Skotos Tech Servers Status

TEC Reboot

Shannon — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:43:22 PST

TEC didn't automatically return from its Monday morning reboot, today, and instead had to be coaxed back up by hand. All should be normal again, with no data lossage.

TEC Less Wobbly After All

Shannon — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:57:02 PST

The restore of TEC we did this morning has held steady for almost 6 hours of use, which is far better than any of the troubled restores we did. So, we're hopeful now that we're going to be able to stay with this one. Though the downtime was extended as we picked through backups, total data loss turned out to be only 2 or 3 hours.

Tec Wobbly

Shannon — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:23:00 PST

We are testing out a restore of TEC that I'm highly suspicious of. We should know in the next few hours if it's stable or not, but be aware that we'll probably need to reset this one.

TEC Status

Shannon — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:55:31 PST

Unfortunately, after multiple tests with multiple TEC backups, we've been unable to restore it to a working state. It's likely that something else is going on than just data corruption, but it'll need to wait until tomorrow at this point, so that I can see if any other engineers have ideas and/or consider more extreme measures, like pushing the game to a different machine.

TEC Back Again

Shannon — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:41:19 PST

After some more tomfoolery, the game is back and looks stable. We managed to reduce the rollback from 34 hours to 10.

TEC Back

Shannon — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:14:49 PST

After 3+ hours of fighting, TEC is back up. Unfortunately, all of our backs following Monday morning were corrupt, so we had to rollback about 34 hours. We'll be looking into reasons for this in morning, but for now enjoy the game.

TEC Rebuilding from Previous Save

Shannon — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:05:26 PST

Sadly, it looks like the core dump that occurred at 2:55 corrupted the database. We're going to be rebuilding from the save around noon.

TEC Down

Shannon — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:57:46 PST

We are aware of the current problem with TEC, and are currently trying to cleanly restart the server.

Tec Up

Shannon — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:59:52 PDT

Back up, from the 1pm PT backup.

TEC Down

Shannon — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:39:12 PDT

TEC got stuck for some reason this evening and unfortunately would not restart cleanly. We're now restoring from backup and will try and restart the 1pm (PT) database.

Downtime Concluded

Shannon — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:59:49 PDT

Our scheduled downtime for Ironclaw, Lazarus, and Lovecraft has concluded. The games should now all be back up and available.

Ironclaw, Lazarus, Lovecraft Downtime: Thursday

Shannon — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:29:42 PDT

We have a scheduled downtime for the Ironclaw, Lazarus, and Lovecraft games starting at 11am PT on Thursday October 27th. We expect the downtime to be an hour, during which access to the games will be intermittent. It could be extended if we run into any problems with the upgrade we're doing, but if so we'll post here.

TEC Down & Up

Shannon — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:43:52 PDT

TEC went down this afternoon for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's been restarted cleanly, and we've got our fingers crossed that there isn't a more integral problem with the data.

Web Server Temporarily Down

Shannon — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:10:10 PDT

Some work at our colocation facility resulted in temporarily downtime for the main Skotos website. It should be returning momentarily. None of the games themselves were affected.

TEC back up

Erwin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 06:33:09 PDT

No time lost. Cause found and will be sorted out one way or another.

TEC Should be Back

Shannon — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:29:31 PDT

Server successfully restarted.

TEC Down

Shannon — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:22:07 PDT

We are currently looking into the TEC downtime.

Ironclaw Back

Shannon — Tue, 31 May 2011 15:06:50 PDT

We've got Ironclaw set up with some new resources and restarted, which will hopefully restore it to stability.

Ironclaw Downtime

Shannon — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:08:16 PDT

We are temporarily taking Ironclaw down to try and resolve the crashing problem which started up last night.

Planned RPGnet Maintenance

Shannon — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:23:14 PDT

RPGnet & Xenagia will be down for parts of today due to planned maintenance. We are upgrading its OS as part of our work toward restabilizing vBulletin.

RPGnet Back

Shannon — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:36:52 PDT

RPGnet came back up under the new vBulletin a couple of hours ago. It'll take us a few more days to get styles & other things working again.

RPGnet Being Upgraded

Shannon — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:44:42 PDT

As announced last week, we are upgrading RPGnet's forums today. This will be causing downtime with weird messages. In the meantime visit the rest of the site. The good news is that due to some efficiency help we were able to get, the upgrade is going faster than expected.

rpg.net/xenagia.net

Erwin — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:27:17 PDT

The forums are available again.

Grendel's Revenge

Erwin — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 06:23:08 PST

Grendel crashed and had to be restored from the most recent backup, which happened to be from around 4 AM Eastern. Apologies for the inconvenience.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net back up

Erwin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:43:19 PST

Machine is back up. Things look to be back to normal (as far as that is possible). Carry on.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net reboot in progress

Erwin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 15:38:48 PST

Forced a reboot on the web-server and now running a file-system check. Expect to be back up shortly. Database back-end is unaffected by this.

RPG.net forum back up

Erwin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 05:47:19 PST

The database back-end had stopped responding around 3AM Eastern but failed to trigger any notifications. The processes have been restarted and look to be running normally again, now.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net network issue (tentatively resolved)

Erwin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:46:25 PST

Network connectivity appears to have been resumed. Still awaiting an explanation but not complaining, meanwhile.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net network issue

Erwin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:29:54 PST

Network connectivity is disrupted. We are inquiring. All machines are running fine otherwise.

RPG/Xenagia server back up

Erwin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 09:23:14 PST

The server is back up. Still doing things in the background so there may be some slowness, but we promise not to do any more on the fly tuning this year!

RPG/Xenagia server

Erwin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:49:53 PST

The database backend tripped up badly after a setting was changed on the fly. Now making sure it's fully sanity-checked before bringing it back up.

rpg.net/xenagia.net (done)

Erwin — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 13:25:00 PST

Database work is done.

