[turtle]

Of course, it is Christmas Eve and Daddy Santa has a lot of work ahead so I'm going to be hit of miss tonight and tomorrow!

[turtle]

Server is coming down. Likely for two days. I'll let you all know when it comes back up.

Major electrical work at my house for the solar install.

[Brad]

Good luck! Thanks for the heads up.

[709]

Renewable energy FTB FTW!!

[Brad]

Originally Posted by 709 FTB

[709]

Right? Up until a bit ago I had that world running on an old High Sierra cheesegrater – I'd revisit every once in a while just to jetpack around. Somewhere along the way FTB upgraded their login app and I couldn't get the old world running again. C'est la vie.

[turtle]

We should be back up and running solid again. Solar isn't done but the power outages related to it should be for now. I've not been able to test it... this has been a REALLY stressful couple of days.

[turtle]

I'm gonna shutdown the server for a little bit so I can upgrade the host. Should be up in relative short order.

[turtle]

We are back.

[turtle]

Ok, I'm just gonna throw this out there, my internet service is really sucking right now. A tech is on the way but who knows when it will be "properly" repaired. Was stable, isn't now and hasn't been since the 3rd or so.

[turtle]

Known downtime is coming Monday the 27th. Likely all day but should be back up by evening.

[turtle]

Ummm...

We might have some REALLY bad news. I know that this server is not really being played on much, but it might get even less traffic here in a month or so.

I got a call from someone claiming to be AT&T to tell me that they will be killing my VDSL service next month. There is no other provider in this area. Everything is pushing me to go wireless. Those all have data caps and no static IPs nor port forwarding.

I might lose ALL of me resources being hosted in my house. This would be all my web services and all would have to go away or find a new home on the web again.

I looked at Starlink and they don't even offer coverage in my area yet. I would be waitlisted for them. So far they seem to be my best option though... once I would be able to get service with them. No static IPs, but maybe port forwarding. I also think they are free from data caps IIRC.

This sucks. I'll keep y'all posted.

[drewprops]

We will pay for an AWS instance if that's necessary, or are there dedicated MC world spin-up companies?

Also: that sucks. Very sorry to hear your news


...

[Brad]

Dang. Sorry to hear that! Minecraft server aside, I seem to recall that you've been hosting so much other personal stuff from your home network. I can only begin to imagine how stressful that will be to sort out. I've had Google Fiber in my home for the last few years, and whenever I hear news about their Fiber division, it's almost always a rumor about its inevitable demise, and my anxiety ramps right up. My next "best" options are Spectrum and AT&T, and unsurprisingly they are both much more expensive for much worse service.

As for the Minecraft server, I could trim the world and bring it back over to the main AppleNova server here. I'd need to enable the world border setting since I don't have unlimited disk space, but like you said, there's not a lot of activity lately, and I'm pretty sure this server could handle the load. (More on that below, though…)

As much fun as our little gaming community has been, though, I do believe its glory days are firmly behind us, several years behind us in fact. I would be bittersweet to say goodbye, of course, but maybe it's a happy ending for the server go quietly in the night while nobody is watching.

Originally Posted by drewprops We will pay for an AWS instance if that's necessary, or are there dedicated MC world spin-up companies?

Yeah, there have been dedicated Minecraft server hosts for the better part of a decade. I believe it's a pretty mature market now, but the last time I looked around (never seriously, just out of curiosity), most of them (certainly not the cheap ones) didn't allow the freedom to basically run with root access and do anything like we've had with T's server (and previously mine on AppleNova).

AWS gets expensive pretty fast, especially considering how little time we spend in game, at least compared to the dedicated Minecraft hosting services. The baseline EC2 type we'd want would probably be t4g.medium (2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM) which would run $25/month plus disk storage costs. To compare, dedicated Minecraft hosts with roughly equivalent resources run around $10/month. Do we have enough interest to sink ~$150-300/year on Minecraft? Probably not. I think my last login was around the December/New Years holiday break, and I've doubtless sunk countless hundreds of hours into our worlds over the years.

I currently pay $30/month for the server that runs AppleNova. It also hosts a few other personal projects of mine, and it's still somewhat idle. Linode just announced their first price increase in the whole 15+ years that I've been a customer ("Created: 2008-02-11"). Previously, as hardware got cheaper, every few years they'd actually give existing plans more resources for the same price point. I guess selling out to Akamai means someone took on a fat wad of debt, and now daddy's gotta get paid.

Anyway, soon it'll be $36/month, and I'll probably opt down to the next lower tier at $24/month (I'd already been thinking about dropping from $30 to $20, and this rate increase may push me over). The current tier has 3 CPU cores (of a 2.2 GHz AMD EPYC 7601) and 6 GB RAM. The $24/month tier has 2 CPU cores and 4 GB RAM. That would be pretty slim for the forums, database, my personal projects, and Minecraft. It could probably muster a couple people online, but certainly not the 10+ we had when business was booming a decade ago.

Huh. Actually, now that I do the math, it might be more economical for me to move all of AppleNova into AWS. That certainly wasn't always the case. One of the problems with running AppleNova in AWS EC2, though, is that EC2 blocks normal sendmail activity. That means the forums sending automated emails (subscribed thread updates, PM notifications, password resets) would be difficult or impossible to configure. But I digress…

T, I'll try to keep a close eye on this thread for your updates in the coming days and weeks. I'm long overdue for downloading a backup from your server; I'll update my local copy this weekend. As we approach end of service, I think it makes sense to coordinate a proper shutdown of the game server, at least in its current state. Maybe we can rally the troops for one last hurrah before the end?

If we don't migrate to a new server, I'm thinking it would only be fair to (…drum roll please…) finally share a downloadable backup of the current world for Drew, Grey, Ken, and anyone else who's still lurking to enjoy exploring on their personal machines. I could upload it to a free junk file hosting site like MEGA since serving god-only-knows how many GBs from AppleNova might be a tall order.