Been awhile

Its been awhile since I posted, the servers are doing OK, we need people to bring them up in the mornings and that isn't happening with out me, I think we should look to expand upon on member base with players who play in the AM, that might help get the server up and going.

Server #2

We had a problem where server #2 stopped working for a about 2 hours last night, the issue seems to have been a networking one, the server stayed up it just wasn't connecting to the outside world, as soon as it did i started getting the log in HLSW so, I know it didn't restart, other wise I wouldn't have been getting the log.

Other then that things are pretty neutral at this point, we're holding our ground, not gaining, but not losing.

been ages

Its been ages since I updated this thing;

Here's the skinny, we're doing alright, people are starting to buy slots we've got both servers settled. We had to use Beetlesmod as something in Sourcemod is causing crazy lag issues, other then that nothing is really new at this point.

SQL Database

For some reason admin is getting screwed up between the 3 different servers, some people have no admin on one server and too much admin on another server, it is very odd, and I am having problems pinning it down, computers shouldn't act this way. :-P

Team Fortress 2 Custom Server Tab

When Valve made the changes to TF2 to list any servers which made changes to the core game play settings on the custom browser tab they screwed a lot of servers, those servers seen a sharp drop in traffic.

The way it worked was with a new cvar called sv_tags, what would happen was if you had short spawn time you would get the sv_tag “nomorerespawntime” and you would be listed in the custom server tab and face a massive drop in players. There is a tag called “increasedmaxplayers” if you server has more then 24 players.

There are two ways around this, one remove the settings that caused the tag, a lot of people don't want to do this, many people like short spawn time or playing w/ more then 23 other people. The other way is to use addon software for the server that obscures the tags. Both Beetlesmod and SourceMod can do this. We run SourceMod on both servers.

Our Gold Rush server is 28 slots with normal respawn time, our 2fort server is 32 slots with 5 second respawn time, both servers are listed on the Internet tab and get lots of traffic. So much traffic in fact that we are considering adding a 3^rd server for custom maps.

What Valve should have done was added more filters to the Internet tab and used the sv_tags in such a manor as to filter the results, instead of putting people in a tough spot, by either playing by the rules and getting no traffic, or using hacks to get listed.

Fatty fun

Look at them Fatties!

Slacking

I've been slacking on the updates here.

Well, aside from The Bunny event things are going well, #2 is still a problem, but, it seems to be getting better. Our #1 server is ranked 113th in the 94th percentile. Gold rush seems to be fairly popular at this point, we're not having a problem keeping that server up. The 2fort server has a problem when the lag strikes, the server will lose people and die out, if it weren't for the lag that server would be doing much much better.

What we're thinking about doing is running a server out of Arcanus' house, he has fiber so it shouldn't be a problem, he has a quad core box w/ 3gb of ram, so that shouldn't be an issue, we just need to set it up so that we can get some remote control over the box, no one wants to sit and baby sit a PC all day. We would like to run this off of the server edition of Ubuntu, we'll need Andrew to figure out a procedure for this work though, we won't have the same pretty web interfaces that we have with the paid hosting, we'll have to do all this stuff the hard way with the command line, unless Mister Ubuntu Certified can figure out a way to set that up.

We've also added some more people from the 352nd and have a lot of pubs who wish to join us, so things are going fairly well for us as a whole.