Posts by wild1145

↩  Miasmus Ultimately yes, that's why I've pinnged Nick as I'd like his input as he banned you and will have seen what you posted.

↩  Luke We already have guidance on the discord rules for what lines up with what. Like here, it's a section 1 offence which means unless they can prove they didn't do what they are accused of, it's an indef ban.

↩  Luke It's sorta what happens when we're all human... People will make their own judgements.

↩  Miasmus We're not willing to go back months and months. If something has happened within the last 72 hours then it's fair to report it, but anything beyond that and it's nothing more than doing it out of spite.

For section 1 offences such as this the final decision sits with me and ATLAS's corporate leadership team. We can't say if you have broken the law because we are not a judge, but we can make the decision that in our judgement it's likely you would be deemed to be breaking the law, which is the case here.

↩  Luke The rules were clear. And we try to moderate with consistency. The issue a lot of the time is that unlike the forums, we haven't got people who can read every post in real time / close to real time. Things get missed. If people are breaking the rules on Discord, it should be reported if a Discord member of staff has not already taken action.

Ping @"simplynick"#11

I've cleared Flarum's cache as well to see if that helps, I've noticed this happening a lot with tags and it's quite annoying.

So I thought it's only fair to give folks a bit of an idea what's going on for me, because I fully appreciate I've been somewhat snappy and generally stressed recently, and for some people they've received a sharper end of the stick than usual.

Right now, I'm trying to find and buy my first home (Which is surprisingly stressful for what feels like it should be shopping, it's not fun, it takes a lot of my time up), in addition to this I am still working a 40+ hour week day job, which I do love, but can be quite stressful due to the nature of IT and all that good stuff. On top of all of that I'm trying to progress things here on TF, but more importantly I'm also trying to grow ATLAS (Which pays for TF's server hosting, which I have to pay for from my day job).

I am doing what I feel is the best for the server with the hand I've been dealt, and while there is a lot more stuff I'd love to be doing my hands are tied as a result of the shrinking player base and lack of development capacity combined with a lack of my time.

After the discussions today it's also become pretty clear there are enough people in the community that have either lost faith in me, or wish to actively argue against everything I do.

Back in November 2020 I put my name forward for owner, and I was pretty clear as to what I wanted to achieve and since then have been very clear on my own style of ownership and how I would approach things, but none the less people don't seem to either agree with that position now or potentially are arguing for the sake of arguing.

I've felt I have had no choice but to cancel a number of projects that I feel will have helped to grow this server and expand our audience and keep us relevant for another 10 years, but reflecting tonight I'm struggling to see that position as viable with our current direction.

With all of this in mind, and out of respect for TotalFreedom and it's community, I am going to give the current server executives the ability to invoke the ownership policy under Scenario 1 if they unanimously agree (And the community are supportive of such a decision) that I am no longer representing the community or the direction this server should go in. This offer will stand until the end of this month, if by then the executives haven't notified me that they would like for me to step down, I will assume there is still confidence behind the decision making I've made to date and that I have the communities support going forward.

I've given TF a lot of my life over the last 9 years, and I hope that the executives and the community as a whole are able to see that, but equally for my own mental health I can't continue to have things run the way they currently run.

Thanks all.

Changelog 27/8/2021

• Minor corrections from when the Evangelist title was changed
• Changed scope of the community manager role to focus more around community health and the running of events cross-platform
• Changed scope of the marketing manager to ultimately also be accountable for player retention.

After a few threads recently, I wanted to update you on the current state of development capacity and capability within our community, because I feel it's a topic that urgently needs to be discussed, and for greater visibility and awareness to be had throughout the community.

At the current time, and at the time of writing this TotalFreedom has no active developers working on functionality and features for the TF Server. While we do have 3 developers, at the moment they are all busy with non-TF work.

The reality of this position is that it significantly reduces what we are able to do, and what we can provide to the TF community, and makes it impossible to look to start developing new features and functionality on Freedom-01, or any of the other development related activities that we are keen to be undertaking, including a lot of the gamemodes and activities that we recently have had to shelve.

