[Brianetta]

Attention all Cyberdogs!

Server Down-time


The main Dogcraft server will be shutting down for maintenance on Tuesday, 23rd January, 2018 at 08:00 UTC. Work is being undertaken to improve the database that the server uses, and unfortunately this cannot take place while the server is running.

It is not anticipated that this will have any effect on your in-game inventories, builds or entities.

I am allocating an hour and a half for the down-time window, to allow time for a complete database backup to be taken. If it runs on, then I shall be keeping players up to date via Discord.

That time in some popular time zones:

N.A. West Coast: 12:00 midnight
N.A. East Coast: 3:00am
UK, Morocco: 8:00am
Western Europe: 9:00am
South Africa: 10:00am
Australia (Sydney, Melbourne): 7:00pm

[Brianetta]

Follow-up

The server is available once again. It took much, much longer than expected - nearly nine hours, instead of 90 minutes. Please accept my apologies for that.

Nine hours? What on Earth went wrong?

Everything went according to plan, except the timescale.

• The database was backed up, which took about 30 minutes. This was as expected.
• The old, broken MySQL database packages were removed and purged. This took a couple of minutes, as expected.
• I updated the OS with security updates, etc. This took five minutes, well worth it.
• The new database engine, MariaDB, was installed and configured. This took nearly three minutes.
• Then came the data restore. That data, which took 30 minutes to back up just before. I knew it would take longer to restore, and I figured maybe twice as long. Boy was I wrong. This took the best part of eight hours.
• Finally, some testing, a final reboot and players were let in.

Good job I took the whole day off work! I was originally planning a late morning.

So, at no point did anything actually go wrong. Data was never at risk, the Minecraft world and people's inventories were never in danger. It just took a lot longer than I planned.

Will this happen again?

Probably not. The database packages had been in a bad way since before I came on as admin, and I've been wanting to get it sorted ever since. The same system that does security updates also updates the database, and it thought it had unfinished business with MySQL. Re-installing it (and replacing it with the slightly faster MariaDB alternative) was what had to happen to fix that, and the fix should be permanent.

[_edo]

Brian, so much thanks for all this under-the-hood work!
And... you even took a day off from rl work for it? o.O     <--dedication.

You're gold (Spandau Ballet parlance) or, in mc-speak, diamond.

[ebi_furya]

I'll second that. Here, here! Thank you for what you've done.

And on a side note, thank you for pointing out the MariaDB. I've used mySql at work for years now, but after reading up on this one, will be making a switch. So double thanks.

[xclickitx]

Great job. Thanks for the update.

[legowar1508]

yep! thanks so much! are there any new features we should be aware of?

[Brianetta]

yep! thanks so much! are there any new features we should be aware of?

Not as a result of this work, no.

[Skelleton123]

Thank you so much Brian for putting in all those hours of your free time! Really appreciated!