Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in FurryMUCK Status' LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, May 11th, 2012
12:09 am [tugrik]	Short downtime for the Muck We had a quick maintenance reboot of the MUCK tonight (like we try to do every three months or so). While we were at it, I went ahead and got some security and software updates done on the box that were sorely needed. In the process the database got unhappy with us. Revar is putting in a fix right now and we should be back up in a few minutes if all goes well. **Edit 5 minutes later: We're back. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 24th, 2012
4:40 pm [tugrik]	UK/Euro secondary DNS recommendations? I'd like to get some secondary DNS servers overseas for our UK/EU users. Does anybody have a decently reliable/fast 2ndary provider to recommend over there? I run my own primary DNS servers and have domestic (US) secondaries already. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:10 pm [tugrik]	SSL Cert update As part of the domain cleanup I've updated the SSL certificate for FurryMUCK. It is self-signed. Depending on your client it may put up a warning. Here is the cert info to compare for those who want to know: Subject: furrymuck.com Furry Enterprises Operations San Jose, California, US Issuer: furrymuck.com Furry Enterprises Operations San Jose, California, US Serial#: A170B42F3C1EFC80 Valid after: Feb 24 03:37:22 2012 GMT Valid until: Feb 21 03:37:22 2022 GMT Cipher in use: AES256-SHA SHA1 Fingerprint=A6:51:9B:08:6D:66:32:B1:86:23:38:96:5D:B8:BE:A0:72:F0:B5:2D (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
7:51 pm [tugrik]	furry.com redirector set up! I've put the muck-redirector on the 'furry.com' domain. As folks' DNS caches update around the net, anybody still using "furry.com" will get a reminder page with the new name instead of the muck. So, please: update your client configuration files (.tfrc, trebuchet configs, etc) and start using the new name today! furrymuck.com port 8888 (8899 for SSL) It works on both IPv4 and IPv6. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2012
2:36 pm [tugrik]	Moving to furrymuck.com - Please read! Since the mid 2000's FurryMUCK has owned the 'furrymuck.com' domain. It has echoed the main 'furry.com' domain but never saw much use. Over the years the MUCK and its services have been separated from other projects so that it can exist on its own, using a dedicated virtual server with its own billing and business agreements. As I own the 'furry.com' domain and it has other projects on it that are unrelated to the muck, I made the decision to move the MUCK over to furrymuck.com. Furrymuck will now be located at furrymuck.com 8888, instead of the former site of muck.furry.com 8888. While both names still work as of 02/2012, sometime before the end of March 2012 the 'muck.furry.com' name will be removed. Remember, this is only a DNS change! The server itself isn't moving at all. For those who use IPv6, all the former IPv6 names will still work on the new domain just as they did on the old. After this year's IPv6 day the main 'furrymuck.com' name will have a full AAAA record permanently as well. If you have any questions or comments about the change, please either comment here, email tugrik@furrymuck.com or page #mail Tugrik in-game. Thank you! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
2:57 am [tugrik]	We made it! 2012 is covered. To everybody who pitched in during December's donation drive: thanks to you we were able to pay the hosting bill for all of 2012 in one go. I just got the confirmation from our host that the annual payment was processed and accepted, which is why I'm posting this notice at this crazy late hour. For the record, this is the first time we've ever been able to make an annual payment based on donations. Thank you all very much! For the curious: We were able to get a 10% discount by doing this as an annual payment, per Linode's payment policies. The total cost covers FM's processor, bandwidth and storage needs for the year, as well as distributed backups. In addition, I still maintain two additional off-site / other-provider backups for redundancy. Technically we didn't *quite* make the goal: we were $22 short as the New Years Eve ball dropped in FM's timezone. But three days later, and boom, there it is... just in time for that annual payment to clear... so it still counts. *nods* While the donation buckets always remain open to get a jump start on next year, I promise to not re-start the pledge drive until December 2012. :) (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