Planned maintenance for RPG.net/Xenagia.net

Erwin — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 12:43:54 PST

On Wednesday December 15, RPG.net and Xenagia.net will be down for an extended maintenance window, starting 9 AM and ending 5 PM (Eastern).

rpg.net/xenagia.net

Erwin — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 09:37:08 PST

Database unexpectedly required some extra TLC. No ETA at this point.

Grendel's Revenge

Erwin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:45:40 PST

We had to roll back to the prior backup (about 5 hours ago) due to a game crash. The game is back up now.

TEC maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:39:55 PDT

My apologies! I completely forgot to put up a notice here about the upcoming maintenance, as it was also announced in the forums. We are roughly on track, but be patient as this is by no means a small task so it would not surprise me if it takes a little longer.

Castle Marrach down (resolved)

Erwin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 10:31:34 PDT

The game has been restored from the previous backup, which was 2-3 hours before the problems started. Everything has been moved onto different hardware.

Castle Marrach down

Erwin — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 07:06:36 PDT

There appears to be a problem with one of the disks in the machine Marrach is on. We have no ETA available yet.

Global Maintenance Window

Erwin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:36:16 PDT

All upgrades have been done. Everything should be up and running again. Carry on!

Global Maintenance Window

Erwin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:05:05 PDT

Window begins now.

Global Maintenance Window

Erwin — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:58:45 PDT

On Wednesday, October 20, we will be applying software updates on ALL machines. The more active machines will be dealt with earlier in the day when possible but all machines (games, forums, Skotos UserDB) will be affected. The window will be between 9am and 4pm Eastern (6am and 1pm Pacific).

Grendel's Revenge

Erwin — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 13:46:28 PDT

Rolled back the game to the backup from yesterday around 5pm Eastern. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

TEC

Erwin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:15:57 PDT

After around 40 days of running (definitely a record in recent history) the game crashed. We have rolled it back to the most recent backup, which was 4.5 hours earlier. Carry on.

RPG/Xenagia server down (resolved)

Erwin — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:36:42 PDT

Back up, now.

RPG/Xenagia server down

Erwin — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:18:43 PDT

Restoring database consistency, expect to be back up and running in under an hour.

RPG/Xenagia server down (resolved)

Erwin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:11:24 PDT

That was fun, was it not? Ok, not really, but the server is back up and running.

RPG/Xenagia server down

Erwin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:58:04 PDT

Servers are like kids: The moment you answer the phone, they want to have your attention. This server demanded a database sanity check and is getting one now. No ETA at the moment.

Twitter test

Erwin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:05:44 PDT

Testing if OAuth setup works, so that updates are pushed correctly.

TEC

Erwin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:11:50 PDT

The game crashed shortly after midnight and unfortunately I was not aware of it until the morning. The most recent backup was from yesterday at 3pm ET. Until this bug has been tracked down, the backup frequency has been increased to once every 6 hours, instead of 12.

TEC down

Erwin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:23:46 PDT

The game was stuck in a loop and could not be brought down in an organized fashion that would have allowed it to restart without time loss. That is to say, we had to bring it back up from the previous backup, early this morning. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Grendel maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:02:46 PDT

Performing some overdue maintenance on the Grendel database. It should be back up within 15-30 minutes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Global Maintenance Window

Erwin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:51:03 PDT

On Monday, June 28, we will be applying software updates on ALL machines. The more active machines will be dealt with earlier in the day when possible but all machines (games, forums, Skotos UserDB) will be affected. The window will be between 9am and 4pm Eastern (6am and 1pm Pacific).

TEC down (resolved)

Erwin — Sun, 30 May 2010 08:46:53 PDT

Good news, in a way. It turned out the game was still running but locked up in a loop. I was able to bring it down gently and restart it without lost time. Carry on!

TEC down

Erwin — Sun, 30 May 2010 08:04:52 PDT

The game is down but I am currently not in a position to do anything about it. Hope to be in an hour or two, so hang in there!

UserDB (resolved)

Erwin — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:43:36 PDT

All better now. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

UserDB

Erwin — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:50:43 PDT

Lagging UserDB is lagging. Rebooting it with altered configuration to fix this. Cross your fingers that this will do the trick.

TEC down

Erwin — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:26:09 PDT

Looks like a software crash and we will have to roll back to the 3 AM (Eastern) backup. Expect to have the game back up as such in a few minutes.

Planned RPG.net/Xenagia.net maintenance

Erwin — Tue, 04 May 2010 06:10:01 PDT

This maintenance is now in progress.

Announcing planned RPG.net/Xenagia.net maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:55:12 PDT

After the unpleasantness yesterday there are some minor issues that need to be dealt with. There are also some pending software upgrades. We are going to deal with both of these tomorrow morning, 9 AM Eastern, 6 AM Pacific, 13:00 UTC. Maintenance window is an hour.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net down (done)

Erwin — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:52:13 PDT

We are back up. It took longer than strictly needed because I foolishly attempted to salvage parts of the messed up filesystem, but in the end I had to restore it all from backup anyway.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net down

Erwin — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:09:49 PDT

Unexpected trouble with filesystem. Working to restore it but have no ETA yet.

Main site and forums

Erwin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:18:52 PDT

Hardware issue with the server running the main Skotos websites. Moving the entire thing onto different hardware now. Hope to be back up within an hour but will keep you posted if takes much longer than that.

Unexpect downtime

Erwin — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:13:41 PDT

The physical machine that hosts TEC and (at the moment) a few other things like my.skotos.net, needed to be taken down briefly to prevent accidental power interruptions while we deal with some other hardware. It will be back up as soon as possible.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net (update)

Erwin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:57:33 PST

The unpleasant news is that we need to restore a lot of data from backups, which is going to take a while. The good news is that we should have very little missing data once we are back up. Anticipate a few more hours of downtime while we work on this.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net (update)

Erwin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:15:05 PST

This will require someone to visit on-site which is going to take some time. Will update again when we have news.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net

Erwin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:09:52 PST

The host of these websites demanded some TLC. Working on it right now.

