OSY Discussion Forum

Apparently I've got a dodgy power adapter on an eSATA disk that is extremely important to me. So I've got to toy with this thing for a bit in an effort to resolve the issue. This will require shutting down the server for a bit. Downtime will commence in about half an hour. I will post here once the server is brought back up.

Actually it looks like I can avoid bringing the server down for this. My eSATA controller driver doesn't support hot swapping the disk, but I found a work-around for Windows that will resolve that issue:

Sweet. Another excuse for rebooting bites the dust. Thank goodness nothing WoW related is stored on this drive, so WoW will remain up without issue.

Damn Antec enclosure needs to be replaced. The power adapter cord for it is no longer maintaining a secure connection unless it is bent a certain way (which it is and will remain until a replacement gets here). Damn. I hate it when something that was supposed to be solid can't even last six months.... Well here is the replacement I grabbed off of Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Macally-G-S350SU- ... 386&sr=8-1

Hopefully that will do the trick. Oh and a helpful tip for anybody that tries out the Hotswap utility I mentioned earlier.... the drive automatically reconnects when the power is flipped off and on. So since I forgot to detach the eSATA cable, I had a tight moment where the server was less than responsive. Still no reboot required.... sigh.

No worries Jay.

I've always been antsy about workstation/desktop class hot plug stuff. I've had it bite me in the ass in the past. For the extra piece of mind, I certainly don't mind if you want to have some downtime. But it if something is supposed to be hotswappable, it doesn't hurt to try.

Heh. Yesterday was full of downtime. Heh. I got a little crazy and updated a bunch of stuff. Stuff like VMWare, Windows Updates, Linux Guest Updates..... an OS upgrade or two. Whoops. Yeah the server is now running Windows Server 2008 R2. Nobody had logged in for the last few days so I figured I'd go ahead and get all of these upgrades out of the way. I also installed my new eSATA enclosure.

The server should be good to go for awhile now. I also fixed a deeply annoying issue in which the MaNGOS service would attempt to start before MySQL, which resulted in it failing when the server started up. I made some registry edits to add a dependency to the MaNGOS service for MySQL, and the problem appears to be solved now

I imagine the dead time on logging in is due to 3.3 being out now. MaNGOS is working on adding support for it and apparently it somewhat works in current SVN snapshots. I'm hesitant to give it a shot until they decide it's stable enough for general use however. Progress for 3.3 implementation is being tracked at the following URL:

http://github.com/mangos/mangos/commits/330

So I imagine within a few weeks, my server will be able to support 3.3 clients fully. Only time will tell however. And with Christmas coming up, all bets are off I suppose.

Ah that explains it. I've been busy all week and of course tried to get on last night. I correctly assumed you were geeking out on it.

Sorry buddy

So I've been screwing around with the SVN ManGOS 3.30 branch this morning and I can actually get it to compile with ScriptDev2. I had to make a few changes to the AuctionHouseBot patch I am using, but I shoehorned it in there.

So now I'm tempted to see whether or not it's worth an upgrade to this new version to see if 3.30 will work. Have you upgraded to 3.30 yet Mord or are you planning to anytime soon?

Of course I could just setup a test realm with it and see how that works out Yeah I think I'll do that. I'll take last nights DB backups and restore them into new test realm DBs....

Test Realm up. Just up the port number for my realm by one and you'll be able to connect to it. Since I can't run a WoW client from where I am at, I have no idea how well this works or even supports 3.3. I don't even really know if I have the firewall configured right The new world is called, "Quagmire" instead of "Molarix".

The DBs for Quagmire were populated using last night's Molarix backups. In a few hours I'll get home and test this setup out myself

So far the 3.3.0 server works well enough. Keep in mind that if you are interested in connecting, you'll need to use 3.3.0a, the absolute latest version from Blizzard. Other versions will be denied access

Cool, I'll check it out. My desktop is on it's last legs, which I'm replacing any day now - it was the only box I had the latest WoW client on. I'm super-busy this week so I probably won't be on much (working right now in fact), hoping things slow down for me next week.

I meant to mention this last week - my kid's private server forced me to update all my home machines, but I can no longer connect to your server. It gives me the following error message:

"Unable to valid game version. This may be caused by file corruption or the interference of another program. Please visit [http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articlID=21031] for more information and possible solutions to this issue."

It actually happened a few weeks ago on my home PC, but I didn't pay it much attention because of the problems I was having with it.


In the meantime, retail's Dungeon Finder and Argent Tournament have really gotten their claws into me...

Hmmmm... that happens when the server version is different from your client version. I guess it's time to look into upgrading for real, huh?

Ok even though Mangos 3.3.0a mods are not official yet - we have officially moved to it. You should be able to log into the normal server with 3.3.0a (3.2.2a will not work anymore). The test realm, Quagmire has been taken down.

Cool, I'll check it out.

My server is in the process of rebooting now for Windows Updates. However I have also applied the latest YTDB content update which adds support for new achievements with 3.3.0 and starts adding basic support for some 3.3.0 content (though basic is the key word there). I've been playing with 3.3.0a over the last few days and I've been very pleased. It had been a few weeks since I last got a chance to play any WoW... but the server is running pretty nicely. My BE Pally is up to level 33 now and all is going well...

Fuck. MySQL took a major dump on me. The damn thing won't even start up now. This is after a MySQL reinstall and reconfig from scratch. If I can't get this fixed - bye bye WoW server....

Whew. It's back. It took an uninstall and a clearing of the InnoDB tablespace in order to resolve the issue. Wow that thing is hard to debug.

And of course we are down again. The good news I finally managed to track down the performance issue I was getting nailed with. Apparently the version of the Auctionhouse Bot patch I was using was creating endless item_instance records and wasn't appropriately cleaning it's auctionhouse records. This resulted in millions of spurious records in the DB. I've updated the patch but I'm still cleaning the ratty data out of the tables. Once that is done we should be back better than ever...!

I hope...

Alright everything is back. Let's see how it goes!

By the way, did you realize that granting two talent points per level means you can actually get more than 71 points? That's kind of cool, though it's a bit of a game breaker. I can't remember what level my Rogue is, but I think he had something like 85 talent points last time i played him.

Yep. I did that on purpose. One of the mods I made today was I doubled all Talent Point awards for DK quests as well. It may be a game breaker - but remember - the server is designed for soloing. So allowing you to have a greater range of talents is one way of allowing your character to handle a wider variety of content on it's own.

I do especially like how dungeons are soloable. Very fun.

Okay I made a few more changes to the config today:

Horde/Alliance players can now be friends and chat with one another.

Quests now provide 3x the experience instead of 4x (I felt like I wasn't getting to see enough content in some areas because I was outleveling it).

Exploration provides only 4x the experience instead of 8x.

Rest Experience accumulation has been reduced drastically (I went overboard bigtime here). From 25x down to 0.5x. I figured with exp awards increased all around, there was no real need here. Anybody with rest experience before the change still has it however.

So yeah fun stuff. It definitely appears that the auctionhouse bot item_instance bug is fixed. I've been checking the tables each day and been pleasantly surprised to find that the numbers match up appropriately.

My next planned update will occur whenever the vehicles patch on the MaNGOS forums progresses a bit more. Once it becomes stable enough - I'd very much like to add that feature into the game.

Note: Molarix has been updated to the cutting edge version of everything as of this morning. It now requires a client patched to 3.3.2.