Posts by wild1145

@shrimp#2176 I've added that to the post anyway, ty.

As the winter break tends to be one of the most popular times of the year for TotalFreedom, I have decided this year to impose a full change freeze on the TotalFreedom servers.

During this window we will be restricting the changes that are made to the server and it's core infrastructure, so we will not be pushing new plugin updates / releases out and the only changes permitted will be ones agreed in advanced or that are deemed "Emergency".

As part of this all staff applications, reinstatements and similar will be frozen throughout this time. I am aware a lot of people tend to return over the winter break, and while it's great to see many admins who have been inactive for some time, I also appreciate that it's not so productive for the server when we end up with a lot of those re-instating or new players applying for admin who are unlikely to stick around.

Any applications and such that have not been resolved before December 17th will be locked and frozen until after January 4th 2021. The EAO may wish to add additional restrictions in advance of this window, and I'm sure if that is the case it will be announced shortly.

I appreciate this isn't something that's been done in some time, I know Mark when he ran things would often put a freeze to admin apps, and I am not sure if this will work, but my hope is that by getting things to a solid and stable state before December 17th, we can all enjoy a bit of rest and relaxation over the festive break without firefighting the server!

If you have any questions please let me know.

FAQ:

Q: Is SMP Affected by this?
A: Yes, the SMP server will be restricted in the changes that may be made in line with the freedom server.

Q: Are the beta servers affected by this?
A: No, as the beta servers are not likely to have a significant number of players, it will not be impacted by this change window. The beta servers may however not be available for joining during this window, it will be dependant on if we are still undergoing active beta testing for anything.

Q: Can I still appeal a ban?
A: Yes, we will still be allowing people to appeal bans of all natures, the only impact comes for reinstatements and new applications to become a member of server staff.

Q: Does this impact the round of senior admin applications currently underway?
A: No, the Senior admin applications should have concluded before this change freeze is introduced. If they over-run for any reason we will update this post with the decision made on if we postpone the voting or allow it to continue into the change window.

I will just chime in on this one in the interests of transparency.

We do now have a hub world up and running, however due to other things that I've been working on, I've not had time to transition that into a fully functional hub server. It's on my to-do list but from the MB's perspective they've done a smashing job and it's ready to go.

We are now starting this.

The SMP and MB Servers will not be affected just for clarity.

@DragonSlayer2189#2134 I don't think having it public actually makes any sense though, because you can't actually do anything about the data for one thing, you can just look and guess at what the data means. Given I doubt anyone else here has a detailed understanding of how the infrastructure is provisioned / configured what you may be seeing and going "Oh that's what it is" could be absolute nonsense, like with the DDoS example in your OP. We then end up in a position where I spend more time justifying the data and what it shows, then being able to do anything about that data, which is my concern.

Also, this is the standard monitoring tool I run on all our ATLAS services, it makes far more sense for it to be on a uniform platform where I can get actionable information rather than hosting something just so you and some other folks in the community can have a nosey as well... I can't see any benefits to going back to using Netdata, only more and more issues that it's going to cause me in the longer run...

TF Right now is spread across many servers, some of which are dedicated for TF's usage, some are shared as ATLAS Corporate services (Such as the DB) so you'd only ever get half the picture anyway, which is why I'm concerned this will waste more time in me implementing it and troubleshooting questions folks have than the benefits it could ever serve...

@Miwojedk#2160 Not as far as I was aware at least, I thought the entire point of these (And it's something I disagree with tbh) was so Exec's who weren't deemed to be fulfilling their duties could be removed without causing a massive song and dance about it...

@fionn#2131 Further to this.

I have absolutely no issue suspending admins and imposing sanctions on admins or players on the forums and in game if people are going to continue to bully and harass people. I've seen the content that has already had to be moderated on this thread, and it's absolutely unacceptable.

I won't sit here and allow that type of behaviour to continue, so please take this as your one and only warning, if it continues those individuals will no longer be welcome in this community.

If you're banned from the forums, then there is no sensible way for that to be enabled either way.

The e-mail process may be re-introduced, but I'm also looking at potentially moving it to a form based submission instead, just to try to structure things better, but this can also then format things and if needed can have it automatically post it in various places if that's something that we wanted.

E-Mail is just proving to be something slightly more complex to work through, just down to some complexities and making sure it's somewhere that everyone can access it.

NetData is just one of many options out there to implement server monitoring.

The graph you're referring to is the one on the ESXI Host that runs the TF server, where ESXI and Linux always seem to have weird reporting on memory usage, it's a bit of a weird bug and I'm not quite sure what's causing it, but hopefully will be patched later on.