Maintenance window

Erwin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:38:43 PST

On Saturday March 6 there will be a general maintenance window in which we will apply various upgrades on any machines that need them. This will include the forums, games and UserDB server. This will be a 3 hour window starting around 9 AM Eastern.

Power glitch

Erwin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:49:34 PST

All machine (and in fact it appears to have been a colo-wide) issue restarted unexpectedly. All games were restarted from their last stable state. For most games this meant a 1-2 hour revert. For TEC and Grendel it was a 12 hour revert. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

TEC downtime (fixed)

Erwin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:36:17 PST

TEC was down (for under an hour I think) after it tried to eat all the available RAM in the machine. With some magic we prevented that from happening repeated upon each restart, so we did not need to revert to a previous backup. Carry on.

Unscheduled UserDB restart (done)

Erwin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:16:51 PST

UserDB is back up. Carry on!

Unscheduled UserDB restart

Erwin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:02:02 PST

The UserDB needs an unscheduled restart to adjust its configuration. This will happen in a few minutes. Apologies for the inconvenience.

TEC down

Erwin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:03:06 PST

Unhappy hardware was stuck and is being power-cycled. After that we will bring the game back up from the most recent backup.

TEC go boom

Erwin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:58:35 PST

TEC gave us an unpleasant surprise just now. Bringing it back up from the most recent backup (approximately 2 hours ago) in a few minutes.

RPG.net/Xenagia.net maintenance and reboot

Erwin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:42:32 PST

Tuesday morning (December 22) we will be performing software upgrades on the machine running various Xenagia.net/RPG.net websites. This includes at least one reboot, so downtime is to be expected. Maintenance will be between 9 AM and 11 AM Eastern (6 AM and 8 AM Pacific, 2 PM and 4 PM GMT).

The Eternal City lag-fest

Erwin — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:36:37 PST

TEC was lagged for the past hour and a half and I was in the middle of Christmas shopping so I couldn't immediately step in and kick it into behaving properly. It is back up now, carry on. This was not a hardware or OS issue, but code within TEC going haywire, for what it's worth.

RPG.net/Xenagia maintenance and reboot

Erwin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:20:39 PST

Friday morning (December 4) we will be performing software upgrades on the machine running RPG.net and Xenagia.net websites. This will include a reboot so some downtime is to be expected. Maintenance will start at 9 AM Eastern (6 AM Pacific) and is expected to take under an hour.

The Eternal City: Planned downtime (done)

Erwin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:44:53 PST

TEC is running again, on the new machine, and with a slimmed down database. Minor fixes here and there aside, it looks like we are good to go.

The Eternal City: Planned downtime

Erwin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:11:24 PST

On Friday, November 20, The Eternal City will be down for maintenance. We will start at 9 AM Eastern (6 AM Pacific) and be back up approximately 4 hours later. This will be a double feature: Compacting the TEC database, but also moving the game over to a different machine.

Network issues (fixed)

Erwin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:53:22 PST

This issue, which was affecting all our sites, has been tracked down, and squashed. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Network issues

Erwin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:54:45 PST

Not quite sure what is going on yet, but there appears to be a network problem that is making it rather difficult to access the websites and games. We are aware but may not be in a position to do much about it until tomorrow morning.

Scheduled maintenance (done)

Erwin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:01:28 PDT

The maintenance is finished and the games are back up. Carry on.

Scheduled maintenance

Erwin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:08:28 PDT

Tuesday morning (October 13) between 10am and 12pm Eastern (7am and 9am Pacific) we will be performing software upgrades on the machines that run Ironclaw Online, Lazarus Project and Lovecraft Country. The actual down times within this window will not be particularly long but expect them to happen on short notice.

Scheduled maintenance (Xenagia.net, RPG.net)

Erwin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:06:16 PDT

Tomorrow morning (Friday, October 9) starting 10:00 AM Eastern (7:00 AM Pacific, 14:00 or 2 PM GMT/UTC) we will perform routine maintenance on the machine hosting RPG.net and Xenagia.net. We estimate that this will take under an hour.

The Eternal City is back up

Erwin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:23:53 PDT

Restarted from the most recent backup, which means a rollback of approximately 3 hours (I think, I did not finish my coffee yet).

The Eternal City down

Erwin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:14:49 PDT

TEC needed to be restarted. Working on that now, with an ETA of somewhere around 30-45 minutes.

The Eternal City is back up

Erwin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:53:14 PDT

It's back up, restored from the backup made yesterday, 4:50 PM Eastern.

The Eternal City down

Erwin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:42:55 PDT

TEC decided to surprise us with a Sunday morning crash. Currently checking from what backup to restart it.

Grendel (done)

Erwin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:16:38 PDT

Maintenance has been finished, the game is back up.

Castle Marrach

Erwin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:19:21 PDT

Castle Marrach had to be reverted to the state it was in at 10:20 PM Eastern (7:20 PM Pacific) last night. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Grendel

Erwin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:55:16 PDT

Tomorrow morning we will be taking down Grendel for maintenance. This work will take place between 9am and noon, Eastern Time.

The Eternal City

Erwin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:10:59 PDT

The game is back up now.

The Eternal City

Erwin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:44:28 PDT

Due to unforeseen circumstances we need to revert to a backup of about 24 hours ago. We will post an update when it is done.

Scheduled maintenance (finished)

Erwin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:09:42 PDT

Mea culpa! No game-time lost but much longer actual down time than planned. At least the intended software upgrades were successful. We will reschedule the upgrades for other machines another day.

Scheduled maintenance (update)

Erwin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:05:05 PDT

The maintenance on the machine hosting Castle Marrach took an unexpected turn. We are now working to resolve this. Our apologies. Consider the maintenance on the other machine postponed for now.

