Server Move Sunday 5th May

[Coops]

I'll keep this brief...

CE has been around for a decade and a half, and in all that time we have had as many Server issues as with the current one. We only moved to this server earlier this year but have had a litany of issues, downtime and recently unexplained reboots.

I have been doing my very level best to resolve and push our host and data centre to take interest but to little avail. So this month I leased a shiny new server. VERY well specced, that should be more than enough to see us through another half decade. Now CE has become something of a large amorphous creature with the Main site, Development server and many Sub domain support sites. So it's not a simple 'flick a switch' to move.

I have been spending time ensuring our new shiny home for CE is as rock stable and ready to accept CE as advertised and so far no issues. So I have decided to set a move date of the Sunday the 5th of May. I will narrow down the shut-down and transfer window closer to the date, but likely early Sunday Morning. The actual transfer time will be a little dependent on DNS propagation, but I'm hoping only a few hours.

No data will be lost and when you log back in all your shiny toys, sets, and fury friends will be there to welcome you.

Keeping you up to date...

Coops

[Coops]

OK, so it was a mixed day of successes and a few failures, but we have moved to our new home. Downtime was reasonably minimal, around 40 mins in total, though typically I managed to do it over one of the hot spots for resets around 4:00pm. So, apologies for the lack of a few rests.

Overall it went well, and I was really happy to see not only the game back up but also Stats, Community Forums, The Guides site, Bug Track and the News Site along with several other entities that keep CE running from the staff perspective. Let's not forget the Vast number of Crons that had to be restarted.

Sadly, one issue that I've spent the last three hours peering at is the maps. These were rebuilt last year, and they are using some code that our new server really doesn't like. I fully intend to fix the issue, but in the meantime I've put back the old maps. Yes they load slower, but they do the same job, just less eloquently.

I have some ideas on how to fix the new maps, but need some time to run some ideas out into real code.

I'm hoping that this will be the last move for a long time!

Furthermore, I hope you enjoy the extra speed and fingers cross reliability and uptime.

Coops