Official News page 2

MOVING TO THE CLOUD

by Hazed

I’m not sure what the digital equivalent of removals men would be, but the bits and bytes will be dismantled, wrapped in newspaper and carefully packed into virtual crates for Fed’s move to the cloud next weekend.

The fact that we are moving to the cloud won’t make any difference to you - it’s just the same as if we were moving the game to a new physical server. Alan is going to have to back everything up from the old server, install it on the new server, and then redirect everything to the new home.

We don’t have an exact schedule for what’s going to happen when. But over the course of the weekend, Alan will have to take Fed down a number of times in order to back various things up safely. Note that for the purposes of this exercise, it’s a five-day weekend, from Friday to Tuesday - Alan has taken an extra day off work to make sure he has plenty of time to get everything done.

At some point, when the game comes back up, he will declare the backup to be done - at which time, anything further that you do in the game won’t get saved.

Yes, it’s going to be your chance to try all those risky things you always wanted to do but never dared to. You can fly into the sun, tackle the Graveyard puzzle, explore the Martian ruins. Why not see how many of the ways to die in Sol you can find?

For the techies among you: we are moving from a 32-bit operating system to a 64-bit one, so once he has all the backups, Alan will need to convert all the databases.

Once he’s done that and got everything onto the cloud, the old server will be switched off. The DNS records (which act as the internet’s address book) will be changed so that anyone logging into the game or visiting the website will be directed to the new server. However, there is likely to be a period of 24 hours or so when the DNS records will be a bit confused: you will have to wait until your ISP updates its own copy. You will be able to log on by using the numeric address, and once I know what it is, I’ll mail it out to the Fed2 Star mailing list.

And then life can go on as normal in Fed DataSpace! (For certain values of normal.)

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