So... what happened last night?

[Ashya]

TS and the site going tits-up and all that. Did the cleaning lady pull the plug on the server so she could plug in her hoover? (Actually had that happen at a customer. Regular like clockwork, every Tuesday night at 21:15 hours for weeks, until we posted someone in the server room...)

Just curious, ya know? And can we do anything to prevent it? Help out in some way?

 

[Ronin Storm]

Something a little more fundamental...

RapidSwitch, who host our colocated server, went down at 23:00 UK time last night. Apparently they were doing scheduled maintenance to one of their core routers. This was allegedly supposed to last either 45 minutes or 2 hours. Reports from other sites indicate that it went down for over four hours. It seems that RapidSwitch didn't deem it important to actually tell anyone that they were doing this in advance, which is poor but unfortunately pretty typical of companies involved in providing web connectivity. I'm not the RapidSwitch account holder so I can't really follow up with them to give them a kicking but we're not the only ones who were affected.

Hopefully, we're back and stable for a bit. Unfortunately I suspect a couple more bums in the road yet as our server was moved to a new data centre (which they proudly announced) and has been having connectivity issues ever since. We'll try to keep you updated... but we're not being notified either so it'll be pot luck.

Hang in there.

 

[Panda with issues...]

I'd propose an alternate theory. Ronin, Trax, Ghostwolf and I were about to escape in the rescue vehicle in left 4 dead, and the Zombies cut the server power to prevent this.

"How can they cut the power man? They're just animals...!"

Either that or they hit us SO HARD we fell off the internet.

 

[Traxata]

Well, both you and I seemed to lose total internet connection, that may of course just be your flaky be router, and my shitty belkin router

 

[thatbloke]

My net connection has been rather flaky the past two days too now that you mention it...

 

[Ronin Storm]

Likely to just be coincidence. My connection has been stable. Promethius' connection, on the other hand, has not. Prom herself seems fine. Uptime all good, load all good... just the network letting her down.

 

[elDiablo]

Oh god, here we go, start the conspiracy cry babies off again

MY internet has been better lately!

 

[Ashya]

Fail provider is fail? Geeez... when ya do maintenance it would be nice to tell people.

 

[Ronin Storm]

So, we went down again for a couple of hours, it seems. RapidSwitch are still arsing about with their routers. Traffic is a bit screwy and our latency to the server seems to have doubled but at least the insane packet loss has gone away (was 70%+ earlier). Still dropping the occasional packet and running at around 30-40ms (should be more like 20ms for me).

According to helpful post elseforums, RapidSwitch haven't fixed the issue, just dodged it for the time being. Expect more downtime. Sorry folks.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Just to close this one off, for now:

Looks like RapidSwitch have stabilised and they appear to be doing all the things one does after a serious outage. They're offering RAM and/or hard drive upgrades for free for their customers, which I suspect won't help us as Promethius is colocated not a managed server. I'm reasonably happy that they just get their network sorted and we can go back to business as usual.

Shout if you experience any other issues.

 

[SwampFae]

Just to close this one off, for now:

Looks like RapidSwitch have stabilised and they appear to be doing all the things one does after a serious outage. They're offering RAM and/or hard drive upgrades for free for their customers, which I suspect won't help us as Promethius is colocated not a managed server. I'm reasonably happy that they just get their network sorted and we can go back to business as usual.

Shout if you experience any other issues.

Good to hear that things are getting back to normal. At least ofr the time being.
T'was nice of them to offer upgrades(Even if that will not help much in this case).
Here's hoping that the network will remain stable for a long while. /cheer

 

[T-Bone]

I was thinking of where to put this so I might as well put it here. I'm pretty sure our server has tonnes of bandwidth and space unused. if so is there any chance of running a ventrillo server on it as well as the teamspeak one? You see, when our server was down we used another guilds vent server for our raids and there were two very large noted improvements over TS. The first is that people on vista (and this includes me) have random disconnect issues on teamspeak that no one seems to be able to solve, Vent doesn't do this and you can imagine how frustrating it is when I get kicked from TS in the middle of an encounter etc. The second is that the voice quality is so much better and the program seems to be something I'd like to play around with. If you need a volunteer to set it up then I can do it, though I've never used vent before. However, if one of your current server admins wants to do it then that will be fine also.

 

[Traxata]

T-Bone, Vent servers cost money for slots, where as to run your own non-profit org. TS server, it's completely free.

I'm sure Haven will be along at some point to talk the specifics, but that's the general reason (I believe) that we've got a TS server and not a Vent server.

 

[T-Bone]

Indeed, you appear to be right.

I will talk to the people in the wow guild and see about getting some donations going. Thanks.

 

[Ronin Storm]

An alternative is Mumble, which has the advantage of being free like TeamSpeak but actively maintained (and thus higher quality) like Ventrilo. I started having a look at that today but I had to stop due to work; I'll keep investigating and report.

 

[BiG D]

Some of the guys I game with run a mumble server, and I'll vouch for the sound quality -- much better than vent. The interface is all kinds of confusing, but I might just be too used to TS.

 

[thatbloke]

So I'm not sure how much it would cost to get a full license for Vent (it seems they only give them out to registered businesses) but the license enclosed with the public version of the vent server only allows for a maximum of 8 clients to be connected to the server at any one time....

 

[thatbloke]

I was thinking of where to put this so I might as well put it here. I'm pretty sure our server has tonnes of bandwidth and space unused. if so is there any chance of running a ventrillo server on it as well as the teamspeak one? You see, when our server was down we used another guilds vent server for our raids and there were two very large noted improvements over TS. The first is that people on vista (and this includes me) have random disconnect issues on teamspeak that no one seems to be able to solve, Vent doesn't do this and you can imagine how frustrating it is when I get kicked from TS in the middle of an encounter etc. The second is that the voice quality is so much better and the program seems to be something I'd like to play around with. If you need a volunteer to set it up then I can do it, though I've never used vent before. However, if one of your current server admins wants to do it then that will be fine also.

Speaking of Ventrilo, if it's something we really want to try out, Multiplay have a discount on all their gameservers for a while...

 

[Haven]

Waiting patiently for TeamSpeak3 although no idea how long that will take. The original reason for rolling out Teamspeak over Vent is simply that Vent didn't exist when we started playing Natural Selection back in the day.

I've not seen any disconnect issues with XP or Windows 7 (I avoided Vista so no comparison there). Try running it in XP compatibility mode.

As for quality, we can soon increase the bitrate or use a different codec, personally I have not heard a difference in quality between Vent and TS.

I'd rather we choose a technology and stick with it across TheHaven, similar principle to having everyone use the same forums for different games. Without that standard we start to become fractured and finding people online becomes more difficult.

The current plan is to move wholesale to TS3 once it hits release.

Features for those interested.
Babelfish german review translation.

 

[thatbloke]

Incidentally, I've been on Vista for over a year and never been disconnected from TS, ever.