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Greetings Sylvanites,

I know you haven't heard from me for a while, but rest assured I am still here and working to keep the world running as smooth as possible.
In light of this, I am announcing a scheduled downtime this weekend to do server improvements and upgrades.
This shouldn't be a long-term downtime, but may take a few hours.
I am planning on working on it late evening Friday and/or early morning Saturday.

If you try and connect and it isn't working, just sit by and try again in 30-minutes.
Hopefully everything will go smoothly.

-Llewellyn

Greetings all,

Just wanted to let you know that the server will be down for a few hours this afternoon as I do periodic maintenance and updates to the OS.
I will post in this thread when I am finished and it is back up and running again!

Llewellyn

Greetings all fellow Sylvanites,

Sadly "Real Life" rears its ugly head again and it seems like the rain-check I received with Harvey, Irma, and Maria has come time to be cashed.
Nate is scheduled to arrive at my door-step within 12 hours and I have secured and tired down everything that I can. I took the time this morning to do a complete server backup (both local, remote, and on a USB key) and have started turning off all non-essential electronics on the same backup battery. I am going to leave it up and running for as long as it can (hopefully forever) but the weather gets to decide that ultimately.

I am not worried about my house, property, or the server itself. Mainly my concern is downtime due to power/internet outages. The backup batteries should coast us through any temporary outages, but anything over an hour will get us.
I am leaving now to drive out of the path, Hopefully keep you guys all updated and I learn things.

-Llewellyn

Going to do a router reset.
New router I got is having issues and needed to have firmware updated.
Total down-time should be less than an hour.

Many apologies if you try to log in and it is still down.

Llewellyn

Greetings my fellow Sylvanites.

It has been a while since I have come to you with news of the back-end, but now that life is returning to normal after the holidays it is time. I have seen a couple of posts on here concerning random lagging and/or crashes/disconnects. This means that it is time for me to perform some routine maintenance to ensure that our world remains awesome.

Thus,
Tomorrow, around 10am Central Time Zone, I will be taking the server offline for a few hours to perform this critical service. I will post on here approx. 30 minutes before the down-time and will let everyone know just as soon as it is live again. Thanks in advance for your understanding and I sincerely appreciate all those who help Cypress and the staff keep Sylvan Heart such a wonderful place to live.

Llewellyn

Greetings Sylvanites!

Many apologies for the server downtime this morning, I was working on hanging my new projector screen in the media room and managed to drill through a hidden power line in the wall....
Needless to say the resulting arc kinda scared me. Sadly, it also blew the power to the server's outlet. It took me a few hours to fix, but everything is good now and the server is up and running waiting for you all to log in and play.

Sorry again,

Llewellyn

P.S. The power drill was toast too, but I am 100% fine.

Greeting Sylvanites,

I hope everyone is doing well and really enjoying themselves as the summer heat hits those in the US.
Just wanted to give everyone an update on the server's location. I will be taking it down tomorrow for good...


(kidding, hah)


I will be taking it down though for at least a day's time. I just recently bought my first house (IRL) and will be moving everything over the weekend to my new digs.
My internet provider is scheduled to connect and test the internet at the new place starting at 1pm (CST) tomorrow the 27th.
As is my nature, I am thinking of you guys first so the very first thing in my new house will be the server and my modem/router/infrastructure/etc.
I am hoping to have as little downtime as possible, but (knowing IT) I always expect it to take longer than I think it should.
I will try and keep you updated if everything isn't working 100% by tomorrow evening, but I really hope this transition is fairly painless.
I have a lot of other crap to worry about with the whole move stuff.....   

I meant to give you all some more advance notice, but life is crazy atm.
Hope to have good news soon.

Llewellyn

P.S. Downtime "should" be from 10:30 am until ~6pm-ish (all CST)

Greetings Sylvanites,

Apologies for any connectivity issues that you might have had last night.
I received word of problems with long worldsaves, but this morning when I checked out the server I could not find anything amiss.

I will continue to monitor the situation and let you guys know if I need to restart it with plenty of time to get safe.
Also, please feel free to start a thread here if you experience any issues.

Peace be with you,
Llewellyn

Shard was up, but lost all internet so..... yeah...

I saved the shard and took it down to wait out the internet loss.
ISP reports that it is a city-wide service loss, so no ETA on a return.