Scheduled maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:51:03 PDT

Tomorrow morning between 10am and 1pm Eastern (7am and 10am Pacific) we will be performing software upgrades on the machines that run Castle Marrach, Ironclaw Online, Lazarus Project and Lovecraft Country. The actual down times within this window will not be particularly long but expect them to happen on short notice. Thank you for your understanding.

www & forum.skotos.net (finished)

Erwin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:45:42 PDT

The original machine was given a replacement power supply. The forums are back up and www.skotos.net will move back again as well, as soon as your DNS is updated (which should happen within 15 minutes). Carry on!

www & forum.skotos.net (continued)

Erwin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:02:28 PDT

A partial www.skotos.net is now back up on different hardware. The forums and other virtual hosts will have to wait until the hardware has been brought back to live.

www & forum.skotos.net (continued)

Erwin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:04:31 PDT

It looks like hardware failure. While we investigate the necessary replacement parts, we will also look into getting at least www.skotos.net back up so that authentication works again.

www & forum.skotos.net

Erwin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:34:00 PDT

We are investigating the machine. We will update this page when we have more details.

RPG.net/Xenagia maintenance and reboot (done)

Erwin — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 07:17:24 PDT

Maintenance went smoothly and the sites are back up.

RPG.net/Xenagia maintenance and reboot

Erwin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:28:06 PDT

Tomorrow morning (Saturday, August 8) we will be performing routine maintenance on the Xenagia/RPG.net machine. This will include a server reboot. This work will start around 10 AM Eastern (7 AM Pacific, 14:00 or 2 PM GMT/UTC) and is expected to take under 30 minutes.

The Eternal City (back)

Erwin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:56:11 PDT

It is back up. We are keeping an eye on it for the next few hours.

The Eternal City

Erwin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:21:16 PDT

The game appears to have crashed. We will bring it back up as soon as possible but this may involve a rollback.

Database repair

Erwin — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:21:56 PDT

We are currently running an unscheduled database repair. To speed things up we've shut down most everything else on the machine. No ETA available at this point. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

Billing (fixed)

Erwin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:23:09 PDT

The problem should be fixed now, but we will keep an eye on it of course.

RPG.net and Xenagia.net maintenance

Erwin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:06:14 PDT

The scheduled maintenance is taking longer than anticipated. All together it should be under 2 hours, though. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Billing

Erwin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 06:53:21 PDT

CC charging/validating is not working right now. This happens to be on the CC processor side of things, so nothing we can do except recommend PayPal as an alternative and wait for the problem to be sorted. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

The Eternal City

Erwin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:32:33 PDT

The game was stuck for about half an hour. After some, shall we say, magic it was unstuck and then given a restart. It looks like no time was lost, meaning no rollback was needed.

Billing (fixed)

Erwin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:54:29 PST

It has been working for several hours again. Carry on.

Billing (continued)

Erwin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:47:05 PST

The charging/validating issue is out of our hands, as it happens to be on the CC merchant side of things. They are aware of it and are dealing, but have no ETA for a fix, unfortunately.

Billing

Erwin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:41:35 PST

We are investigating a problem with charging/validating credit cards. Until this is sorted you are encouraged to use PayPal. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

TEC login issues (fixed)

Erwin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:35:18 PST

The problem has been fixed, thankfully without need for reverting to a previous backup. Carry on.

TEC login issues

Erwin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:09:27 PST

The Eternal City currently has problems that are make it impossible for anyone to log in. We are working on this but have no ETA yet. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Staff websites & email

Erwin — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:22:13 PDT

Email, including mailing-lists, has been back up since Wednesday. TWiki websites are taking some more effort unfortunately. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Staff websites & email

Erwin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:23:42 PDT

The TWiki websites for staffers along with *@*.skotos.net email addresses have been unavailable since this morning due to problems with the machine that runs all of that. They will remain so until at least Wednesday, possibly Thursday. When we have news regarding this we will share it here.

Lazarus, Ironclaw, Lovecraft

Erwin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:19:07 PDT

The machine hosting these games was, due to an unfortunate accident, powercycled. It came back up just fine but the filesystem-checking took some time. All games have been rolled back to the most recent 2-hourly snapshot.

TEC rollback

Erwin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:39:07 PDT

TEC unfortunately needed to be rolled back. The most recent backup was an hour ago, so almost no time will be lost. Expect the game to be up by 9pm Eastern.

Forum/web server unresponsive (resolved)

Erwin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:39:30 PDT

Restarted the server as gently as possible given the circumstances and it is back up now. It will be a bit slower than usual while the RAID1 filesystems sync in the background for the rest of the evening.

Forum/web server unresponsive

Erwin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:10:37 PDT

The server on which www.skotos.net, forum.skotos.net and a few other websites are hosted is not responsive. We are working on this and hope to have it back up soon.

Skotos Status on Twitter

Erwin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:30:47 PDT

The Skotos Status is now automatically posted on Twitter. Follow us at http://twitter.com/SkotosStatus if you're interested. :)

TEC rollback

Erwin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:37:29 PDT

After a pleasantly long run of over a month, TEC crashed this afternoon. We've restarted it from the most recent backup, which was around 7am Eastern (4am Pacific).

Planned maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:04:55 PDT

Tomorrow (Thursday, May 22) we will be performing routine maintenance on the server for RPG.net and Xenagia.net. We will use this opportunity to do some additional maintenance on there that requires taking down the server for a short time. This work will take place between 10am and 11am Eastern Time, a.k.a. 7am and 8am Pacific Time.

The Eternal City down (no longer)

Erwin — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:27:01 PDT

After reverting to the 6am (Pacific Time) backup, the game is back up.

The Eternal City down

Erwin — Sun, 18 May 2008 13:00:46 PDT

We spotted an unfortunate bug after our uptime run of 30 days that requires us to revert to a backup of (at the time of writing) 1-2 hours ago. It also involves fixing some code and recompiling the game-driver, which is going to cause another bit of delay because of lack of decent network access of the relevant parties.

The Eternal City Maintenance

Erwin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:10:04 PDT

Thursday (April 17) we will work on The Eternal City for major maintenance, involving picking apart a backup taken in the morning and putting it back together. There is a poll in the Welcome Area about what to do in that time (9AM to 9PM Eastern, or 6AM to 6PM Pacific), most likely it will be a so-called No Save Day.

