Post by FunkySwerve on Sept 9, 2005 17:27:56 GMT
We had to take the server down almost as soon as we brought it back up, since a hardware failure somewhere was causing corruption, both in the program and in character files. On Wednesday DS finally acknowledged that a hardware problem was the cause, and at that point they began transferring us to another machine. That transfer should be complete sometime today (Friday the 9th), as they told us it'd take 2 days. At this point it looks as if only a few files were affected by the corruption, and your characters won't have been unless 1) you were unlucky and 2) you logged off the character on the server recently. So far we've located only one corrupted character, but there are definitely a few out there, judging by the number of consecutive crashes we had just before I took the server offline again.
How are the crashes related to corrupted character files (.bic files)? Each corrupted character crashes the server when the playername it is filed under tries to login. In the one instance we managed to isolate, only one character out of 11 in the player's folder was corrupt (there's one folder per playername in the servervault).
What happens when the server crashes and how will you know if one of your characters is affected?
When you try to login, you will see NO characters displayed on the left side of the screen, regardless of how many you actually have. At that point, nothing you can do will matter. The server has already begun to lock up, and you will received a disconnect/timeout message shortly after that.
What if that happens to me?
If that happens, you should NOT try to login that account anymore, and should immediately contact a DM. We will attempt to fix the corrupted character, and if we cannot, we will at least remove it so that you can play with your others. If an older version of that character is available in a pre-DS backup, we can also restore that version as a last resort.
So, to summarize, the server should be back up today, under the same name but a different ip/port, and we will have some difficulty as the corrupted characters as yet undiscovered cause crashes as the the players whose folders those characters are in attempt to log in. We may, as a last ditch resort, have to password the server and distribute the pass one at a time as people attempt tro login, in order to identify the affected accounts.
Again, thank you all for your patience.
Funky
How are the crashes related to corrupted character files (.bic files)? Each corrupted character crashes the server when the playername it is filed under tries to login. In the one instance we managed to isolate, only one character out of 11 in the player's folder was corrupt (there's one folder per playername in the servervault).
What happens when the server crashes and how will you know if one of your characters is affected?
When you try to login, you will see NO characters displayed on the left side of the screen, regardless of how many you actually have. At that point, nothing you can do will matter. The server has already begun to lock up, and you will received a disconnect/timeout message shortly after that.
What if that happens to me?
If that happens, you should NOT try to login that account anymore, and should immediately contact a DM. We will attempt to fix the corrupted character, and if we cannot, we will at least remove it so that you can play with your others. If an older version of that character is available in a pre-DS backup, we can also restore that version as a last resort.
So, to summarize, the server should be back up today, under the same name but a different ip/port, and we will have some difficulty as the corrupted characters as yet undiscovered cause crashes as the the players whose folders those characters are in attempt to log in. We may, as a last ditch resort, have to password the server and distribute the pass one at a time as people attempt tro login, in order to identify the affected accounts.
Again, thank you all for your patience.
Funky
