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EnterTheGame |
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EnterTheGame
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IRC
Network Information |
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IRC
Help and Guides |
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MD Server Maint |
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November 6th, 2009 |
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Our MD Server will be going down between Sat and Monday to be relocated to a different rack in it`s data center. We have had it out of the DNS loop now for over a week and there are only about a hundred people left on it. If you are one of them, please just reconnect to irc.enterthegame.com
Thanks!
VD-WHiZ |
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306 characters |
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New Feature for Approved Eggdrops |
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October 7th, 2009 |
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Starting today we have implemented a new feature for all of the approved Eggdrop bots on the network. All Eggdrops will automatically be logged into a vhost named Eggdrop.on.EnterTheGame.com upon connection. We feel this will add a layer of security to them by making it so people can`t see their real IP Addresses.
Normally you can only get a vhost by being a member of an established organization or clan, which left eggdrops that were a service to certain channels in a void and unprotected. We feel this addresses that issue for our eggdrop users.
The best part of this is, you don`t need to edit your channels auto-op or auto-v lists for your bots to still have the access they had before. Because they were added to your channels lists via their real ip all access they had before they will still have now.
Also, if you`d prefer to have your bot on a different host, you are still able to log them into your clan`s/org`s vhosts as always.
VD-WHiZ |
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966 characters |
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Eggdrop Issues |
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June 13th, 2009 |
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Due to some extra security measures we added a week or two ago to help protect the users and network from spambots that were joining, eggdrops (being they are also bots with a simular configuration to the spambots) have been getting detected and banned as well.
We just finished a work-around for this. We have modified our system to where we can add approved/good bots to the security system so it will recognize them and they won`t be glined. To apply for your bot to be added to the good bot list please see WHiZ or GeoM in #ETG.
Thanks!
VD-WHiZ |
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Reserved Nicknames |
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October 8th, 2008 |
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We are going to be reserving all *Serv & *Services nicknames to prevent confusion with users and what bots/services are ones run by ETG and other people. There are only around 6 bots on the network that are using names like that, so now makes for a good time for us to implement this change. We hope this will prevent confusion and improve security to where nobody would accidentally msg any non-ETG run bot passwords or such. Thank you for your understanding, any questions can be asked in #ETG.
VD-WHiZ |
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New Security System Enabled |
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October 7th, 2008 |
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As of last night we have re-implmented banning on all insecure connections we find. The past year we have generally only been banning abused connections, spambots, and trojaned machines etc. It has left us pretty secure but it has left us with greater abuse by ban evaders and left us being on the defense against them. We will start going back on the offense at preventing these insecure systems from being used on our network, and you will see a gradual increase over the next year of more and more of our security systems coming back on-line to keep those systems off. These will help keep people from evading bans, as well as will cut down even more on spamming and other problems.
I`d like to personally thank GeoM for helping out with the creation and testing of this new system.
VD-WHiZ |
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Major Network Maint TODAY! |
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September 30th, 2007 |
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We will be taking down ChanServ, splitting and updating some servers and doign various other maint this morning between the hours of 9-11:59am. To prevent as much downtime as possible please connect to fl.enterthethegame.com or germany.enterthegamme.com. Either one of those servers will at least keep you connected to IRC during the maint.
Thanks,
VD-WHiZ |
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Explaination of Recent Downtime |
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June 16th, 2007 |
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Greetings,
I would like to take a moment to further explain our recent downtime (in the past 1.5 weeks).
We have been doing some major upgrades to our infrastructure the past couple weeks. We invested in a large managed switch to replace our large unmanaged one we had been using the past 5 or so years. We invested in remote power cycling equipment to be able to cycle power on servers remotely, and we also spent a bit of time to get WOL functionality setup and tested on ChanServ`s main server.
All of these investments and this and other work was to improve our overall uptime and hasten our ability to respond to any downtime. The overall outages we were having during this time was a couple 1-2.5 hour outages during installations and testing.
We still have not finished with all of this work and will continue working on it soon, but put everything on hold after a major stint of downtime we had on Wed 6/13/07. This downtime was completely unexpected and uncontrolable by us.
Long story short the morons at AT&T messed up one their backbone routers affecting many of their customers in our area, giving all of us an inability to connect to the majority of the Internet including most high-traffic sites such as Yahoo etc.
Our main office & ChanServ got caught in this mess and likewise both were unable to connect to the rest of ETG as well. The outage was immediately noticed, pages went out, phone calls were made, and staff was dispatched to the office to see what was wrong. Sadly upon getting there we discovered it was a bad internet outage. We had other plans in place if it dealt with power, but this was something we didn`t have a good answer for.
We called AT&T around 12:30 and talked to them the majority of the early morning hours. After struggling for a long time to get past Tier 1 techs who only knew how to read off questions and answers off a flowchart, we finally got to Tier 2 support that wasn`t much more helpful. They didn`t take our outage very seriously and considered it something needing a machine or router restart on our side despite us saying there had been no changes and the problem layed with them.
We were in the office until around 5:30am when we finally gave up getting AT&T to listen and decided to try again in a couple hours.
