Primary Server Downtime


November 7, 2016

Robobenklein

During planned downtime starting on Nov. 5, we encountered a few hardware issues with our primary community server. (All hosted and rented servers along with voice and web communications are normal.) Through the week until Nov. 12 we were busy fixing the community server, however it is still not yet in an 'ideal' state.

Until further notice, most of our community servers will be offline, including Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio, and Tekkit Lite. These are our more intensive or difficult to maintain servers, which is why they have been running on personal hardware instead of VPS systems like our other servers. TF2 and DarkRP are both VPS hosted and will continue to operate.

Although the server is in a functioning state, it is degraded in various aspects. (Most due to old-age, since this was a used server we bought in 2014.) Since it's degraded, we don't want to run the risk of crashing the server entirely, as we don't have funds set aside to purchase a new system for these resource-intensive servers.

We have 3 issues that we still need to fix on the main server until we can put it back into operation:

  • A new SCSI SAS hot-swap Drive to replace a failed drive in our array.
  • A new hot-swap PSU unit, to replace a PSU failure, and so that we maintain redundancy in case the second one fails too.
  • A RAID backup battery, so that should our PSU die, data caches are still written.

Once those three issues are fixed (estimated $100-$150 of parts) then we will be happy to resume operation of the community servers.