For the monitoring we're using, for standard monitoring NodeQuery is in use, and gives me regular tactical overviews of the server estate, this polls every 5 mins and has various alarm thresholds to notify me if things go wrong.

High Level Overview:

Process Breakdown:

That gives me the majority of the information that I actually need, however where I do need more granular information, all the information is also being pushed out to Elastic which is the option ATLAS uses for the majority of the more detailed monitoring when we think it's appropriate. I've posted screen shots of that before.

In relation to the DDoS attack suggestion, that wouldn't be the case with the current servers architecture, any attacks on the server would end up ultimately hitting my edge router and that'd probably crash long before enough traffic actually hit the server to do any damage...

With regards to RAM, I think I've covered that, it's a reporting error with ESXI because I allocated the server 20 something GB of RAM originally as part of testing something, and the only way to re-size that is to take an outage, which I don't really want to be doing when it doesn't actually impact anything...

And regarding the database, NetData on the server wouldn't show anything relating to that up, as the DB is hosted externally (Though obviously I could install netdata there but hey ho).

I can see the benefits, but I'm not sure why having all the servers detailed metrics data public is really the best idea either way, while yes I'm sure it can help people debug things, I'm also hoping we should be having less of these issues as we move forward with a more robust approach to DevOPS on the server and how we actually manage the server going forward from a releases perspective.

Just to let everyone know I'm going to be moving the database that stores all of the Freedom servers player data to run on our main Database service between 13:00 and 15:00 UK Time.

While I don't expect it to take this long, it very possibly might.

This change should let the player data load a lot quicker, and will allow us to also start tracking player time in SMP as well, and surface that data in a sane way to the overall dashboard, and when we bring the hub server in it can track that as well. It will also longer term allow us to phase over to a different option that will run at the network level when we come to bringing the network fully into service.

Full outage information can be found here, and updates will be published on the same link - https://status.atlas-media.co.uk/maintenances/X6MgoWfllUhZ

So further to this post, I thought people may be interested to see some of the major improvements we're rolling out between now and the end of Q1 2021 - https://blog.atlas-media.co.uk…jor-improvements-roadmap/

@SupItsDillon#1989 If it was a handout to a friend, he'd already be an admin.

For additional context here, James is a member of the ATLAS senior management team, and is effectively the second in command of the company, so if I am not able to be reached for any reason, he has the delegated authority to make decisions that I usually would. He oversees a number of ATLAS projects including the TF SMP Server, and is involved in the running of this server and community from an ATLAS perspective which is why I've recommended him becoming an admin, to enable him to work more closely with our existing team and to get more involved with the community as a whole.

There is a bigger question around how we handle staff as a position as @StevenNL2000#1990 mentions in his reply, where we need to work out a better system both for ATLAS staff members that are wanting to get involved in the server at a lower level, but also for how we handle SMP ranks and other staff ranks in the future especially once we do bungee things together. That's not to say there is a solution today, but I do agree something needs to be thought through as to how we deal with these sorts of scenarios going forward, and is something we will be working on so as TF grows and we hopefully bring more gamemodes on board where there may be differences in staff, and as ATLAS hopefully continues to grow and we have more people involved from the ATLAS perspective when it comes to TF, we can recognise and enable those individuals as appropriate.

@SupItsDillon#1979 He was banned for impersonating, and the length of the ban was due to the vast quantity of previous offences that had been committed. It wasn't a first second or third time he'd been banned just since I took over as owner...

@hyfae#1965 CoreProtect isn't open source fwiw...

If you can give me a solution that works just as well as CoreProtect should, and we can migrate the current CoreProtect data to then I'll be open to the suggestion. It is worth noting it turns out we were using a pre-release version of CoreProtect and that's what currently runs on the server. We are looking to change back to a stable non-modified version of CoreProtect so hopefully that should fix a lot of these issues going forward.

I'm open to suggestions though, just tell me what the options are...

@SuperRyn#1959 Because you can't see people doing it... You're not spamming commands, you're spamming queries using /co i

@Noah#1947 The thread gets moved as it evolves... You originally put it in the wrong place, and then it ended up being mostly spam / other shite...

I think this is going to be more annoying than anything else? Unless someone can give me a good reason this wouldn't be a major annoyance to everyone??

Can someone fill me in with why this has had to be historically blocked in the first place? Would be useful to understand why things are being blocked so we can all make an informed decision as to why it should be un-blocked...

So CoreProtect should also track changes to signs as well, there's certainly a DB for it...