With all of this in mind, I need to make the community aware that we will be struggling to add additional bespoke functionality to TF for the foreseeable future, and that at the moment any and all developer effort we have will be re-tasked towards the Java 16 upgrade, and then the absolute minimum upgrade required for us to support 1.17. I hope that between these things it will enable us to sustain our current player base.

I will be continuing to look at the additional plugins that have been approved, and where they can be added without developer effort they will be added, and where they require developer effort they will be left until we have sufficient capacity to pick such work up.

I appreciate this is disappointing, but is just the current state of things. Please just keep this in mind when you're unhappy things aren't moving as quickly as they could be...

↩  DragonSlayer2189 And is sort of why I'm saying I'd rather strip /sit out of TFM and use an external plugin if we can anyway.

Would be good to understand what this does differently to both the TFM and better chairs. I'm personally all in favour of moving to other plugins and reducing TFM's functionality for cosmetics like this.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime that introducing docker into the mix would make the server a lot easier to manage at the root access level

It really wouldn't. It adds extra complexity and to be brutally honest, doesn't give us any benefits. We're not trying to dynamically scale our capacity, or run multiple identical copies of the same environment. The current setup gives us a much greater level of flexibility that we actually need.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime but it was also mentioned that the server hardware won't support docker.

It's not strictly true. The technology (OpenVZ) does as of a couple of years ago support docker, and I run docker inside some of my OpenVZ containers for very specific things that are easier to do this way. The way some things like Petro use docker doesn't play as nice though.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime also, i sent a few security suggestions to ryan.wild@[atlas website] 20 days ago because that was listed as a security contact in a forum thread. should i use os-security-reports instead?

It was honestly probably ignored, if it wasn't coming from a reputable e-mail address / someone I recognised and all that, it will have gone to spam.

If there are security issues that are genuine threats, os-security-reports[AT]atlas-media[dot]co[dot]uk is the e-mail to use to report those.

If they are suggestions around improving how TF handles it's security, then forum posts are the most appropriate way to do it, because TF's security is linked, but not the same as ATLAS's wider security posture. It's also worth noting that our approach to security evolves over time, and we don't generally publish the exact security lock down information for our hosts, things have changed more than a couple of times since I took over as we've evolved onto different setups and different requirements have come up.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime with the panel, the server, and the website in the same docker network, they could seamlessly interact, allowing for a schematic system and anything else you would want to add.

It also introduces a single point of failure for the entire network, and would require a substantial single KVM VPS to make it work properly or again, you go back to the same issues we already have, and it defeats the point. But again, with our current direction of travel I see no reason why Docker is the better choice over what we have.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime the panel could be behind an IP whitelist

This is really really bad security practice, and breaks both the models of zero trust networking along with NCSC Published guidance around security policy.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime have its own auth just to be safe

Which unfortunately introduces the exact issues I've referenced in replies to Video.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime the only thing is to do that we might need to abandon one or more of our providers, like OVH or Hetzner.

Given we only use a single provider (Superior-Networks), and that won't be changing, this would either be a blocker or non-issue.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime as an op, this is beneficial because the server would be able to restart itself unless manually stopped

It already does this with the current setup.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime and when bugs are reported, devs could more easily debug them in the panel.

This is exactly what we want to avoid, we have a development server for a very good reason...

Quote

↩  Telesphoreo Docker doesn't work with OpenVZ. If you go to the Superior Networks website you'll see that the vps's use OpenVZ.

I have covered this in the earlier reply on this post so won't re-hash that.

Quote

↩  Telesphoreo That's why I theorized it because I have no idea if wild is using OpenVZ or not for TF or just the Superior Networks servers.

TF is on OpenVZ and for now would have to stay there, at least for Freedom-01, I am looking to start moving VPS's over to KVM subject to there being no hick-ups, and some TF Servers like the GMOD were on KVM anyway. Freedom-01 unfortunately has a rather unpredictable world growth size and so being able to quickly and easily change the disk quotas without needing to do higher risk activities such as re-partitioning disks which can be time consuming and generally requires an outage.