11:17 am [tugrik]	Donation Update: 61.45% of the way there! :) I'll cut-paste the news bulletin update from the muck here: --------------------------------------------------------------------- 12/15/11: If you'd like to donate towards FurryMUCK's upkeep our goal is to cover all of 2012's fees ($1188) by the end of December. So far we have reached $730 of that goal! There are multiple ways to donate. Serve widget: http://bit.ly/FMDonate Dwolla: http://bit.ly/FMDonateDwolla PayPal: donate@furry.com For how to send a check and other details type 'news donate' while logged into FurryMUCK. It costs us $99/mo to keep this place running. Anything you can pitch in is greatly appreciated. Thank you for supporting FurryMUCK! --Tugrik ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
3:26 pm [tugrik]	Added Dwolla After having it suggested by multiple friends, I've added a Dwolla account. You can now donate via Dwolla as a PayPal alternative if Serve's sign-up was too much of a hassle: While it defaults to $10 you can change the amount to anything you like. (Comment on this)
2:40 am [tugrik]	2012 Donations: Help Support FurryMUCK! We're into our 21st year now - the Muck is old enough to drink. :) Plenty of players are still hanging out and having fun so we intend to keep the place online to the best of our ability. FurryMUCK runs on a virtual machine at Linode. It costs $99/mo in total for the virtual machine, bandwidth and secure backups - $1188/yr. While I've always gladly paid for the server's upkeep I very much welcome any donations that our players and fellow admins might pitch in to help offset some of that cost. If you'd like to help out there are a few ways you can send in some funds: Since many folks are rather upset with PayPal right now (and I'm no grand fan of them currently either), I've set up a Serve donation widget, Google Checkout and a Dwolla link. Serve is a service from American Express that seems to be decently secure and well run so far. To use it, just follow this link to the Serve FM Donation widget: Google Checkout has higher fees so your donation goes slightly less far, but it's many folks' preferred payment system so I've included it here: $5.00 - Help Support FurryMUCK$10.00 - Help Support FurryMUCK!$20.00 - Help Support FurryMUCK!$100.00 - Help Support FurryMUCK! Dwolla is a new competitor to PayPal a lot of my artist friends like. They require less invasive amounts of information than Square. $10 is the default but you can change it to whatever amount you wish. FurryMUCK's Dwolla donation page is here: If you still want to use paypal our account is still open. You can donate here: (Or just use our PayPal email address: donate@furry.com) Lastly, if you prefer, you can send a personal check. I process them through my business merchant account. Payable to: Monoceros Media 2883 Aiello Drive Unit #3 San Jose, CA 95111 ----- As always, here's the quick disclaimer I need to make sure you know about: FurryMUCK is not a charitable organization, nor is it a non-profit. Donations are not tax deductable. Think of it as a "tip jar" for the admins and wizards of the Muck that keep the place running. I record all donations and pay approprite California and Federal taxes on monies donated towards FurryMUCK's upkeep. Donating, while highly appreciated, doesn't get a player any extra privileges or features in FurryMUCK. It will, however, get you a big whiskery grin from me and a hearty thank-you from all the rest of the wizarding staff. Thank you again for your support. Here's to hoping we can get a few more decades out of our little virtual world. :) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
11:05 pm [tugrik]	Fuzzball Muck and Trebuchet software upgrades Tonight we rolled in a maintenance upgrade on the Fuzzball software that runs FurryMUCK. As part of the fixes put in the muck also now supports native IPv6, which should help keep the Muck online and accessible as the slow transition to IPv6 happens around the 'net. :) To access the muck via IPv6 you need to be on a valid IPv6 connection and use the following address: ipv6.muck.furry.com Use the same ports as you did for IPv4 (8888, or 8899 for SSL). You must also use an IPv6 ready muck client. If you use raw telnet most modern implementations accept the "-6" parameter to use IPv6 if your connection has it. For those of you who use Trebuchet, it has been updated to support IPv6 as well. Download the latest update here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/trebuchet/ If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment here or email me at tugrik@gmail.com . Revar is the one who did the upgrades to the server software. Thanks, Rev! (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