Grendel Maintenance

Erwin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:41:45 PDT

Tuesday morning (April 15) we will take Grendel down for maintenance. The work will begin around 10 AM Eastern (7 AM Pacific) and we anticipate the game to be back up 2 hours later. Sooner is always possible, but not guaranteed.

lazarus, Ironclaw, Lovecraft (done)

Erwin — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:10:21 PDT

After some delay because a check was due on all file systems the games are now back up, restarted from statedumps (backups) made shortly after 10 AM Eastern.

Lazarus, Ironclaw, Lovecraft

Erwin — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:33:17 PDT

The machine appears to be stuck. We're reviving it as we speak.

UserDB maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:28:34 PST

On Friday morning between 10 and 11 AM Eastern Time the UserDB will be down for maintenance. During its downtime access to authenticated parts of our website (on www.skotos.net and sites for the individual games as well) will not be possible.

Marrach and Ironclaw maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:20:44 PST

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, February 25) between 10 AM and noon Eastern time (also known as 7 and 9 AM Pacific Time) we will restart both games repeatedly for maintenance purposes. Actual downtime as a result of this is expected to be under half an hour but the games are also likely to be lagged or otherwise difficult to use during the maintenance window.

Grendel Maintenance

Erwin — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 11:32:49 PST

On Monday, February 4, we will take Grendel down for maintenance. The work will begin around 10 AM Eastern (7 AM Pacific) and we anticipate the game to be back up 2 hours later. Quite possibly sooner than that, but no guarantees.

Plannet reboots

Erwin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:43:39 PST

Happy New Year!

On Monday (January 7) we will be performing routine maintenance. Unfortunately this will require a reboot of the machines, affecting all of them (UserDB, games, web and mail servers). This event of sorts will take place between 10am and noon Eastern Time, a.k.a. 7am and 9am Pacific Time.

Planned reboots

Erwin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:54:41 PST

On Wednesday (December 20th) we will be performing routine maintenance that unfortunately requires a reboot of the machines. This will affect all machines, games, forums, etc, between 10am and noon Eastern, also known as 7am and 9am Pacific.

RPGnet / Xenagia Up

Shannon — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:28:10 PST

Things went better than hoped. There was an I/O problem, which we're going to be looking into more deeply, but the machine is now back up, and the MySQL tables were consistent, which means that a long rebuild isn't needed.

RPGnet / Xenagia Down

Shannon — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:00:38 PST

It looks like the RPGnet/Xenagia machine suffered some type of serious hardware failure overnight. We're currently working with our colo to bring it back up. Once it's back up, it will probably take a considerable amount of time to rebuild RPGnet's MySQL tables, which will likely be required. We should be back today, but it may be late, depending on the exact problem.

Maintenance Window Scheduled for Wednesday

Shannon — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:41:40 PST

Our ISP has announced an electrical system maintenance window for Wednesday the 12th, starting at 6pm and running for 12 hours. It should have no effect on service, but the nature of the work could result in an interruption of service if there is an unexpected problem.

Maintenance Window Scheduled for Sunday

Shannon — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:40:24 PST

Our ISP has announced a maintenance window for our network routing on Sunday. It should have no effect, but there could be one or more brief interruptions of network service from 10am-2pm PT.

UserDB reboot

Erwin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:34:47 PST

The UserDB is being restarted to put a configuration change into effect that should help reduce the lag of the past 12 hours. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

TEC and Grendel maintenance (final)

Erwin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:14:26 PDT

Both machines are back up and running and their respective games are back up as well. Carry on!

TEC and Grendel maintenance (continued)

Erwin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:56:34 PDT

As always, rack servers are a pain to work in/with and cause unexpected delays. The work with TEC is going well, but slower than hoped. We intend to have it back up before 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern). Work for the Grendel host was delayed as a result but we intend to have that back up in the same time frame.

Grendel maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:04:48 PDT

Unexpectedly we will need to have another look at the Grendel machine, which we'll do around the same time as the work on the TEC machine, tomorrow (Thursday) between 2 and 3 PM Eastern (11 AM and noon Pacific).

Grendel maintenance (final)

Erwin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:33:11 PDT

The maintenance for the Grendel machine is finished.

Grendel and TEC maintenance

Erwin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:39:37 PDT

Tomorrow morning (Wednesday) between 9 and 10 AM Eastern (6 and 7 Pacific) we will perform some minor work on the machine Grendel runs on.

The next day (Thursday) between 2 and 3 PM Eastern (11 AM and noon Pacific) we will perform maintenance on the machine TEC runs on.

As always the intent is to improve the running of the games, by improving the hardware it is running on or the software running on there.

Grendel Maintenance (final)

Erwin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:38:03 PDT

The machine and game are back up. We will be doing some things in the background but that won't require any further reboots. Carry on!

Grendel Maintenance (continued)

Erwin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:10:12 PDT

Some minor complications are causing this maintenance to take a bit longer than originally planned. We will post an update as soon as we are done, of course.

Grendel Maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:48:39 PDT

Tomorrow we will be performing necessary maintenance on the machine running Grendel, replacing a failing drive in its redundant setup. This will be done between 2 and 3 PM Eastern (11 AM and noon Pacific) and we anticipate about an hour of downtime.

Planned reboots (done)

Erwin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:25:06 PDT

The maintenance is dealt with, slightly faster than scheduled, so by all means resume what you were doing!

Planned reboots

Erwin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:41:36 PDT

Wednesday morning between 9 and 11 AM Eastern time (6 and 8 AM Pacific) we'll be performing routine maintenance on our machines which unfortunately includes a reboot of each machine.

The actual downtime for each individual machine should be under a few minutes but given preparations before and sanity checks after the actual reboot and because the reboots won't all be done at once, the maintenance window is a bit longer than that.

Planned reboots (done)

Erwin — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 06:55:18 PDT

Both sets of reboots have been dealt with successfully. Carry on!

Planned reboots

Erwin — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:13:18 PDT

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday) we'll be rebooting the webserver hosts for www.skotos.net, www.rpg.net, www.xenagia.net and the relevant forums. This is to get some security updates in place.

