PEQ is down again ??

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by rup1033

So far I have only donated 10$ towards the PEQ project but I'm poor and have no job at the moment, if I was working I'd totally drop 100 bucks without a thought if it would help make us not disconnect often.

Now the idea of getting a server could be done if every person who plays donates 10 to 100$ you could build a new machine. Perhaps have a thermometer or a donation counter on the server homepage to show how finances are at the time.

A new server PC of 4,000 dollars like I saw mentioned earlier I think is way too much overkill for a small project that is funded from donations and your own pocketbook. You can build a reasonably priced high end desktop PC with a quad core CPU and 8gig of ram and a good quality motherboard , 7200rpm enterprise grade disks with synced spindle speed in raid 1+0 (4 disks with one spare not in the computer so if one fails of a set you can RMA, and rebuild the array with the spare and keep server going), or a raid 5 solution if that's your preference. Don't go too skimpy on the raid card for sure.

IF you were to go with a desktop CPU like an Athlon II x4 3ghz without the shared L3 cache like Phenom or Opteron it would probably look something like
500$ for mainboard chip, and 8gig of corsair xms seris performance ram maybee 100$ for a kvm ip pci card or usb SecureLinx Spider kvm over ip then a raid card ~290$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...scrollFullInfo , A thermaltake TPG-750M 87% efficent gold certified 750W psu 180$.
A good place to get a enclosure for it would be http://www.servercase.com/Merchant2/...Code=AdvServer I purchased one of their entry level server cases, for what I believe was 89$ after shipping, solid steel with 8 drive bays 5.25" and one 3.5". Fits my 12x13 extended atx opteron board.
So around 1300-1400$ doing it that route without having purchased the hard disks.
For drives I don't know about the newer velociraptors. I hear the failure rate is pretty high, but my older original raptor disks have been running all day and night and getting beat on for a few years now and are doing well. Perhaps a cheaper 7200rpm disk set for the raid would be best, as long as they have synchronized spindle speed, avoid western digital RE disks I hear they have a horrible failure rate according to newegg reviews. If you really wanted I suppose you could step it up to Serial Attached SCSI the disks in that category are built like a tank generally which I'm sure you know. Their cost is quite a bit more.

That's just my 2cp worth, just making a few suggestions on a sub 2000$ machine. Maybe such a idea cant work out for you but I was bored and sat and wrote it. And I'm sure someone is bored and sat and read it and may have ideas of their own to post.

We can always go cheaper. The whole point of this plan is to NOT go the cheapest route. As was stated by CD in another thread, I will be providing a the co-lo to put this equipment at my expense. In exchange, I will be running a virtual host on this equipment. Currently, I have that virtual machine running on one of two physical machines so I can move it to the other in the event of a hardware failure. I am not going to give up that redundancy for my own set up. This means it has to be two machines. I do not have the IP space for additional machines without an additional fee per month, which is also not going to happen.

My existing machines do not have the disk IO ability to handle PEQ. They might be a bit light on CPU as well, but it is possible that both could be used in tandem for PEQ if the disk IO problem were addressed. That would require a caching raid card.

The raid cards in our proposal are about $800 each. Sure, we could go cheaper, but then we would not have as much expandability in the future. These raid cards come with 512MB cache memory and are expandable to 4GB cache memory. They optionally have a battery that can be connected to them, which allows the safe use of write caching.

People seem to think that adding more drives in a RAID array always resolves disk IO problems. Just like networking, there are two values to pay attention to with disk IO: throughput and latency. Adding drives improves throughput but does not help latency, and in fact can even hurt latency. Higher spindle speeds and seek times improve latency. Read caching can help some as well if the predictive read ahead logic is good. Write caching can help quite a bit as it allows you to optimize writes to reduce the number of seeks required.

The systems we proposed will have a pair of 147GB 15krpm SAS drives in each. Short of enterprise class SSDs, this is the best we can do. Consumer class SSDs do not have the performance or the reliability we need.

The systems we are getting will be expandable to up to two 6 core xeons and up to 48GB ram. It is currently the cheapest option that I could find that has built in management and the expandability we desired. There are other options up to motherboards that could take up to two 12 core opterons and 256GB ram, but that costs even more than what we already proposed.

Also the suggestion in the quote above does not include any way to power cycle or reset the system. This is a feature that you generally get with more expensive server class motherboards. My current systems have this as well as the ones that are in the proposed setup for PEQ.

Here is the list of components proposed: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...umber=10972134

If you look at the bottom of that list, the subtotal is $4,156.74. Then you have to add for tax and shipping. That comes to $4,587.64. And don't forget that the money we are raising has PayPal fees taken out of it. So this is not a cheap endeavor. But it should be a long term solution, allowing for failures, both software and hardware, and allowing for quite a lot of relatively inexpensive upgrades later if more horsepower is needed.

[Quellren]

Originally Posted by gaeorn

That comes to $4,587.64. And don't forget that the money we are raising has PayPal fees taken out of it.