Around 6-7am AT&T started getting calls from a number of its other business customers complaining of an outage. ONLY THEN did they get off thier butts and take it seriously enough to even LOOK TO SEE IF THERE WAS AN ISSUE and try to find the issue. This is just completely insane. I understand, yes you are a big company and normally if there is a problem on your side you will get alot of people calling in. But if it is not during standard business hours, guess what, people won`t be at thier office to see it and call in. So maybe, just MAYBE if you didn`t have lazy people, who instead would take the initiative when a problem is reported at 12:30am you wouldn`t have had an outage until 5:30pm.
Anyways, after they found the problem. Then they spent many hours trying to figure out how to fix what they messed up in the first place. =/ Rule #1 in router changes, backup your config before you make changes. If things don`t work you can revert to the old one. There is NO GOOD REASON that it would take almost 12 hours from when they realized there is a problem or about 18 from the second it was first reported to repair the problem. Especially for a big company like AT&T which definately had infrastucture in place they could have switched traffic off to while they repaired it.
Anyways, we will be contacting a customer rep this coming week to make sure our voice on this outage is heard well.
We are very sorry for this downtime, and we hope AT&T will put policies in place to actually investigate outages more proactively as a result. Thank you for your understanding.
VD-WHiZ |
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ChanServ Is ONLINE |
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March 24th, 2007 |
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Ok, as stated in the previous news post, we have gone and brought ChanServ back up for testing. All functions are again enabled and we are accepting new channel registrations again.
What you need to keep in mind however is, that if we have to take chanserv back down for more work and go back to using the temporary version during the downtime. Any changes you made to your channels will not exist in the temporary version. They aren`t lost, but they won`t be in that version. When we switch back to the full version, your changes would all be there.
In terms of future planning, we are currently looking into things we can do to help prevent this type of power issue in the future. We are going to either be installing redundant power so we have power from two power companies with automatic switchover, or we will be installing a high-end generator. We feel either of those will suite our needs pretty well for power outages.
VD-WHiZ |
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ChanServ Update |
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March 24th, 2007 |
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Just to update everyone. We are still working on the main server that houses ChanServ. We have replaced its power supply, and all of the harddrives. We have finished copying the operating system and all data over to the new drives and have the raid system currently mirroring them to get us back to a usable state. It has been mirroring the drives the past 5 hours and is 61% done. We expect it to be complete by morning. In the morning we will run a check on everything one last time, and then will verify data integrity. If everything looks good we will test load services back online for a bit to see how everything operates and monitor for any other problems. If all goes well we will be live again Saturday, if there are more problems it might be Sunday or Monday. We`ll let you know more in the morning.
Thanks,
VD-WHiZ |
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ChanServ Downtime |
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March 21st, 2007 |
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Welp.. It appears we are not out of the woods just yet.. The outage we had (thank you oh great and powerful company who illuminates our lives).. appearantly has damaged the main server that hosts ChanServ. We are working to test and find where the problem is, be it hardware or operating system. We won`t have more information on that until tomorrow morning sometime.
Knowing how much we all need ChanServ up we are trying to see if we can get up a backup version temporarily to help. With any luck we will have this up tonight. If for whatever reason we are unable to do this we will make another post discussing it.
Thanks again for your understanding,
VD-WHiZ |
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ETG ChanServ Downtime |
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March 21st, 2007 |
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As you noticed we had a MAJOR outage with ChanServ wed morning starting around 3am EDT. There was a complete power outage to the entire office complex chanserv is hosted at. Calls were placed to the electric company and we were told a team was being dispatched. Many calls over many hours later, we come to find out they never bothered to dispatch despite what they kept saying.
So long story short, 12 hours of downtime thanks to morons[more colorful words edited out] at the electric co. =( Our servers are on backup batteries, but the max they last is about an hour and they did that job and kept things running the best they could. So anyways, we are beyond sorry for this outage, and things are back to normal by the time you read this.
VD-WHiZ |
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Changes 2 Services & Policies |
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July 4th, 2006 |
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We have applied some changes to services to help eliminate the problem of a couple clans that were abusing the scrim system. They should no longer be able to spam under certain circumstances. As always, if you see a clan abusing any ETG System or Service please contact an ETG Admin in #ETG so that we can deal with the abusive user.
We also have modified some of our rules/policies. Please make sure you periodically look them over to stay up-to-date.
VD-WHiZ |
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Planned Maint |
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June 20th, 2006 |
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One of our uplinks is going to have some maint tomorrow on the 21st of June. They have scheduled a window for between 6pm EST and midnight EST. So you can expect to see some user drops and possibly even a net split during this time. If you do get disconnected just reconnect to irc.enterthegame.com and you should be fine.
VD-WHiZ |
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Planned Services Maint |
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May 1st, 2006 |
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We are expecting some maint on the routers that chanserv and other etg services use this friday-sunday. As a result, chanserv may go down for a couple hours during this time while this is being worked on. The downtime is planned for early morning hours (after midnight and before 8am EST) so the main people who would notice the disruptions are those in Europe and Australia.
VD-WHiZ |
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Upcoming Maint |
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March 19th, 2006 |
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We will have a couple splits on monday morning as we go through a little server maint that we have been working on the past couple days. Thanks.
VD-WHiZ |
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