For the same reason we'll be rebooting the host machines for Castle Marrach, Lazarus Project, Lovecraft Country and IronClaw Online and the UserDB host on Wednesday morning.

Both sets of reboots will be dealt with between 9 and 10 AM Eastern, also known as 6 and 7 AM Pacific.

UserDB maintenance (done)

Erwin — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:28:59 PDT

The maintenance is finished, authentication should function properly again. Resume browsing and playing as always. :)

UserDB maintenance ahead

Erwin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:39:38 PDT

The maintenance is still on for tomorrow, but has been pushed back 2 hours (so noon to 1 PM Eastern, or 9 to 10 AM Pacific).

UserDB maintenance ahead

Erwin — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:19:05 PDT

Wednesday morning September 19 between 10 and 11 AM Eastern (7 and 8 AM Pacific) we will be working on the UserDB host, which will involve downtime for the UserDB itself. If you're already logged into your favourite game you should be fine as long as you don't need to reauthenticate (which often includes game-generated webpages).

We apologize in advance for the inconvenience and assure you this is necessary work that needs to be done one way or another.

Planned maintenance (final)

Erwin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:19:57 PDT

The database upgrade/check has finished and the forum has been reopened. Carry on!

Xenagia Reminder!

Shannon — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:22:20 PDT

If you're angsting for RPGnet (now 6 hours into its database repair and counting) remember that you can talk about all your favorite fantasy, science-fiction, and horror Other Media issues at Xenagia.

Planned maintenance (continued)

Erwin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:10:31 PDT

The maintenance has been successful but because it includes an upgrade of the MySQL database backend, the RPGnet forums will be offline for a few more hours. A final update will be posted when everything has been reactivated.

Planned maintenance

Erwin — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:40:49 PDT

Tomorrow (Friday) morning between 9 and 11 AM Eastern (6 and 8 AM Pacific) we will be working on the server used for rpg.net and xenagia.net websites. During this work the sites will be down. Not for the entire 2 hour period, but we can't guarantee it to be up for more than a few minutes here or there. We apologize for the inconvenience but this is necessary work and the sooner it's done, the better.

Planned maintenance (final)

Erwin — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 09:26:07 PDT

Once someone was on-site the problem was quickly diagnosed and resolved. All is well and the sites are back up. Let us know through the usual channels if you notice any irregularities still.

Planned maintenance (continued)

Erwin — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 08:03:20 PDT

Alright, so that went partially according to plan, and partially not-so. The machine did not come back after a kernel change and reboot and someone is on their way to take a look from up close and fix it.

Planned maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:15:30 PDT

Tomorrow (Thursday) morning between 9 and 11 AM Eastern (6 and 8 AM Pacific) I will be working on the server used for skotos.net websites not generated by the games themselves, including webmail for premium accounts and the main pages involving authentication, and the regular and forum websites for lovecraftcountry.com. During this work the sites will be down. Not for the entire maintenance period, but several minutes here and there. We apologize for the inconvenience but this is necessary work and the sooner it's done, the better.

Maintenance downtime (final)

Erwin — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:21:48 PDT

It's all over and done with. I'm still checking a few things but all games are back up and it looks like it went according to plan. Carry on!

Maintenance downtime (cont'd)

Erwin — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 06:28:23 PDT

The announced maintenance is in progress. I'll post an update when it's all over.

Maintenance downtime

Erwin — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:13:22 PDT

On Monday morning, September 10, I will be rebooting the machines on which we run Castle Marrach, IronClaw Online, Lovecraft Country, and The Lazarus Project.

The maintenance window is from 9 to 10 AM Eastern Time, which translates to 6 to 7 AM Pacific Time.

Database downtime (finished)

Erwin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:20:19 PDT

The database I referred to was the one that powers the RPG.net and Xenagia.net forums and a few others things, which I guess was not entirely obvious.

The downtime is over, at any rate, and was limited to about 15-20 minutes. Carry on!

Database downtime

Erwin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:46:52 PDT

At 2pm Eastern today I'll be taking the database down briefly. Expected downtime about 30 minutes.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

The Eternal City

Erwin — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 07:11:18 PDT

Yesterday morning and this morning the game crashed. In both cases the game was restarted from the most recent backup, of course. The cause is still being investigated.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Meta update

Erwin — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:03:57 PDT

For your convenience we have added categories to the status updates and added the possibility to view and subscribe to updates in an individual category.

Castle Marrach

Erwin — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:29:38 PDT

For unknown reasons Marrach's host rebooted. I've restarted the game now.

Apologies for the inconvenience, and carry on. The game was restarted from the 12:15 PM Eastern Time snapshot.

Ultimate RPGnet/Xenagia Update

Shannon — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 18:18:17 PDT

(We're back.)

Penultimate (?) RPGnet/Xenagia Update

Shannon — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:16:04 PDT

The restores seem to have worked. We're now repairing the main posts table on RPGnet. This will take several hours, though we started it at 1pm PT, so we're partway there.

RPGnet/Xenagia Update V

Shannon — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:28:55 PDT

So the largest problem here has been that the facility who we rent the RPGnet machine from doesn't have a lot of experience with our brand of Linux. They've been great, and the machine is only coming back up due to their determination, but nonetheless it took 5 tries to get their restore system working correctly with our file system. These restores each took quite a while, with the longest running almost 8 hours. As of this morning they've got us a bootable machine with all the data restored in main. They're doing some cleanup and hope to have us the machine back within an hour, at which point we'll need to start repairing our forums table and doing any other cleanup necessary.

RPGnet/Xenagia Update IV

Shannon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:19:00 PDT

Apparently the restore produced an unbootable system. Starting over ... At this point, expect a function RPGnet and Xenagia tomorrow.

RPGnet/Xenagia Update III

Shannon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:54:21 PDT

Yep, we're still restoring 5 hours later. The restore program says we're -92% done. (It apparently doesn't deal that well with large numbers.)

