Silver Linings

As those who were online tonight already know, NarniaMUCK is going through a period of technical difficulties at present. While this is clearly a serious bummer, I thought I'd share a story that might help us keep it in perspective. (Myself included.)

If you've read the history notes on the site here regarding NarniaMUCK's origin, you already know that I didn't create the game. I created pretty much everything INSIDE the game, but the game itself was created by a young Danish man named Mike Hansen. He invited me on the game to help with some programming, and over the years I guess I gradually (and not so gradually in some cases) took it over. It wasn't a calculated takeover or anything, but there you go.

Even after I was heading up the gameside programming and administration of the game, Mike still handled our server-side concerns. This goes back to when NarniaMUCk was still very new, and I was working on the basic structure of the game. I was also a mother of one at the time, fresh from teaching and a stay-at-home Mom for the first time, so my hands weren't a full back then and I was hungry for conversation and something that made me feel like I was still contributing to the world in some intellectual way.

Ergo: I spent a lot of time working on NarniaMUCK. And I mean a LOT of time. I spent hours building and programming and coming up with ideas. There are those who very sweetly praise my productivity NOW, but believe me..if you'd seen me back then, you'd think I was neglecting the game these days.

Mike knew his server stuff pretty well, but he was young and in love. His intended was a young girl in Georgia, USA, so much of his time and attention was naturally focused on their wedding plans and the various hoops immigration was making them jump through before she could move to Denmark to be with him. At the same time, his resources were not that great, so he wasn't able to make backups of the game as often as might have been prudent.

And, of course, there came a point when the MUCK died. Just like that. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. Mike contacted me via E-mail to ask what I'd done to it, but I hadn't done anything. Later, I think, we found out that he'd been running the MUCK on a RAID array and it had run into corrupted sectors... But most of that is still gibberish to me to this day. The point is, the MUCK snerked, did a core dump and then completely imploded. Ouch.

The save messages of which we are all so fond do serve an actual purpose. You all probably realize that. Ideally, by saving periodically, the MUCK creates a backup of itself that can be called upon to serve as a replacement if the actual game crashes for some reason. NarniaMUCK creates these backups once every two hours, so if the MUCK crashes at any given time, at most we hope to lose only two hours' worth of work. Even at my most prolific, two hours is surviveable. Sort of annoying, maybe, but not devastating.

Well, the problem with these is that they need to be stored somewhere, and they do take up space. And for a guy like Mike, who didn't have a ton of extra computer space lying around, keeping a lot of backups around wasn't practical. So he didn't... And so when the MUCK collapsed that day, it took all of the most recent backups with it. Mike had to cast about for an off-site backup. Fortunately, he found one.

It was three months old. THREE. MONTHS. OLD. Three months probably doesn't sound like a lot, but back then, that meant that a SERIOUS chunk of work that I'd done just vanished into the ether. We lost lots of characters, dozens of rooms I'd built, and tons of programming. It was unbelievable. It was like going to bed at age 30, a college graduate who is married with children, and waking up to find you're 12 again and you have to get to Middle School before the tardy bell.

I cried.

But! We sallied forth. and recovered. It wasn't fun, but an old version of the MUCK was better than no MUCK at all. And maybe the fact that I had to redo so much made me take greater care as I did build it. I know it made Mike more dilligent about keeping recent backups stored in a safe place, just in case.

At any rate, I just wanted to take this opportunity to compare this with what we currently enjoy thanks to Marstmelo. Mars has generously donated not only his server space and the bandwidth to run it.. He also has arranged to store backups off-site so that if the MUCK's server dies, the backups are safe. There've been more than one or two times when I've gone in to change a line in a program without taking the time to check and make sure I was working with the correct version, and subsequently erased huge chunks of programming that brought the MUCK to a halt. When that's happened, Mars just patiently brings up an earlier save and lets me fix my mistake, usually within an hour. In the years since he generously offered to host us, the MUCK has never suffered appreciable downtime, and we've never lost anything.

Tonight, the server crashed. I think it just wore out and gave up. The MUCK kept running, but the backups didn't save all day. Currently, he's working on getting a new hard drive in place, but regardless of how long it takes us to get the game back online, we can be assured that the most we'll have lost is maybe 24 hours. This means that when we bring the game back up, to bring it current I'll have to set a few props and create two items that I made today.

No big deal.

Many, MANY thanks to Mars for all he does for us. We really wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him, so I hope you'll all take a moment to let him know how much we appreciate what he does for us.