Sorry for the short notice on this.

The downtime we had last Sunday when the server was out for two hours between around 17:30 and 19:30 ET is believed to have been a result of a hardware problem.

We have scheduled some overnight down time, for tonight, so that diagnostics may be performed on the machine's hardware.

For the nerds (most of us): This check will consist of ensuring the server is properly cooling, testing/replacing the RAM, and verifying the BIOS settings are correct. If no obvious issues are found a full chassis swap may be performed, which will effectively move the current drives into a duplicate system/hardware.

Depending on the findings the server may be offline from one to four hours. I expect that we will go down relatively promptly around 4am tonight.

If you are logged in at this time, there will be a slight revert once the server comes back up; the revert will be to the last save before the server went down. There will be no risk to your characters as they will be logged out, just like the daily restart, however there will not be any in game warning for last save.

There is a very remote chance that the technicians will take the server offline during a save as it won't be possible to coordinate the last save time with the technicians that will be performing this maintenance. If this happens there may be extended downtime while I restore the previous save manually. The maximum revert will be 30 minutes.

Taking care of business My man

ie: Cease all critical activities in game, at around 3:00-3:30 EST, to minimize potential loss or time wasted

Thanks for the verbose details, this nerd appreciates it. The question of whether you use remote hands was bouncing in my head until I got to that part of the post.

This stuff costs serious money folks. Donate or subscribe to support these extensive and high quality commitments to the shard's excellence!!

Will the regular 7am EST server restart still take place?

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Yes, if the server is back up any time before 7 it will notify of last save, and restart as normal. However if it comes up at or after 7 it will not be expected to restart again until Sat morning.

Thanks for all the hard work, it is appricated.


Westra

Thanks Derrick! As usual, you are the man. And we "nerds" really appreciate your hard work and fairness. Donate people! It's quick and easy.

Thanks Derrick for the notice! We can plan around this...

Z

thank you admins

Thanks for everyones kind words and understanding.

The server shutdown was a little later than expected, and we were only ended up being offline about 20 min, but it looks like a likely cause of the problem may have been found.

Thank you for keeping us posted. :)

Thanks for the time an effort put in Derrick, most appreciated.

I Love this game

Wonderful. Thanks so very much to all who worked on this.


Westra