Quote

↩  Telesphoreo The reason it doesn't affect other companies like OVH VPSs is because they use KVM.

Most don't actually use KVM, a lot have weird hybrids. AWS for example have used Citrix, Xen, KVM and are now running a custom hybrid. But they generally give you as a user the benefits of pure KVM.

Quote

↩  Telesphoreo The difference is that instead of a shared kernel, each instance can have their own kernel (I think?).

Yes, it's exactly this. It's also "Fully isolated" from the host machine, which has pro's / con's depending on what you're after. For TF given I run the host and the VPS's having it not fully isolated up to now has allowed us to much more effectively scale the server up.

Quote

↩  Telesphoreo Generally speaking KVM is the best way to go

For most things I do agree, I'm less confident on that being the right position for the Freedom gamemode unless we went back to regular world wipes, which is something the community really doesn't want.

Sorry this reply came later than some of the others, it was a bit more technical and I wanted to be at my PC to reply rather than trying to do it on my phone!

For those interested, Superior Networks is currently looking at moving the workloads off of OpenVZ - https://twitter.com/Wild1145/status/1431022505079316481 - It's just going through some testing at the moment to ensure that it is the right thing for what we want to do and that there isn't a better option to give us the best mix of performance, scalability and cost effective business.

↩  videogamesm12 And as part of the re build of the discord. There is only a single bot other than the total freedom one that has that access, along with the 3 people that currently are discord admins. It's a low risk as I've already said, and the panel would introduce greater risks.

↩ @'Panther' That would then require all suspensions to only be managed by me, something which is not sustainable nor desirable from my perspective.

For those curious I'm updating the stats now but here are some pretty graphs and the raw data:

Quote

↩  StevenNL2000 Discord Admin, by appointment (dependent on executive position)

Actually I just assumed you were

1) Always a Discord admin
2) Someone I could trust to hold the position without being a jackass

That's why I never removed it.

Discord staff ranks are also 100% independent of executive roles, so yeah, if you did step down from the executive position your admin status on discord wouldn't be revoked with it.

Though also, it is quite an interesting read, I thought my rank history over the last 9 or so years was a complicated mess but yours seems more so of a mess than I had thought and probably more of a mess than mine 😂

↩  videogamesm12 It has no different access to a senior logging into Telnet, given there are only 3 people on Discord that can give roles that don't mirror in game the risk is very low of that ever actually happening, and at this point the bot being hosted on ATLAS Infra (The same as the server) means if you're capable of hacking into the VPS the bot runs on or getting the token in any way, you've already got full server file access and can do what you want, meaning the bot is the least of my worries.

A panel on the other hand has no such sync ability. I'd take the risk of a suspended senior admin going AWOL to be far more likely than a repeat of a very rare issue which will not be able to repeat itself for one thing due to mitigations already in place, combined with the level of technical complexity that would now be required.

The security argument is really nothing more than an exaggerated position right now, nobody has been able to provide a credible reason why a custom panel we're going to have to write and host and grant even more access to the server than the bot already has gives us somehow more security, when everything I've stated confirmed the exact opposite.

For those curious, some historical data over the last 35 days from Freedom-01's VPS:

Server CPU Load:

Lower is generally better. The orange line is where a "Warning" alarm is tripped, and the red line is where a "Critical" alarm will be raised.

Memory Usage:

Hopefully you all know about this, generally lower is ideal, but you get the idea anyway... The closest to 100% this sustains the more "efficient" we're using the memory allocated.

I've not got historic metrics unfortunately for Disk IO, but I've not seen any warnings that I would expect to see that would suggest they're an issue.

Above charts are the last 35 days.

Quote

↩  FromTimeToTime my impression was the opposite, that the server falls over very easily, and it can use all the help it can get.

From what I've found, the servers resources are more than capable. We rarely actually use near the max memory, disk IO or CPU that the VPS has allocated to it. However it's equally not all that hard to crash servers when you know what you're doing which tends to be where we run into issues...