Changes Next Week

Next week the hosting company change will take place and as we'll have more memory with the new company we've decided to make some changes to the plugins we use, we will be asking Helpers and some Member+ players to help us test the changes on the new server before we switch over.

What you need to do before the switchover:

1) Remember you will loose all your waypoints, carefully note down the coordinates of any waypoint you don't want to lose.

2) Make a note of your 'home' coordinates, home locations will be reset as part of the plugin changes.

3) Bookmark this page! Details of the new server and any command changes will be posted on here when we switch over.

Update On Connection Dropouts

After running a copy of the server at home from a recent backup for a couple of days without issue I decided to take a free trial with another hosting company just to be sure.

After three days running on the trial server there has been no sign of the problem which as I'm sure you all know has been occurring at least twice daily with our current hosting company, with the symptoms of the problem (only visible to me on the console) occurring far more frequently.

Hosting fees are currently paid up until 27th April, with payment for the next quarter due on 28th April,   although I was originally inclined to stick with our current hosting company as prior to the recent changes they were very stable etc it has now been more more than 2 two weeks since this problem first appeared and it feels like I am still having trouble getting them to take it seriously, I have therefore decided that I will not be renewing either the Tekkit or Events server hosting with them.

This means that on or just before 27th April both servers will be permanently moved to a new hosting company and so will both have a new IP address.

I'll post more details once I have confirmed who we will be moving to and what the new addresses will be, I will also use the message broadcast plugin to announce the new IP every 30 minutes for at least 48 hours prior to the changeover. Just to make sure I catch as many regular players as possible I will keep the old server up with a small 'dummy world' until the hosting expires, redirecting people to the new IP.

As I intend to move the world over to the new company there will be some downtime will the switchover takes place, but no player or world data should be lost.

This downtime will depend largely on my internet connection speed and I estimate around 30 minutes to download the world (which is now just over 1.2 GB), then at least 3 hours to upload it to the new server. I am hoping to reduce the upload time by uploading the world files as a single zip file and getting the new hosting company to unzip it for me. The server will also be whitelisted for at least an hour or two afterwards for testing. 

I am pretty much decided on a new hosting company but will save the official announcement until nearer the time, they are slightly more expensive but have excellent reviews and many features that our present hosting company doesn't which should make the Admin work a lot easier!

They have also assured me that the server will easily support 30 player slots rather than the 26 we have now which as we have hit capacity several times recently makes the relatively small extra cost worthwhile.

Watch this space for updates!

Server Down This Morning

The hosting company requested that I take the server down and whitelist it in case they need to restart it etc so that they can check some things out, as Friday mornings are generally quiet and I didn't want to disrupt the weekend I've taken it down now.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I'll bring the server back up and remove the whitelist as soon as they give me the go ahead.

An update will be posted here asap!

UPDATE: 11:30 - Still waiting to hear from hosting company.

UPDATE: 14:20 - Server is back up and whitelist removed, however unfortunately they have still not got to the bottom of the disconnect issues.

Maintenance Today

The extended downtime has now started and investigations are underway, please check back here for updates.

UPDATE: 11:30 - Testing continues, the server will not be back up for at least another 2 hrs.

UPDATE: 12:15 - Good news! World corruption or any other in world cause has been completely ruled out meaning that it's either a corrupt mod / plugin or a hardware issue, testing continues!

UPDATE: 12:55 - I've reinstalled tekkit and the problem still occurs even with a freshly generated world and no plugins, I've notified our hosting company that the problem is definitely not due to anything I have control over, it's in their hands now! Don't worry our world is safely backed up!

UPDATE: 13:20 - There's nothing more I can do now, we're waiting on a response from the hosting company, in the meantime I've brought the server back up and removed the whitelist so you can all login now! BUT the problem is not resolved so be aware that the disconnects we've been experiencing will still occur :( Hopefully we'll get some good news from the hosting company soon!

Extended Downtime Tomorrow

There will be an extended downtime after the daily backup tomorrow to fully investigate the cause of the recent disconnect issues we've been experiencing, I expect this to take 2-3 hrs minimum as it will involve running both automated checks and manually going over the last weeks logs.

In a worst case scenario the server could be down for 6 hrs or longer depending on how difficult it is to locate the problem, whether a fix can be implemented immediately and whether any further testing is required if changes are made.

Please note that the server may appear up during parts of this time but will be whitelisted, please do not attempt to connect until I update this site to say it's ready as this will create extra log entries and may slow down our progress, I'll post regular updates on here to keep you all informed as to when I expect the server to be available again!

Sorry for the inconvenience!

WorldGuard flags & CoreProtect

Since upgrading to CoreProtect 2.04 two of the region flags have stopped working correctly, theses are:

chest-access & use

They still work for regions for which they were already set but fail to work if the flag was changed or set after CoreProtect was installed, I've investigated the cause and it seems that their is no fix for this other than to remove CoreProtect, which given how much it has helped to catch griefers and how much time it has saved staff isn't an option.

I've therefore removed these flags from the command page and removed the related permissions, effectively disabling them.

As we have protection stones and Lockette these flags weren't essential anyway and looking at the region file were only used by an extremely small number of players so this should have minimal impact, I'm sure you can all understand my decision.

Thanks to DigginChickin for bringing this to my attention earlier!