*edit* Okay maybe more like 97%. But lag free :D.

Welcome back to our wonderful little gaming community we have here. Our maintenance woes are over, for now. Everyone should be able to join and play at the same time without any lag. Or if there is any lag it would only be temporary vrs the two straight days of lag we had.

We have made some major jumps forward in how well off we are. Were using a platform built from the ground up with Minecraft and security in mind. We should not have any big problems for a while.

I really want to thank all of you for sticking with us during that really very badly timed maintenance window. I promise if we can ever avoid having a maintenance window during or approaching a weekend, we will avoid it like the plague.

Everyone should know that during the troubleshooting process I removed most entities in the world. I apologize for the inconvenience that this causes you in advance. I would also like to inform you that as part of our Anti-Griefing policy you can contact one of the admins and request that we repopulate your animal farms and we will be there to do that for you. We understand doing things twice sucks and we want to help you avoid very long walks with frustrating animals. We will give you at least 2 of each animal, picture frame, or item you lost.

Keep those ideas and suggestions coming. We are here for you! This group would be nothing without great members like yourself. Make sure you put in your two cents to make this game as fun as it can be for you and your friends. As always, we look forward to playing with you on the server where everythings better in the game.

We have reloaded our operating system and have reinstalled the necessary programs for minecraft. The server started to be functional 3pm est, WAY past when I was hoping to have it back up. It didn't help that right around the time I started to test its functionality Mojang stopped allowing users to login. Luckily that didn't last long and were back up and running now.  While I was at it I upgraded some of our plugins and many server configs. There are still some things that I need to work on but were officially saving the changes again. 🙂 YEA!

It was a long 12 hours of downtime but it will be worth it in the very near future.

If you jump on now you can play and anything done will be saved but the server may still be restarting and lagging every now and then.

Okay so today we ran into an issue. This morning no problems but after that we ran into lag around noon eastern. This was not ordinary lag this was server dropping to just a few frames per second. I spent quite a few hours trying to troubleshoot this problem and ran into more questions than I could find the answers to.

So here's where we are. We are making last second backups to the server and are documenting everything we can. We are working with our datacenter to have a complete OS reinstall. WOAH! Why a complete OS reinstall you ask. Well for a little detour its because when I first got this server it was so that I could enjoy my hobby of playing with linux servers. I just like making them work and trying out new software and testing its capabilities.

Thats what I find fun. Wierd huh? So this server has a lot of wierd stuff on it that is not necessary for MineCraft and to run an optimum server we need a better platform.  We were starting to plan this downtime for sometime next week. We just moved it up to tonight.

What you can expect. Tomorrow morning we will be playing on a server built from the ground up with Minecraft and you in mind.

Want to know more? Here's a little information about how we got started:

So I'm on the phone with my friend one day showing off my server and he asks do you want run a game server on it? I say "yes I do." I knew it would be fun and successful because back in 2003-2007 we ran a clan called 13thArmy. It was a Starcraft and Counter-Strike gaming clan with around 200 members. As a clan we had our own game servers for Counter-Strike and we both managed them :).  I am a little biased here but they were REALLY fun servers! Since I had the whole box we were able to run 12 game servers from one dedicated server and some of them were 64 slot servers that were full 24 hours a day. Tarqquin was able to combine plugins and configurations in a way that made the game non-stop fun all day long! . . great times. . Anyways life got in the way and we have been missing it ever since.

So here we are now. A new group, new game, new people were here for some new good times. 😀 Tarqquin has already put together a great list of plugins and a configuration that is really fun and protective. Now its time for me to setup a great foundation for us to run that configuration on. That will be done tonight and in the morning we should up and running.