Re: Connection solutions (from Ask the Staff)

[Halaster]

We will never, ever make the game require money to play.  However, we have already taken payment in the form of your souls.

[Hymwen]

I demand a refund.

[Zhaky]

We will never, ever make the game require money to play.  However, we have already taken payment in the form of your souls.

Im not sure I have mine anylonger, but I keep selling it anyway, so there you go, have my soul, Im not sure I'll be needing it anyway, and if that is what I have to pay to play arm, then I'll be happy to harvest some more souls  :twisted:

[Sanvean]

We're currently talking about the finances of a solution.  Armageddon will not go pay to play, not matter what we decide.

[Delirium]

FWIW, it seems to have cleared up on my end.

Knock on wood, toss salt, etc etc..

[Anonymous]

We're currently talking about the finances of a solution.  Armageddon will not go pay to play, not matter what we decide.

Sanvean, given that Armageddon is a not for profite website/mud and how long it's been around has anyone considered trying to get some corporation to host it for free?

I work at a major company with several datacenters worldwide and they provide cabinet space and internet bandwidth for free to at least two dozen not for profit websites.    These sites are single-homed in their own tiny subnet with a link to the internet via our border routers.

It's a longshot but the advantages are free connectivity (Armageddon's bandwidth utilization per month has to be tiny given that it's a mud and the website is low on graphics) and possibly free hardware.  It's all a matter of finding a marketing contact because those guys love saying they are giving back to the internet or whatever.

Due to the fact that I'm a sub-contractor I do not feel it would be appropriate to approach the marketing guy I know at this company who does this, which is a shame because he likes me because I worked a weekend on his behalf.

The obvious drawback is that finding a site local to Saikun will be difficult unless he's willing to drive a state over (NY or MA) whenever maintenance is required.

[Sanvean]

I'd rather try to continue funding it out of pocket;  funding through a corporation usually comes with some strings and complciations.

[Saikun]

I'm going to try a couple annoying things over the next few days. I'm getting annoyed. It's a pretty good chance there's nothing wrong with the AT&T link, as it turns out, and also nothing wrong with Ginka. Time to start swapping out cables, jiggling wires, and swapping out network equipment. Nothing shows any signs of being broken, but it's gotten to that point... so, we'll see if that helps.

-S

[John]

Nothing shows any signs of being broken, but it's gotten to that point... so, we'll see if that helps.

*sigh* Don't you just love computers?

Good luck. I hope you find it quickly (mainly for your sanity ).

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I have to say thanks to the Immortals, for their continued work on this problem, and even more for not blowing up at us for bugging out about it.

Good gig.

[chang]

I'm going to try a couple annoying things over the next few days. I'm getting annoyed. It's a pretty good chance there's nothing wrong with the AT&T link, as it turns out, and also nothing wrong with Ginka. Time to start swapping out cables, jiggling wires, and swapping out network equipment. Nothing shows any signs of being broken, but it's gotten to that point... so, we'll see if that helps.

-S

Are there spiders inside ginka's belly again?  (Didn't that happen once?)

[mansa]

http://armageddonmud.livejournal.com/5963.html

Baby Spiders
OK... so Sanvean has been wanting me to post this story for a long time, and I'm getting around to it now.

For those of you who don't know what I do, I administrate the server that Armageddon runs on, named Ginka. Back several years ago, before I was officially in this role, the machine was acting all strange. There were fears that we had been hacked, as had happened several times in the past. The problem, however, turned out to be almost as serious. In an attempt to safeguard the system utilities after the last time we had gotten hacked, somebody decided to keep the various important sys utils on a write-protected floppy, so that someone trying to hack the game wouldn't be able to replace them with their own evil versions. It kind of sounded like a good idea, in theory, but there were many problems with it. Not the least of which was that the floppy had began to disintegrate after years of constant use in the drive. The machine was becoming uncontrollable. Certain utilities wouldn't even work anymore because those sectors of the floppy had been eaten away. The decision was made to mail me Ginka so I could rebuild it.

Now at the time, Ginka lived in the basement of Dr. Dave, User #1 from ISCA. Dave ran an ISP and through some ancient agreement, had been hosting Ginka for free in his basement for years. When Ginka finally arrived, its outside was in pretty sorry shape. The fans were clogged with dust, and I could tell the machine wasn't well cared for. When I opened it up, however, I was in for a creepy surprise. Much of the interior of the case was full of dust, obviously, but also of webbing. In this webbing, and the dust, and everywhere else, were thousands of baby spiders, all dead. It was one of the most horrible things I've ever seen, while working on computers anyway. To this day, I don't know if the spiders had died inside Ginka, or if they had been living in there, and died in transit from Iowa to Connecticut. I didn't think about it very long, and vaccuumed the little suckers up.

Once Ginka was physically cleaned, I backed the data up, and rebuilt the machine from scratch (with the previous components, plus a few little things I added). When everything was working, I sent it back to Iowa, where it was eventually put back on the net.

As something of an epilogue, that Ginka was replaced a couple years ago with a brand new machine that we bought, and which I now host here in Connecticut. We were never able to get in touch with Dr. Dave to recover our old machine (the inside of which contains the signatures of many of the Arm's original imms), and as far as I know, it's still running down in his basement, with nothing on it. The current Ginka does have the signatures of all the imms who attended the AIM at which I built the machine, as well as a nifty logo drawn inside by Gleden.

[Hymwen]

Very interesting read. Thanks, mansa

[Zhaky]

wow almost as a farytail or something, it was wild, and the old imms sounded like some lost civilazation    anyway, the coolest true story I think I've ever heard... when it comes to computers that is, and by the way I've also heard that the word "debugging" actually comes from the time when computers were huge and made by radiopibes (or whatever they are called in english, now a days they are made by tiny transistors), at that time they actually had to get a man inside them and clean them for bugs , I guess that is what you did to old ginka, whom now is on her own all alone   ... poor old ginka, I hope new ginka won't experience the same thing