The provider informed me that there will be a scheduled disconnect of the server from the network for maintenance reasons today on 4.21.2015 between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM CST. The update will improve stability and security.
Since this is only the server being disconnected from the network, there is no risk at all for your stuff on the server. Just please wait until it gets reconnected again. No need to notify my unless the disconnect takes longer than one hour.
So I got the confirmation from the provider that we were, in fact hit by a DDOS attack on Tuesday. Despite all the (more or less hilarious) attempts to be hacked over the last years, this was the first time something like this happened. Since I had no idea what was going on and since it happened 4:00 am in my time, it took me quite a while until I woke up and was able to call the provider regarding the issue after I tried several things to fix it myself since I had to go to the office and was quite busy there.
The provider realized the issue and started filtering the attack successfully. Here is a graph of the network traffic during that time:
So you can see it was quite heavy compared to what normally happens on the server. The daily bigger spikes that you can see early in the morning are by the way the off-site backups that are done every day.
The /find piston command should work now again. The pistons are very weird because normally they would have a data value of zero, but sometimes they have a value of 7 and I have no idea so far why and when. I have removed the data value 7 now from the database, we will have to see if something weird pops up now.
So, after we have been offline, the Minecraft servers went down for maintenance for 5 hours. You can continue playing, but if you log out, you most likely won’t be able to log back in. Please stand by.
I just got the server back online. It seems we had a DDOS, but I am not 100% sure. I still need to wait if I can get a confirmation from the hosting provider. If there are outages within the next 24/48 hours, please be patient, I will be working on it.
There was an issue with quartz ore wins from the lottery. Those should be fixed now. Polished andesite basically worked fine but would show up in the shop as “Stone”. This is also fixed now.
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
I have found this website through reddit which rates a websites reading level and ran it through our front page and our rules page and we got level 6 on both of them:
So next time someone says the test is too complicated, ask them about their age. If it’s below 11, they are right. Not that we should change anything, it just means they probably might be better off on another server.
So it turns out that the plugin which resets our end world does not completely wipe it. It seems that someone has been abusing this by building a base outside the reset radius that the plugin applies and maintaining farms there to make the dragon fight easier.
So I was forced now to install a manual end reset process that once a day wipes the world completely. Please do not exploit bugs in the game. If I catch someone doing this it’s an insta-ban.
Someone tried to submit a new user promotion proposal but it failed and sent me an error message. I fixed the issue and the system should be working now. This was still a leftover issue due to the username -> uuid change.
When I was away the last 2 weeks, I went diving and saw some really cool stuff. Here are some of the highlight photos:
These are eagle rays. I have not seen them before so well. They are cool but have a really weird face
This is a porcelain crab. They live on the same anemone as the clown fish (above it). They have a fan-like thing that they open up and hold up in to the water (the two inside-pointing arms between the claws), then use smaller brushes (the smaller arms inside of that) to clean out whatever they caught.
Sting ray, this one was quite big (about a meter across)
Sail Fish. Never seen those before. They are huge (like 3 meters) and aparently one of the fastest fish. They have a extendable fin on the back, looks very cool.
Here you can see the face of the eagle ray. As I wrote above, very weird.
Green see turtle. They are stuck to the ground eating most of the time, it’s not so easy to get a photo of them against a blue background.
This is just a quick draft between getting up and getting breakfast. I will convert this into a page later.
IMPORTANT: If you can, empty your inventories and Enderchests in all survival worlds before changing the username, otherwise there is a risk that the contents will be gone.
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
So FYI, I am on vacation. Since I had to cancel Christmas and New year as well as Chinese New year (Which is a major deal around here), I finally took the chance to go for 2 weeks on vacation, something that I do only every 2-3 years. I will still have some telephone calls on several days for business, but I am sure I will be able to relax a lot during this time.
What does this mean for the server? Not too much. If there is ANY problem or question, just email me as usual. My reply just might take a bit longer and you most likely won’t see me on IRC at all, and I most likely won’t be making any non-urgent fixes for the time.
So this whole post is more to tell you that I did not fall off the edge of the world in case you don’t see me in-game. Have fun minecrafting!
GMail is currently blocking our emails. If you are registering a new account, please use an alternative email if possible. We are working to fix the issue.
[Update] I managed to resolve this a couple of days ago. [/Update]
There are several things that I am working right now and others that I re-discovered as to-dos:
Just updated the server to 1.8.3. Not much more to say to that. Good to know we are up to date with the client.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
So we used to have an end world that was connected to our main world, which is the city. However, the issue was, that despite the fact taht your inventory would be cleared, people could drop weapons etc from a creative world city through the portal into the end and then fight the dragon.
So I had to create an end world which is not connected through a standard End portal to the city. Instead it’s the same portal tech as used in the spawn house to get to the other worlds.
The result of this however is that you cannot get out of the end throug the standard portal either. In order for you to get your stuff out, I allowed people to deposit things in the end.
So next time you kill the dragon or want to get your stuff out of the end, simply deposit it and kill yourself.
The biggest piece still missing here is the lot reset. Good news is that I made some significant advances here. That means I have a system running where all the annyoing code changes seem to be done. What I have to do now is to test the different scenarios under which a lot can be reset and what happens if someone put a reservation on it.
As a first step, I will reset those lots that can be reset without acting on reservations, those are the most frequent anyhow and the safest to do.
The whole lot reset process can only run when the server is down. And I need to run tests carefully so I do not need to restore lots from backups and lot ownerships on top of that. So this whole process might take a couple of days. But at least we can see some progress now. Sorry again for the delays. I really had hopes to do this faster. The main issue I had was first of all that now since I am a father, most of my free time at home is spent with the baby. And then, most surplus time in the office was eaten up recently with some urgent project.
While I will be travelling most of march, I hope that I can get some stuff done and that we can see a step by step normalization of the lot reset process.