Oh man!

I get the equipment and my desk moved to the new apartment, get the internet hooked up, put the hard drive into the server, and it crashes an hour later during a linux update. That IDE hard drive is six years old and ran almost 24/7 for five years.

Sorry guys... This is gonna have to wait a while now. I have to finish moving into the new apartment and then get ready for my other hip to be reconstructed on October 20th. I don't have the time or the parts i need to bring the servers up.

---Panther

If you weren't in yank land, I'd send you a replacement HDD.

Why not ask someone here to ship you a spare, what you need, 8GB or something stupidly small?

that drive was a 160GB that had only about 12GB of stuff on it. I have access to getting another drive-- probably for free-- but.... no time to get the server up now. it will probably have to wait and become a project after I get don with the hospital and done with my extended care. so it could become a project that gets started as much as three months down the road. I do not know how long i will be in extended care yet.

---Panther

No worries mate. i've already got the files updated. I have Raptor up for Bub, and open
Panther sometimes if people call for it. It'll never be lost, only kept safe for later.

Well I hope that the surgery and aftercare goes smoothly, it's never a fun ride but should make your life all the better afterwards.

Idle thought re: scorched, how about we build some redundancy with over the net replication of the server/drives params? Not exactly over the net RAID but you know what I mean, at least some form of redundancy? Nowadays with internet plans and hd space on the cheap, surely that would be a viable solution, yes? Plus it makes the whole thing more solid, less prone to disaster and recovery is just the matter of flicking on a switch or change an ip.

ditto. one of various piles, collecting dust:

happens when you do rebuilds for people. reusing old drives isnt worth the risk when new are so cheap and theyre paying/twice/you are if they fail. you cant really just 'dump' people's stuff without zeroing it, and that takes hours.

i hoard so much junk. ive given away 3 or 4 good ones just recently. trouble is, itd cost more to send to the US than itd cost to buy the same on ebay.

good luck, anyway, panther. i hope things turn out ok.


hayt "Idle thought re: scorched"

i remember something in one of gcamp's news/development goals posts about more website integration. i dont know what that meant, but a big change i like to imagine is some kind of centralised stats system. ive pondered this previously...

suppose we wanted stats for any official server shown on this site or another elsewhere. i thought we could use some kind of on demand probe of whichever other site/server for some xml or json or something. maybe we could go as far as crawling other sites/db's at set intervals and storing the data in a central location?

we already have some redundancy for mods, in the form of user downloads. (all mods get stored in full at the player's end). i think thrax is probably all we have beyond that. i can probably try and mirror some of thrax's stuff on one of mine at some stage if it helps.

I have the mods from v42 backed up on my computer in a big zip file as well.


Armor

I'm more thinking of something more robust, like having a complete server up with a replicated db and hd of all that's necessary to run the games and that can be just put online at a moment's notice if another node/hd fries up. The db could be refreshed relatively securely and easily over the net I believe, I've never done it Myself but I know that there are several solutions which exists for that, from secure FTP to VPNs etc.

You never know when your server is going to be fried or destroyed in a freak accident, where I work everything is clustered using RAID fiber channel arrays, both apps and dbs and the replication sites are located thousands of miles away in case of (insert favoric apoc disaster here). Am not saying that this is required here, but similar setups can be done for free.

I see that sourceforge has things like that to replicate from MS SQL to MySQL but I am sure that there is a ton of other possibilities.

I guess it all comes down to how is the infrastructure built for scorch, and how it can be made more resilient, the front end is just your gateway to the backend, and the backend needs that replication/redundancy so that user experience is maximized and also just to be on the safe side of things.

I do agree however that as far as backups are concerned, the local copy that everyone has is likely VERY safe As for Thrax's stuff, yes it would be good to see it archived someplace just in case.

yeap. gc's stuff is already on a proper server at a datacentre, as youd expect for a site this size. (nothing you cant check with a whois on the ip). i dont know about backups - it's not my business, but ive seen enough to expect it's covered.

most mods and mod stats are hosted on home pc's/servers, independent of scorched3d, but for the registration stuff. ive hosted on a vps a couple of times. i recently offered to put armour's mod on one for testing - he needs that extra upload speed. (a pain in the bum, 'cause im a debian man in squeeze world, for the most part, ramble dependencies ramble.

for the sake of the conv, though, memory on rented servers is damned expensive, and mod hosting takes a lot compared to your typical apache deamon/fork. it's probably not something people are going to do unless they happen to have servers already.

id like to see a nice efficient way to transfer mods to the client, hosting on a home server, but without relying on that home connection's upload for the mod transfer. i suggested we might have a type association for 's3d' that would allow a one click mod download/install from any website hosting the file, as a start. beyond that, id love to see a 'serve mod from http://etc/mymod.s3d' option in the server hosting settings. i dont like to request it - it's too obscure and i doubt enough people would use it(?)/know this thread wasnt secret spanish code for turkey sandwich.