4:13 am [tugrik]	IPv6 support For you network-gear heads out there: now that it's available at our colocation site, we're working to get IPv6 connectivity up for FurryMUCK. The new IPv6 address and DNS forward/reverse are already set up and operating on the server. Revar's currently working on the fuzzball code to handle the required extra support. With luck we should have it up by the end of the weekend, but no promises yet. :) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 10th, 2010
2:52 pm [tugrik]	Network issue in the Fremont data center There are connectivity issues going on with the Fremont data center where FM is hosted. It's affecting multiple Linode customers, not just us, but I'm not sure what's going on yet. Checking on it now. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 20th, 2010
9:09 pm [tugrik]	Brief storm-related outage Due to a rather feisty storm cruising through the SF bay area, there was a momentary power-equipment failure in our host's datacenter. They got power rerouted and the main host back up in a few short minutes, and Lassie (the built in watchdog code, no joke) brought us back up moments later. Things seem normal for now. --T (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
10:46 pm [tugrik]	FM is back OK, that sucked. Here's the message from the provider, Linode: ~~~~ Hi, It is with great regret that I must inform you that our attempt to recover your data from fremont28 has been unsuccessful. While our first assessment of the issue appeared to have been promising, a recoverable situation quickly turned into a non-recoverable one following a series of unfortunate events caused by the host's failing hardware. I'd like to note that while we do attempt to take every precautionary measure we can to minimize the occurrence of such issues, unfortunately hardware is not immune to problems and while uncommon, catastrophic failure can strike at any time. When we were first alerted of the issue affecting fremont28, our system administrators were quick to respond to the call. When our attempts to salvage Linodes on the host's existing hardware were unsuccessful, we opted to move the drives to a standby host in hopes to recover customer data. Unfortunately the damage had already been done, and our efforts to recover the Linodes had failed. We have now moved all customers over to a new host where you will be able to deploy a fresh distribution via the dashboard. For customers who had the Linode Backup service enabled for their Linodes, you are able to restore from a backup by navigating to the "Backups" tab of the Linode Manager. As a host, we certainly understand that there is no substitute for your data, however in light of this ordeal, we will be applying a 3 month credit to the accounts of all affected customers. This credit will be automatically applied to future invoices. We truly apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. Please do not hesitate to reply to this support ticket should you have any additional questions or concerns. We greatly appreciate your continued business. Best Regards, Danny Ariti ~~~~ On the "at least SOME good news" side, we do indeed subscribe to their backup service. Our entire server restored to the new site within 5 minutes of queuing the task, and the muck booted up 30 seconds later. The hourly snapshots were lost when the drive packs went down, but our backup from 2am this past morning was in the backup collection as expected and worked great. Yes, I'm not happy with the performance of the new provider -- I got a lot of positive recommendations on Linode -- but as a network admin, I realize that MTBF (mean time between failure) does indeed 'just happen'. I'm willing to let them have one big kaboom like this and write it off as terribly bad timing. If we get a second notable downtime like this again, though, we'll be hopping back to a physical server at another provider, even though it costs a little more. --Tug (12 Comments |Comment on this)
7:52 pm [tugrik]	FM Update To quote the email from linode: Support Ticket 239961 has been updated by 'dariti' -------------------------------------------------- Hi, The host that your Linode resides on has suffered from a hardware failure and we're in the process of transplanting the drives to a new host. We have been communicating with datacenter personnel to execute the drive swap, but unfortunately we have hit a few bumps along the way which have delayed resolution. Your continued patience and understanding is certainly appreciated. Should you have any additional questions or concerns in the meantime, please do not hesitate to reply to this support ticket. Best Regards, Danny Ariti -------------------------------------------------- (5 Comments |Comment on this)
