and other weird characters), then your items...etc won't load; if this happens, remove the characters from your name and rejoin the server.

 

Crates are now resetting as intended.

 

CSC and lottery are now both back. Congrats to NeverReady for winning the lottery with 20k cubes!

 

BBuild is now back online, although it is missing Wire.