ok so main and all that jazz is covered, well nice

For the mods, I realize that they are storage heavy and yes on prime servers that's costly. The problem is that free options don't abound or are limited by the current flavor of the day, having a webserver someplace with just drivespace I imagine is feasible. Bandwidth might be another issue. however most people download the mods only once

How about hosting the mods on sourceforge? they could be linked projects uploaded there as co-apps for scorched 3d? They could come with a wrapper I guess that would make use of the standard install path used for the original scorched, or use whatever directory it uses (i.e. under Vista64 it's under .scorched3d). Clicking on the link on mod pages or just launching the app could hotlink to the sourceforge download package provided we know the OS etc.

I'm just throwing ideas, I don't know how the innards of scorched3d works, I'm just an IT Infra guy

For mod downloads, using bit torrent would be the best solution. Would still hit the main server hard, but when others are online playing, they'd help with upload.

Would take some coding tho.

As for stats backup, I doubt there's much risk of them disappearing. MySQL DBs are SOOOOOOO tiny, that they can be uploaded anywhere in very little time through the day (prob maybe 4MB for all of thraxs stats?), even to email servers etc.

Quit worrying Hayt, panther was hosting his own and too busy getting his body carved up to spend the time bringing the server backup. It's an isolated case.
Besides, WTF cares about some missing stats?

Oh I'm not worried, I just wanted to put My 2 cents on making the thing both sleeker and more robust since I don't have time to actually build a mod I'd gather I could give ideas to make the source and central hub sleeker a bit

no, theyre not. theyre nothing. 50MB each or so. it's not the storage. a GB or two of transfer a month for our needs probably costs less than the e youd need to power your desk lamp. (tis 2011 - cloud server/HD video era). im sure gavin could host all the mods for download here without noticing the difference.

no, memory - i did mean memory, RAM, as opposed to storage. running a scorched server for a big mod uses quite a bit.


yeap. we do need this file type association for 's3m' mod packages or whatever they are. click it and the mod gets auto installed.

i think there's already a sourceforge effort for mods - maybe that's the way to go. either way, like i say, data transfer/storage, the way things are - no worries, mate. the issue is maintenance/uploads/keeping the downloads up to date.

i dont know how we'd go about uploading mods on here (this site). it'd need gcamps approval and there'd be a can of worms to open around security. i think i did mention it in a PM about the site design.

ive recently written a php http file manager, matter of fact - maybe something like that's an option. i expect we could use some of the code here if there's a call for it. have one mod admin guy, perhaps (ie thrax if he was cool with it). it's nothing id have time to implement code wise at the mo, personally.

For the most part, Every person that ever plays scorched already has what it takes to be a
server. it's part of the program you run. It's miniscule for bandwidth while playing, and except
for downloads, even dialup users can play full-speed.

I have a ton of unintentinal redundancy here anyway. All 3 of my working pc's have
everything setup to start the servers at a click, since i just xcopy the whole folder tree
to each pc. If one pc dies, i can restart on another till it's fixed.

Storing mods offline is fine, as long as they are kept current. Since we modders tinker from
time to time, the only true latest is from the mod-server auto-downloads. But that doesn't
mean the earlier one's are broken, just incomplete till they pop by for the update.

We can't store mods on source-forge tho. Not that we "cant".. more like we're not allowed.
They have rules vs storing anything that may contain partial copy-righted material. Since
many mods contain sounds pics and themes that are taken from other sources, we cannot
store them there in good faith. Think of Swars itself.. The entire thing is a tribute to Lucas's
Star-Wars, and as such.. might be a bit copyrighted somewhere.

We'd asked about something torrent-like in mod-downloading from gameservers, but it
never went anywhere. As long as we don't go a bit over-board in designing, the mod-sizes
don't get too large. Any patient person can have it in 2-10 min when he enters the
gameserver for the first time. After that, further updates are almost instant on login.

Game-servers for S3d, are like many other game's the world over; Q3A, Counterstrike, etc
They are hosted freely by those that enjoy sharing it. I only host 4-6 mods, but i have more
in storage.. Probably more Mods than we have players lately. As popularity demands, i drop
some mods and swap in others for a while. Panther's mod could easily be traded in for a while
if folks called for it.

just to add to this. 10 minutes on a fast adsl connection, say 1 megabit upload, split between two users, with nothing else sharing, means a mod size of about 40MB. that's quite a restriction, and as time goes on it'll be more so. i dont imagine much benefit in a p2p or torrent system.