Staff Meeting Summary for November 5, 2011

[TAfirehawk]

I have a question.... So does this mean they are setting up a lib server for the community to play with and a community dev team to work on bugs on it? Or have i misread this? If so, does that mean the current lib will be transfered there, andbe active for quite a while?

The Community Division doesn't really have a "dev team" so don't expect any code changes to Liberator. TheAnswer has done a great job getting Liberator to be as stable as it is and we don't want to lose that functionality. Mainly we will have database and restart access but don't expect anything more than what you have today with Liberator until the Nova code is ready to replace it. We may look at ways to enhance the "Liberator Experience" but please, please don't expect it to be touched at all and consider anything that MIGHT get done as a pure BONUS.

Liberator is staying on the same server but there may be some downtime associated with re-tasking all the SWGEmu servers. Announcements will be made in advance of any planned changes.

Call me overly cautious, but is it wise to keep the emu servers on the same host? We've already seen some major hd breakdowns and keeping them on the same machine will cripple all of them at the same time if anything goes wrong. Seeing as there are multiple dedicated servers available I would suggest separating them so only one of them will be down if the unthinkable happens. Totally different subject - once Nova replaces Liberator, will you still keep a separate TC or will that be it, subject to periodic wipes?

Our dedi box host is FDC and they are reviewed the best at being the least expensive for unlimited bandwidth. The TB's of data we use each month really limits the hosts we can use. Hardware failures on one metal box doesn't mean we will see failures on another. And Vlada is right, we have two boxes in Denver and one box in Chicago so things will be spread around a plenty. And don't worry, backups will be a plenty

Of course we have been looking at alternatives to FDC and even possible Cloud solutions. Trust me, we are doing everything we can to bring you a great SWG PreCU playing experience.

The current plan, subject to change of course, will leave Liberator and Nova up permanently. One will be for "regular" play with minimal wipes and the other for direct play-testing for the Devs running the latest code.

Expansion on what that is exactly used for could be useful.
I heard it was only $7 and it runs Aceblades Windows' QA Tool but curious why the tool needs a VPS so explanation on that would be cool.

We have an internal task management tool that was donated to us by InforumUp. Normally this license would have cost $2,100.

Why do we need this?
a) As with every QA department tasks need assigned to individuals with goals for dates of completion.
b) This allows us to go in-depth regarding Tasks / Testing Flow and communicate / distribute the workload.


Attached is an image of the Shipwright tasks that were assigned.

Attachment 2801

Is there any kind of heartbeat/drbd or even mysql replication in use or planned to prevent disaster or make recovery more expedient?

I mean, I don't think there has been a single after disaster report posted. No indication it's even had thought time put into it.

Read the second post....Of course we will have better backups in the future.

We kept people updated throughout the process so everybody that wanted to know has the information for what happened. I certainly don't see the need for an "after disaster report"....we had RAID fail and didn't have a separate backup for the character/user account table but everything else on Liberator was safe.