It doesn't have to. There are no fees when donating money, provided you:
1) use the 'personal' tab when sending money. Label the transaction as a 'gift', 'other', or 'cash advance'. The other two options 'living expenses' and 'payment owed' won't have the paypal fees deducted but somehow don't seem to fit. This is, after all, a DONATION, not a PURCHASE.
the only other thing is:
2) pay for it with a paypal balance, or a validated bank acct. if you use a credit card or debit card there is a fee, I believe it's smaller, but still a fee.

This isn't shady, underhanded, or 'secret-squirrel'. You are making a donation. Not a purchase. Read the paypal site and stop wasting money.

[IamITdude]

Wowsie, just browsed that list of components. You're sure going for redundancy upon redundancy. Seems a solid plan, although I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to just go mid-range setup and then simply upgrade mid-range again in a year or two. The logistics of that might be a shit storm in itself though.

You say you're going to be running two of thoose bad boys? I hope you've got enough wall amps at your hosting provider to run two huge guzzlers at peak(ing) capacity. Back of the envelope calculation, they are going to be sucking up what 7, 8 amps? I host my servers in a shared co-lo which puts a severe limit on how much juice my servers can suck up without me paying extra.

But given you're proposing this I guess you've considered this.

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by Quellren

It doesn't have to. There are no fees when donating money, provided you:
1) use the 'personal' tab when sending money. Label the transaction as a 'gift', 'other', or 'cash advance'. The other two options 'living expenses' and 'payment owed' won't have the paypal fees deducted but somehow don't seem to fit. This is, after all, a DONATION, not a PURCHASE.
the only other thing is:
2) pay for it with a paypal balance, or a validated bank acct. if you use a credit card or debit card there is a fee, I believe it's smaller, but still a fee.

This isn't shady, underhanded, or 'secret-squirrel'. You are making a donation. Not a purchase. Read the paypal site and stop wasting money.

Unfortunately, most donate via credit card. But yes, for those who do not, they can use the option you state.

[war_master11]

it really blows that the server is not up for the entire weekend, guess i'll go back to starcraft2

FNW, for the sake of the whole peq community, why dont you allow others to access the server? seriously already, we appreciate that you are the "founder" of all this, but if you dont have the commitment to this project anymore, why dont you just give it up and let someone else handle it? the rule you have right now is just gonna kill this project if this same problem keeps happening. Look at recent peq population vs p1999 and you'll see TGC player base is going down hill.

[DeathSymbolic]

Originally Posted by war_master11

it really blows that the server is not up for the entire weekend, guess i'll go back to starcraft2

FNW, for the sake of the whole peq community, why dont you allow others to access the server? seriously already, we appreciate that you are the "founder" of all this, but if you dont have the commitment to this project anymore, why dont you just give it up and let someone else handle it? the rule you have right now is just gonna kill this project if this same problem keeps happening. Look at recent peq population vs p1999 and you'll see TGC player base is going down hill.

Agree. As I said before , whether it is free or not does not matter at this point. The purpose of having a free EQ Server is completely defeated when the server goes down for 5 days at a time. It would be one thing if it was a freak thing that just happened once or twice. But this has happened Like 5 or 6 times since the start on 2010 alone...for extended periods of time just like this one. What is the purpose of people donating , and for that matter , why should anyone donate even a penny to a shaky server run by some dude who clearly does not want to even be doing this anymore? The server is losing people every single day that this drags out longer. Get some stability going on PEQ before it dies for good.

[robinreg]

Originally Posted by DeathSymbolic

Agree. As I said before , whether it is free or not does not matter at this point. The purpose of having a free EQ Server is completely defeated when the server goes down for 5 days at a time. It would be one thing if it was a freak thing that just happened once or twice. But this has happened Like 5 or 6 times since the start on 2010 alone...for extended periods of time just like this one. What is the purpose of people donating , and for that matter , why should anyone donate even a penny to a shaky server run by some dude who clearly does not want to even be doing this anymore? The server is losing people every single day that this drags out longer. Get some stability going on PEQ before it dies for good.

I don't think it'll die out as long as eqemu is still developing. PEQ is the main and test database for EQEMU and most if not all are based off of PEQ.

[renoturks]

Originally Posted by DeathSymbolic

... But this has happened Like 5 or 6 times since the start on 2010 alone...for extended periods of time just like this one. What is the purpose of people donating , and for that matter , why should anyone donate even a penny to a shaky server run by some dude who clearly does not want to even be doing this anymore?

The entire purpose behind the donations is to move away from this host.

Also, please provide proof of 5 or 6 times this year that the server has been down for 5+ days please. Exaggerating certainly doesn't help your argument. Coming here and sounding off saying that the server is down for a week every month or so certainly doesn't help the next thing you said....

The server is losing people every single day that this drags out longer. Get some stability going on PEQ before it dies for good.

