Loss

[Kirill]

Forum is finally online. Thanks, Alley!

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Horay, we're back. Thanks guys, sure it was no end of pain. Seriously... thanks.

Did we ditch OVH in the end?
Given FL needs such a specialised environment to perform optimally does it really make sense to use a hosting provider?

As was answered before (before moving to OVH, as far as I remember), hosting provider is used due to DDoS protection and connection stability/speed- OVH also has hardware firewall.
What FLServer needs is powerful CPU and number of cores isn't relevant for it because it uses only one thread. But there's also forums, teamspeak and other things like minecraft.

[Reno]

Many thanks Team,well done

Reno

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[Binski]

Thanks Alley and the team!

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The Further Exploits of Captain Antares (August 2015) │ (alt) JonasHudson
*Argo | Special Operative ID (Approved Request)* | Argo Compilation Video
################ *Proposed OF Challenge System* ################
############### The Book of Piracy (Piracy Tutorial) ###############
############### Binski Alamo (Youtube Channel) ###############

[BOB]

Forum is finally online. Thanks, Alley!

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Horay, we're back. Thanks guys, sure it was no end of pain. Seriously... thanks.

Did we ditch OVH in the end?
Given FL needs such a specialised environment to perform optimally does it really make sense to use a hosting provider?

As was answered before (before moving to OVH, as far as I remember), hosting provider is used due to DDoS protection and connection stability/speed- OVH also has hardware firewall.
What FLServer needs is powerful CPU and number of cores isn't relevant for it because it uses only one thread. But there's also forums, teamspeak and other things like minecraft.

There isn't anything magical that these companies do. A hardware Firewall is relatively easy to setup. As for DDOS protection methods I'm sure there are publicised best practices that we could research and implement on servers of our own.

FL dedicated server, TS, and the forums + wiki strike me as completely separate services. Wouldn't it be nice if the Game server went down and the forums were unaffected?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a complaint, just a suggestion for how we could improve our infrastructure.

FL server could have it's own physical box running some small dual core that is easy to clock to really high speeds. The forums just need a standard LAMP or IIS server depending on what back-end they use. TS could probably be put on that server as well given how minimal the load would be. Minecraft could be put on another box or put in a VM on the webserver used for forums.

These 2(or 4) servers could sit behind a another box which acts as a Firewall and has some clever DDOS protection setup.

Hope this doesn't offend anyone, what we have works and is fine, but wouldn't this setup be a lot better?

[Alley]

As was answered before (before moving to OVH, as far as I remember), hosting provider is used due to DDoS protection and connection stability/speed- OVH also has hardware firewall.
What FLServer needs is powerful CPU and number of cores isn't relevant for it because it uses only one thread. But there's also forums, teamspeak and other things like minecraft.

There isn't anything magical that these companies do. A hardware Firewall is relatively easy to setup. As for DDOS protection methods I'm sure there are publicised best practices that we could research and implement on servers of our own.

FL dedicated server, TS, and the forums + wiki strike me as completely separate services. Wouldn't it be nice if the Game server went down and the forums were unaffected?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a complaint, just a suggestion for how we could improve our infrastructure.

FL server could have it's own physical box running some small dual core that is easy to clock to really high speeds. The forums just need a standard LAMP or IIS server depending on what back-end they use. TS could probably be put on that server as well given how minimal the load would be. Minecraft could be put on another box or put in a VM on the webserver used for forums.

These 2(or 4) servers could sit behind a another box which acts as a Firewall and has some clever DDOS protection setup.

Hope this doesn't offend anyone, what we have works and is fine, but wouldn't this setup be a lot better?

Do you think I didn't go over this already? Were we either a really rich gaming community or a large company, sure we could setup a massive infrastructure and handle DDOS ourselves. We don't. 70$ per month is already more than enough for this community and I don't plan to ask our donating members to donate even more.

Yes what happened is a shame. It's a shame it took this long but that's not the worst point out of all.
Also, you should be permabanned for mentioning IIS. BAD.

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Alley was right.

[jammi]

Plus in the past, when we've had private hosts it's been people who've been generous enough to run Discovery out of their own homes and businesses.

Consequently, whenever Discovery's been attacked, they've personally been the one to suffer the consequences, with the business owners in particular suffering real financial losses from the incidents. At some point, each host has come to the unfortunate decision that they couldn't continue hosting under those conditions.

That's kinda why we can't do private hosts any more, in addition to what alley's said.

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News article library, feedback and content requests.

[OldMiner]

There has been a lot said over this incident good and bad.

From Me

A HUGE WELL DONE TO ALL FOR THEIR TOLERANCE AND TO THE DEV TEAM AND ALLEY FOR THEIR WORK AND EFFORT GETTING IT ALL BACK TO NORMAL ASP. And yes I did shout it

[evanz]

I 2nd that, Alley and the devs are amazing, give them time, they do this without any payments, its not their main job, they do this out of the love of freelancer

thanks to Alley for the TS being backup so quick, thanks to my TS tech guy Kirill and my other TS admins

just patience all, itll be back, if your dedicated to the FL universe, just patience is all thats asked

[BOB]

Do you think I didn't go over this already? Were we either a really rich gaming community or a large company, sure we could setup a massive infrastructure and handle DDOS ourselves. We don't. 70$ per month is already more than enough for this community and I don't plan to ask our donating members to donate even more.

Yes what happened is a shame. It's a shame it took this long but that's not the worst point out of all.
Also, you should be permabanned for mentioning IIS. BAD.

Mmm, good points Alley. I guess I hadn't considered everything.
We would need our own servers and this would cost a fair amount of money, especially if we wanted reliable new hardware.

You're probably looking at around 1000GBP/1500USD to set up the whole network in addition to a good connection, DDOS scrubbing fees when we're attacked and somewhere to keep the servers which, as Jammi says, presents it's own problems. Ultimately what we have works and we've just been outstandingly unfortunate recently.
We wouldn't need to set up our own DDOS prevention methods though, just forward our traffic onto a 'scrubber' on the occasions that we do get attacked. These guys https://www.blacklotus.net/ are well respected in the industry and have several physical locations.

IIS isn't that ba... No wait, it kind of is... let the banhammer fly

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Discord: Uber_Beluga