L

Greetings Sylanites,

I haven't heard much from anyone lately in terms of problems or errors, and it warms my heart to see that no downtime has been reported since March!
However it is once again that time of the year that I do my quarterly maintenance to make sure that everything continues to run in tip-top-shape.

I am hoping to begin this process tomorrow morning (depending on low online user-count) and I do not forsee this process taking more than 2-3 hours.

I will post in this thread when I start, Progress, and when I end.

Until then, Stay safe
Llewellyn

Greetings Sylvanites,

I just want to take a quick moment and advise that I am currently in the middle of a freezing rain storm.
My power just flickered for the 3rd time. Even though the UPS are holding steady; expect outages of the server.....
As I will have no power and will be slowly freezing.

Thanks for your attention.
Llewellyn

Just a quick note....

I know that there has been some severe connection issues this weekend. I have been on the phone with ISP again, but they are as usual unhelpful.
It is almost as if these problems are caused by me hosting, or are aggravated by the shard.


I can only offer my sincerest apologies, and I am trying to work on it.

Llewellyn

Atlas is back in business!

After MUCH consternation with my Internet Service Provider (ISP) I think that the issues I was having over the past few months with the random disconnects and internet-drops has been fixed.
It took a total of:
> Escalation to Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4 customer support (whatever that means aside from talking with different people when I call)
> 7 ISP Technician visits who ranged from completely clueless to half-way intelligent.
Telecom technician who came out and climbed the power pole next to my house and opened up the neighborhood distribution-header
> Plant technician who came out and traced the lines back to the city distribution-header.
> All-in-all I replaced (had replaced) all the Coaxial cable from my router to the house-box, Replaced all the barrels and the wall-socket, Replaced my router and modem, Replaced a barrel at the power-pole, replaced two signal filters at the pole and at the neighborhood distribution-header. Also the Plant Technicians replaced stuff but I never heard what it was.
> ~3 months, and a partridge in a pear tree. (getting in the season early)

tl;dr
Server Migration back to my house Tomorrow Night (Wednesday ~6:30 CST).
So expect the server to be down for at the most 4 hours.
I had to spend $128.43 of your donation money. Thanks again guys for the support!

Llewellyn

Greeting Fellow Sylvanites.

I am going to take some time today to perform my routine server maintenance.
Additionally, there is a service tech from my ISP coming out today around the same time to try and figure out what is going on with my internet.
Finally, During this downtime I am transferring hosting of SH to a friend's server for the duration of Tropical Storm Karen (or whatever strength it is when it finally makes landfall)

Stay safe, try not to get bored, and I will have everything back up and running as soon as possible.

Llewellyn

ISP issues meant that we had about 30 minutes of down-time this evening.
Everything is up and running now, but i couldn't get anything resembling intelligent life on the other end of the help phone line.

No promises, but things are up and running at the moment.

Llewellyn

Greeting fellow Sylvanites.

What I had originally though was my router has now been confirmed as outages by my ISP. Supposedly they are trying to fix the problem, but no resolution as of yet. My ISP has really been letting me down lately with these random outages. I have called them a few times, yet to no avail. I shall keep everyone informed on the progress as I learn of it.

Till then, have fun and be careful.

Llewellyn

Hey everyone,

I would like everyone to go to this website: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Once there, Look and see what it says for your IP address.
If you are the lucky person who's IP address is: 31.210.157.10
Please send me a private message here on the forums.

Llewellyn

PS: I promise that you are not in trouble, and don't reply in here saying: "It's me!!"

Hey all,

Just wanted to leave this link here for you guys to read. Just found out about it this morning and it looks pretty interesting.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/08/revealed-richard-garriotts-massive-ultima-successor/#more-144868
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0

I am quite interested to see where this goes. It definitely has the support, imagine that: raising nearly a half million dollars in less than a day!

Llewellyn

Fellow Sylvanites,

Tomorrow (March 6th), in the afternoon (~5:30-> CST) the server will be down to maintenance and repair. The parts I was waiting for have come in and I am going to be spending lots of quality time with them.

The following is what will most likely be occurring:



PS: Totally not me, Thanks go to the googles for the random image.

Llewellyn

Huge storm headed this way. If you lose connection it might be down for a while.
I will try my best to get things set back up, but I might be dependent on power/internet etc.

Llewellyn,