RPGnet/Xenagia Update II

Shannon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:08:54 PDT

We're up to the restore ...

RPGnet/Xenagia Update

Shannon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:23:01 PDT

The final snapshop backup is done. Our new RAID is currently building. The next step after that is a restore, then the inevitable cleanup of the forum-related tables.

RPGnet / Xenagia Status

Shannon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 08:39:53 PDT

For those of you who use our community sites at RPGnet and Xenagia: We experienced a disk failure last night which kicked the machine offline. We're currently creating a final snapshot of the machine, then we'll be rebuilding it and restoring it. In the process we're also reconfiguring the machine into a more redundant setup, to make a failure like this easier to deal with in the future. This will all take several hours.

UserDB downtime

Erwin — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:45:20 PDT

You may have noticed there was some additional UserDB downtime after the announced maintenance window this morning. The first one was unexpected, unfortunately, but as far as could be determined there were no harmful side-effects. The second was a reboot to upgrade the software package with a fix to prevent the problem that caused that first downtime.

Our apologies for the inconvenience, please carry on now. :)

UserDB maintenance

Erwin — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:59:32 PDT

The previous UserDB downtime was part 1 of necessary maintenance work, on Monday June 4 we'll do part 2. This will again involve a maintenance window of an hour, at 10am Eastern time.

As always anyone already logged into a game can continue to play as long as they don't need any web pop-up windows, which typically require authentication.

UserDB maintenance (complete)

Erwin — Wed, 30 May 2007 07:33:17 PDT

Maintenance went without any problems, the UserDB was back up after approximately 20 minutes. Game on!

UserDB maintenance

Erwin — Tue, 29 May 2007 08:39:56 PDT

Tomorrow morning around 10am Eastern we will briefly take the UserDB down for maintenance. The maintenance window for this will be 1 hour.

Anyone already logged into a game can continue to play but anything web-based that requires authentication will fail during this maintenance.

Skotos Power Problems (final)

Erwin — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:59:24 PDT

All websites except webmail.skotos.net were brought back up in the course of the day, yesterday. Last night and this morning we restored the webmail accounts for premium account holders.

With that, everything should be back up and running normal. If it isn't, please let us know through the usual channels.

Skotos Power Problem (update 2)

Erwin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:09:27 PDT

The website machine insisted on being unhappy so for today at least I've revived www.skotos.net and forum.skotos.net on different hardware. This may not work 100%, but well enough for folks to log into games and such. The rest will follow tomorrow.

Skotos Power Problem (update)

Erwin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:45:00 PDT

All machines are back up, except for the one running our main website. We are working on getting it back, one way or another.

Skotos Power Problem

Shannon — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:10:17 PDT

In doing some power work, our colo facility accidentally knocked down power to every machine they're hosting. The power is back on now, but there are continued routing problems to a few of our machines. We've got a call in to the facility, but it may take some time to restore everything, because they may well be dealing with hundreds of calls at this time.

Marrach Move

Erwin — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:30:49 PST

Tomorrow we'll be moving Marrach back to its own machine. This means about an hour downtime, starting at 10 AM Eastern.

UserDB maintenance (done)

Erwin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:23:55 PST

The reboot has been performed, carry on. :)

UserDB maintenance

Erwin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:23:58 PST

Monday morning we plan to reboot the UserDB, to tweak its configuration.

The Time: 10 AM, Eastern (7 AM Pacific).
The Date: Monday, January 29 2007.

Time allocated for this work is 1.5 hour. Anyone already logged into a game can of course stay logged in, but a lot of web based (authenticated) things will not work during the downtime.

Maintenance done

Erwin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:33:31 PST

All games are back up. At some point in the near future Marrach will be moved again, but there will be an announcement to that effect before that happens.

Game on!

Marrach Update

Erwin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:18:34 PST

The complications have resulted in us needing to move Marrach back to the very machine that it came from, temporarily, while we remove the unhappy one from the rack and deal with that later. We'll bring it back up after we're done with the second maintenance job today.

Marrach Maintenance

Erwin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:49:31 PST

We ran into an unexpected complication and will need someone to pay the actual machine a visit. This should happen shortly, but it will quite likely mean a somewhat extended downtime. We'll do our best to have Marrach back up as soon as possible and post updates here.

Machine maintenance

Erwin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:21:25 PST

To correct another misconfiguration, we'll be taking down the machine with Ironclaw Online, Lazarus and Lovecraft Country on it from 2pm to 4pm Eastern Time, tomorrow (Thursday). Our apologies for this inconvenience, but it has to be done.

Maintenance (Castle Marrach)

Erwin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:15:42 PST

To correct a misconfiguration, we'll be taking down Castle Marrach tomorrow from 10am to noon, Eastern Time. Our apologies for the inconvenience and we invite you to try out some of our other games if you're looking for a distraction!

Games moving

Erwin — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:36:36 PST

Tomorrow (Thursday), throughout the day we'll move several games onto a new machine. This includes The Lazarus Project, Lovecraft Country, and Ironclaw Online. Downtime for the individual games will be in the 30-60 minutes, mostly to synchronize the files from the old to the new machine.

This move should make all of them quite a bit snappier.

Site Back Up

Shannon — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:19:21 PST

Thanks for your patience.

Skotos Web Site Down

Shannon — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:06:09 PST

The Skotos web site is currently down due to technical difficulties.

Castle Marrach maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 07:35:51 PST

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we'll be performing the same kind of maintenance for Castle Marrach that's been done for Ironclaw Online, Lovecraft Country, and others. Expected downtime is about 4 hours and this work will start at 10 AM Eastern Time, with the game being back up around 2 PM. Our apologies for any convenience this may cause.

Lovecraft downtime

Erwin — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:49:52 PST

Apologies for the extended downtime this morning with Lovecraft. I ran into an unexpected problem and rather than having to abandon the work already done and redoing it some other day (1.5 hours of work down the drain) I tracked it down and solved it today. All should be well, now!