6:39 pm [tugrik]	FM hardware work The host FurryMUCK is on had a hardware failure. It was causing extreme lag. Once they identified the problem, the folks at Linode brought the box down to fix it ASAP. I just wish they'd given me a few moments of warning so I could have notified the players. Our machine should be 'frozen' and will come back when the hardware below it is replaced. Current ETA is within an hour or so. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
9:46 pm [tugrik]	New server info (Crossposted from my own journal) The MUCK was moved to a new server this weekend due to shenanigans at our colocation center of the last five years. Having them lose their IP block was the last straw, so we got out while the getting was good. For those who asked: we moved to Linode. This means that Furry's machine is now a XEN host instance. We got the 2048 option: 2G memory, 4 virtual processors, 64GB disk, plenty of transfer. After talking with their techs it was the best sized option for what we're doing (primarily based on memory size). The processor and storage are a little overkill, but there was no option to downsize that while keeping 2G of memory. Our cost at the previous datacenter was $90/mo. The cost for the Linode is $80/mo. We added in the live-backup option for an additonal $20, bringing our total monthly cost to an even $100/mo. We're going to continue to do our own backups as well (many copies, many places!) but it's very nice to have hourly snaps at the provider like this; that's worth the $10 increase to me. The other nice bit is now the MUCK is a XEN-image running CentOS 5.5 64bit. This means I can move the image to any other XEN host or self-run XEN server (I have a few already in service) extremely fast, if necessary. While the IP itself isn't portable so the DNS would have to be updated, everything else for any future moves should be extremely fast. So far the new service seems to be running great. We had bad timing in that Global Crossing and Comcast were having a bad night with one of their exchanges -- a bit of badness in the 'net that affected more mucks than just Furry -- but otherwise it all went pretty smoothly. We'll keep an eye on it over the next month and if everything's still working great I'll pay for a year of service in advance to get a 10% discount. If things are rocky, I'll keep it month-to-month while researching better hosting options. Because the prices are similar and there is only a partial month overlap, this move cost me all of a whopping $30 or so. In addition we get FM's 5-year-old server back, though I'm honestly not sure what we'll do with it. Most likely we'll keep it in cold storage at the shop for a while in case we have to emergency-return to it in the next few months. After that it'll probably get sold (here online or via Craigslist) and see if it can raise some operating cash as either someone's new server or a 'hey, I own what used to be FurryMUCK!' nostalgia piece. The drives would be deep-scrubbed clean first, of course. As always, the donations bin is open if anybody wants to pitch in. Currently Revar and I split the $100/mo operating cost and we're always grateful when a few of the players kick in some cash to help cover. But donations or not, we'll always keep this running for as long as folks want to keep logging in and playing. :) Help support FurryMuck! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 21st, 2010
10:25 pm [tugrik]	...and we're there. The muck is now running in its new server at 74.207.243.108 . All DNS names have been cut over. Within 24-48 hours the DNS should be pushed around the 'net properly. If you're having problems until then, please use the IP address. Thanks! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
7:49 pm [tugrik]	Moving at 10:00PM PDT tonight! OK, the testing looks good. We're going to do the move to the new site in just a few hours, at 10:00PM PDT. Here's how it'll go: Right at 10:00pm we'll shut down the old MUCK and do a full database save. The data will get rsync'd to the new server and the DNS updated. Once the rsync is completed (should only take a few minutes) we'll bring up the new server at the new address. The old site will then be brought back up with a 'redirector' to point users at the new MUCK location. That'll be left running until the IPs expire on Sunday night. By then hopefully everybody will have the new DNS updates so it'll just work. For those of you die-hards who only use the IP address, the new machine's IP is: 74.207.243.108 (2 Comments |Comment on this)
6:18 pm [tugrik]	The new muck is up for testing! Help us stress-test the new server before the move later tonight. Please log into the new server at: newmuck.furry.com Nothing there will be saved; it'll be overwritten with the latest copy of the current DB when the real move happens. --Tug (Comment on this)