Scheduled network maintenance

I just received this notification from our hosting company regarding the network upgrades and some scheduled maintenance taking place tomorrow:

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note to let you all know that starting at around 4:30PM tomorrow (09/03/2013) we will be conducting some network maintenance so you may experience downtime of up to 5 minutes and the maintenance should be complete by 5:30PM.

During the maintenance period tomorrow we will be doing the following:-
+ Installing new 48 port gigabit switches into all 3 of our racks
+ Installing another uplink to all 3 racks to double our uplink capacity from 1Gbps to 2Gbps for each rack
+ Configuring some new security settings to aid stability in the occurrence of a denial of service attack

After all these upgrades are complete we should have a much more stable network with a lot less downtime because of disruptions from DoS / DDoS attacks.

We would just like to thank each and every one of you for staying patient whilst we've been planning and rolling out these upgrades.

Kind Regards,
Nitrous Networks Ltd.

Network Upgrades

Our hosting company is carrying out further network upgrades over the next couple of days so we may experience random disconnects and short drop-outs during this time, please bear with us, it will be worth it in the long-run as the upgrades are aimed at greater stability, resilience and preventing DDoS attacks.

I'll post an update once the work is complete.

Thanks!

Do Not Craft Iron Shovels

Unfortunately the server has developed the 'iron shovel gzip' bug that plagues many Tekkit servers, what this means is that if you craft or pick up an iron shovel your player data will become corrupt, you will be instantly disconnected with a 'gzip' error and unable to reconnect.

Once you have this issue the only way for you to get back on the server is for your player data to be deleted, this means you will also loose any items in your inventory at the time.

If this happens to you and you are unable to get a message to an Admin or Moderator in game via another player then please e-mail us at admin@diggyminecraft.co.uk so we can get you back in the game asap.

There is currently no official or unofficial fix for this bug, plus the item cannot be removed from the game or banned in a way that prevents this issue as even attempting to craft an iron shovel causes the problem whether the crafting is completed successfully or not.

I will be investigating further and hopefully a fix or workaround will be found, until then please remember not to attempt to craft this item.

Philosophers Stone

Having received several polite requests from regular players to reconsider our policy regarding the Philosophers Stone and after some consideration and testing we have decided to give all players the ability to craft this item, however no rank will have the ability to hold it or use the right click functionality due to it's ability to be used for serious griefing.

Please note that because you cannot hold it you may have difficulty picking it up when dropped if you have empty slots in your hotbar.

Enjoy!

New Plugin - Experience for killing mobs

One of our plugins disables experience drops as an anti-lag measure, but whilst this helps server performance it does make experience much more difficult to obtain as killing mobs no longer gives experience.

Over the last two days several players have requested alternative means of gaining experience and I'm pleased to announce that after some testing we have now installed the SmartExp plugin.

The plugin is configured to give experience directly to the player when they kill a hostile mob, notifying them of the amount of experience awarded and their progress towards the next level.

Please note that this plugin will only award experience when a hostile mob is killed, no experience is awarded for killing animals (including aggressive wolves) or villagers.

Enjoy!

Daily Backup Downtime

We have decided to schedule a daily downtime to take a full backup and run some tests to check for issues, this downtime will usually last no more than 10 minutes.

This will take place between 19:00 and 19:30 with a warning being given in world at least five minutes before the server goes down.