DoctorDitko

Hell, the last downtime was 61,320 hours! That turkey was very cold.

We tend to call it "air in the wires." PS: The "traditional" approach: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl

I don't know. Doesn't look entirely trustworthy.

And to be honest, OVH's average downtime is something like 2 hours a year for most clients. It is entirely possible that the initial support ticket was not escalated because the servers were all online as far as yon internet was concerned, and the intra-server connections were not understood to be critical.

Welcome home, Mondo! Sorry the place is a mess. It's the French Maid's day off.

Percussive maintenance, my old friend!

The first and still the best! (Unfortunately, it is still not opened to players. "DoctorDitko is not allowed to access this server. Reason: Stability testing before we open it for general use.")

It seems to be the internal networking between servers that is causing the issues. These can be tricky to track down. We had an entire cluster offlined because one node's InfiniBand card went bad, and it was spewing so much garbage to the IB switch that no real traffic could get through. That said, OVH have a rep for good hardware, good connectivity, good value... And crappy customer service. Think snooty French waiter (it's a French company).

It occurs to me we have a few servers worth of GMs with not much to do. (Excluding the engineers battling the problem, of course.) This inspires two thoughts: It might not be the best time to start a flamewar on the forums. Someone will probably notice. We should have enough people to run an old-fashioned RPG. Tabletop Champions, anyone?

The number 2600 also has other resonances for older folks, with certain hobbies...

I have searched the spreadsheets and this forum, and have had plenty of luck, all bad. Can anyone help me find the sound for the controller /Rad heal Radiant Aura?

Never rains but it pours. The building housing the clusters I shovel coal into for my day job had a pipe break and the basement flood yesterday. My paranoid boss designed our server room, though, so we're the only thing in the building still in business... As others have said, "IT happens."

I dunno, she doesn't look entirely trustworthy.

They really have had a stellar uptime history, especially for a volunteer-run cluster. That said, emergency reboots typically involve some diagnostics or repairs. Good luck to them, says I! I think the message broadcast was: "All servers going down for emergency reboot."

I've said it before, Yomo, you embody what makes this game's population such cool froods! Bless you for your (now doubled) generosity, and all the fun!

Nice guide, thanks! Incidentally, when playing the Grifter I choose "Crime and Punishment Monthly" and it works just fine to click through. Happy heisting! (And if you are ever on Torch and see me there, usually as "Real Doctor Ditko," hit me up. I'm always up for a nice SBB!)

Second Red Dragon, I think they are also sold as Piktek. Cheap as dirt and twice as hard to destroy!

Thanks! I can't believe I missed that thread. IIRC, CoH used OpenGL for graphics and DirectX for input. WINE would cover the DirectX part. Some of the issues they raise are solved problems, though: SDL 2+ has several OpenGL translation options, so that may not be a problem. I know OpenMW uses SDL to run Morrowind -- and pretty well on Android -- though Android 11 broke their touch controls, it's not bad with a Bluetooth controller. (Get it from FDroid if you are interested. You'll need an actual copy of Morrowind.) And the whole point of WINE on Android is to run generic ARM[32,64] binaries on Android, so if someone could make a compiled one public, I'd love to play around with it.* (See WineHQ for that one.) Lutris on Linux uses Vulkan stuff to run CoH now, so that part's not as silly as it sounds. Screen size... That one's a puzzler, I bet that would take some actual coding to do one of the auto-zoom features some games have. (One of these might help!) Anyway, it would be fun to try, however many black boxes need connecting. * Probably during lunch or bathroom breaks at work, but I do some of my best mad science then!

Short answer: Yes Long Answer: Yes, but... (This is all IMHO) Autohit powers are rare and precious, take them whenever one is offered. It's a one-slot wonder, drop a Range, Recharge, or (my fave) Perfect Zinger in and you are golden. (PVPers should start with Accuracy.) If you do slot it, it can mule some nice bonuses. It IS the Tank signature power, do you want some Brute or Blaster getting all the bad guys' attention? Check the power customizations, depending on powerset you may have some fairly humorous options. Every time a Tank skips Taunt, the archetypal Tank sheds a tear...

Hadn't seen this term, so I looked it up. First two entries on DDG: Welcome to BLUF https://www.bluf.com BLUF is a club for men who enjoy wearing breeches and leather uniforms. Founded in 1997, there are now over 4,000 members worldwide, and many of them meet in person at BLUF events. BLUF (communication) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication) A BLUF (bottom line up front) is acronym for a standard military communication that is precise and powerful. Precision is attained by beginning a message with the bottom line so the reader immediately gets the most important information first. This differs from an older, more-traditional style in which conclusions and recommendations are included at the end, following the arguments and ... Thanks for that. The second one jibes with the journalistic practice of inverse pyramid, aka "Don't bury the lede!" The first one... Sounds like 90% of the playerbase!

Excellent points, thanks for the expertise. I was counting on the networking and graphics to be handled by WINE. I think if someone compiled the CoH client for Windows on ARM, or maybe even RT, we might be able to fake it from there. (And, yeah, we're probably looking at one of those Bluetooth keyboards...) I'm not thinking of running a Hami raid, but just enough function to check my messages and maybe update my auctions would be fantastic!

I am a script kiddie. I hack together bash scripts to help with my system admin-ing, I can do a "./configure, make, sudo make install" without flinching, but I am in no way a programmer. So, to anyone who is, given that: Windows for ARM can now emulate 64-bit x86 fairly well. WINE for Android just hit a milestone of compatibility, given ARM Windows executables. We have the source from SCORE. Is there any hope of combining these into a CoH I could run/walk/crawl on my Android phone? Would it be daunting to try recompiling for ARM-64? Please destroy my vast ignorance, it has purple triangles on it!

When someone levels (particularly an attractive female toon) and I typo leaving out the d in "Good on ya!" Fortunately, so far they have seen the humor and guessed my innocent intent... Still embarassing!

Faultline, as I'm sure you know but didn't bother mentioning: Backups are great, A for effort. F for results unless: said backups are offline ('cause ransomware) and tested ('cause real life). There is an ancient story (Aw, Doc! Not again?) about a software engineer who was hired to write a backup system for a major corporation. He did this, and they promptly fired him. (This, unfortunately, happens a lot.) One day, the corporation suffered a catastrophic hardware failure (all the hamsters died at once). "No worries!" cried the management, "We planned for this!" They went into the engineer's cobweb-laden cubicle and opened his files. And found the notes for his never-written restore system... My sympathies lie with the Sanctuary admin, but it sounds like they are out of their depth. Next time, I suggest they publish their security setup in detail. If it's proper, the bad guys learn nothing useful from knowing it. If not, the good guys can suggest fixes. (Ask a cryptographer, they publish their source code. It's designed to be robust even if the attacker knows the entire source code.) Disclaimer: I know little of Windows servers, I only run the desktop version, and only for games. (And with nothing but TCP/IP 4 enabled on the NIC!) My idea of securing a Windows server is to put it behind a locked-down Linux server! But, still, sorry to hear of this, and I can only hope there was a script-kiddie with a grudge behind the attack. Good luck, admins!

Your point?