Planned maintenance

Erwin — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:00:08 PST

In the next few days we will be taking the following games down for maintenance, each between 10am and noon Eastern time:

Tuesday: The Lazarus Project
Wednesday: Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night
Thursday: Ironclaw Online

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Authentication

Erwin — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 09:08:23 PST

We're aware that authentication and related activities that query the UserDB have been slow in the past few days. We know the cause, which is temporary, but can't easily correct the problem. On a related note, I rebooted the UserDB, in an attempt to speed it up. In a few minutes I hope to find out if that helped.

Games back up

Erwin — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 11:42:42 PST

The three games (Ironclaw, Lovecraft and Mortalis) are now back up and running.

Server down

Erwin — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 09:06:00 PST

The server Kelner on which Lovecraft, Ironclaw and Mortalis live, is having technical difficulties. I'll be bringing the games back up elsewhere for now and will post an update on that as soon as it has been done.

UserDB performance

Erwin — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:35:46 PST

The UserDB (the server that our games and account web-pages connect to, to check your credentials) has been experiencing some hiccups. They are entirely my fault. The most recent one was due to trying to squeeze 2GB of data into 1GB of RAM. That just makes things a bit slow. I promise to leave it alone for the rest of the evening. Carry on!

TEC Status

Shannon — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:53:55 PDT

It looks like we're having some continued TEC downtime due to some additional problems. Bruce is currently working on it, but expects at least 2 more hours of downtime, possibly more.

TEC Rebooting

Shannon — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 08:32:41 PDT

We had a crash of TEC late last night. It's now being brought back up and we should have regular service within an hour.

Forums Down

Shannon — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 11:22:03 PDT

We are doing a large-scale upgrade on the Skotos forums which will have them down part or all of the afternoon.

Days of Wonder (Really) Back

Shannon — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 11:33:15 PDT

We had some continuing issues, but it now looks like the Days of Wonder games are really working again, meaning that you now have a total of 10 different board games to supplement your RPG experience.

Limited Downtime on Thursday

Shannon — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 14:16:48 PDT

We're going to be some final moves & cleanup of our new colo this Thursday (June 8) from 2pm-5pm PT. Downtime should be very limited, but we'll be swapping some ether cables as we clean things up, and that will cause lags of several minutes long on individual machines as we do.

Partial downtime (2)

Erwin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:55:03 PDT

Whoops. It went so smoothly I forgot to post an update. All games are back up. Game on!

Partial downtime

Erwin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 11:31:57 PDT

As per the announcement earlier this week, we're moving some of our servers, with as effect that Castle Marrach, S7 and Lazarus Project are currently unavailable. An update will follow when everything is back up and running.

Days of Wonder Back!

Shannon — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:50:52 PDT

The Days of Wonder games are back! We apologize for the extended downtime. And if you like board games, be sure to try out our new GTO games too.

Thursday Downtime: Marrach, S7, Lazarus

Shannon — Tue, 30 May 2006 13:32:28 PDT

This Thursday, approximately 11am to 3pm PT, we'll be moving another set of machines to our new facility. This will result in temporary downtime for Castle Marrach, The Lazarus Project, and the Skotos 7 server.

Days of Wonder Issues

Shannon — Fri, 19 May 2006 10:58:26 PDT

We're aware that logins to the Days of Wonder games are currently not working. This seems to be a side effect of yesterday's move of the Skotos web server. Unfortunately the technician needed to fix this at DoW is currently out of town, but we're nonetheless hoping it can get resolved soon.

We are back!

Erwin — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:15:45 PDT

That scheduled downtime went as intended, but we had a minor hardware bump to work around, which slowed us down a bit. Website, games and UserDB/authentication should now all be back up, however. Carry on!

Planned Downtime: Thursday the 18th

Shannon — Fri, 12 May 2006 16:41:32 PDT

We are planning a site-wide downtime this coming Thursday from 11am to 3pm, PT. We will be moving the machines with our web site, the user database, and the games Galactic Emperor: Hegemony, Lovecraft Country, Ironclaw, and Mortalis, and thus they will be down for the interim. Other games may be marginally accessible, but without the website or database, you won't be able to log onto to them. As with other recent downtimes, this one is scheduled to get machines into our new co-location facility.

Grendel\'s Revenge Even More Back Up

Shannon — Wed, 03 May 2006 15:26:52 PDT

We just fixed a problem relating to filetypes which was preventing some people from logging into GR.

Grendel\'s Revenge

Erwin — Wed, 03 May 2006 09:59:44 PDT

The game is back up, game on. :)

Grendel\'s Revenge

Erwin — Wed, 03 May 2006 08:45:19 PDT

The game has been taken down and we are moving data around as we speak. Expect several hours of downtime and an update on this site when it's back up.

TEC in transit (2)

Erwin — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:58:56 PDT

It's back up now. Game on!

TEC in transit

Erwin — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 09:29:13 PDT

The TEC move is now in progress. Sit back, relax, have lunch, watch a movie or read a book, and we'll let you know as soon as it is back up.

Next Wednesday GR Move

Shannon — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:19:10 PDT

We'll be moving GR to a new machine at the new facility a week from Wednesday, on 5-3. This downtime is expected to be several hours long, but will result in GR running on a newer, faster machine.

Thursday TEC Move

Shannon — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 19:15:07 PDT

We'll be moving TEC to the new facility on Thursday morning (PT). This will result in approximately 2 hours of downtown.

Pending Machine Moves

Shannon — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 11:46:41 PDT

Last Friday we signed a contract with a colo facility which we'll eventually be hosting all of Skotos at. We've had this in process for quite a while, and we've been hosting RPGnet at the facility since January; we've been very happy with the results. The new colo facility will have more reliable power and network than we've been able to provide at the Skotos machine room, which should generally limit hardware issues as our sole point of failure. We're going to be moving all of Skotos over sometime between now and the end of May. We've got a test machine there already, and will be moving other machines soon, but we're waiting on some new hardware before we can finish things up. We'll make sure to announce scheduled downtimes for the move here.