PEQ won't die. I've been around long enough to know that, of all the servers on the Emu, PEQ is the least likely to die. For starters, it's a test server. It is just here to develop a database for all of the other servers to use. When I started on PEQ, we peaked at 30-40 characters. It has only grown since then. If a large population of players is the goal, then there is most certainly about 50 other ways to grow the server's population. As it stands, we don't feel the need to grow the population or we would implement some of these things.

[Mghargh]

Originally Posted by war_master11

it really blows that the server is not up for the entire weekend, guess i'll go back to starcraft2

FNW, for the sake of the whole peq community, why dont you allow others to access the server? seriously already, we appreciate that you are the "founder" of all this, but if you dont have the commitment to this project anymore, why dont you just give it up and let someone else handle it? the rule you have right now is just gonna kill this project if this same problem keeps happening. Look at recent peq population vs p1999 and you'll see TGC player base is going down hill.

PLEASE War Master, bother to read the other posts on this subject Before you comment. The present server belongs to the person who originally set it up. He is no longer active. He is out in Colorado while the people presently running it live on the east coast. Those running it now are Trying to come up with the funds for a New server that they Will have access to. The new setup will cost around $4k & are asking for donations as it is a bit much to come out of their own pockets to run what is essentially a free game server.

[war_master11]

Originally Posted by Mghargh

PLEASE War Master, bother to read the other posts on this subject Before you comment. The present server belongs to the person who originally set it up. He is no longer active. He is out in Colorado while the people presently running it live on the east coast. Those running it now are Trying to come up with the funds for a New server that they Will have access to. The new setup will cost around $4k & are asking for donations as it is a bit much to come out of their own pockets to run what is essentially a free game server.

What I'm trying to say is FNW should designate at least 1 or 2 developers as contact points with the hosting company. Right now it seems FNW is the only one that can talk them, why not let CD or others speak on his behalf?!

At this point, we don't even know what the hell is going on other than CD has contacted FNW. Has FNW even made contact yet with the host server? Or is the hosting server just keep delay the request for some reason??

[VoodooChild]

Originally Posted by war_master11

What I'm trying to say is FNW should designate at least 1 or 2 developers as contact points with the hosting company. Right now it seems FNW is the only one that can talk them, why not let CD or others speak on his behalf?!

At this point, we don't even know what the hell is going on other than CD has contacted FNW. Has FNW even made contact yet with the host server? Or is the hosting server just keep delay the request for some reason??

Great point, obviously best case scenario would be the ability to directly contact someone who can touch the server. I'd imagine this has been addressed already?

Maladien, that's a great gesture.

Admins and those who give their time and resources to the Peq server, thank you. It's a great setup with the website, magelo, database etc. etc. I know I'll play on this server for the foreseeable future.

[Jaqua]

we can talk all day about how we are going to donate yadda yadda. with all this talk of donations and the absurdity of having a server with no access and the only access it has is a man who has pretty much dissappeared. This is sounding alot like a scam now. A day maybe 2 back online yeah.. 3 days going into four ok.. it seems a bit excessive especially when money is being asked for.

Thats not to say that I wouldnt donate but with all this talk about server costs yadda yadda.. hell with 1 grand you could buy a decent server pc with enough power to run its not like we see 500+ people a night anyway.. max we get these days is about 250 if that

[Rogean]

I've set Gaeorn up with a server on our farm. Hes working on setting it up but I think cavedude has the only backup of the database, so we still have to wait until Tuesday.

[gaeorn]

Originally Posted by badplayer

I've never used "enterprise" raid. What do $800 raid cards do that intel chipset raid doesn't do? Isn't the bottleneck the hard drives and not the chipset??? Even with an old ICH8R, two super fastSSD doesn't bottleneck it and these mechanical drivers are way slower.

If you don't know the difference between an Areca raid card with cache and an Intel ICH8R, then there is no point in me educating you. And besides, by the time you get large enough enterprise class SSDs to do what we need, you have exceeded the cost of the raid cards. If you go buy the cheapy consumer SSDs, you won't get the performance needed, and we'll be risking data loss at any time due to their notorious unreliability, particularly when doing lots of small writes (like the emu server does).

Originally Posted by badplayer

Why in the world would that be needed for a EQ server? Those two raid cards take the price from relatively easy to do, to crazy expensive. $2400 vs $4000.

I can't even imagine a situation where you would need such a thing as opposed to a plain old UPS at 1/10th the cost. That's something a giant corporation like VISA would buy for redundancy in credit card transactions. I would imagine most etailers, unless you're the size of newegg, don't even have one. This is madness.

A battery backup for the raid card is so you can use the cache memory for write caching. Sure, you could theoretically rely upon a UPS, but even they sometimes loose power. Redundancy in the UPS reduces the chance of that, but all it takes is a moment without power to loose that write cache and you've corrupted your entire data set. So most raid card manufacturers won't allow you to do write caching unless they at least provide the option to add a battery to the card itself.

As to the cost, it is because we aren't buying the lower end of the list. We could save some of the cost by buying cards that do not have expandable cache memory. But then we don't have room for growth in the future. If we go that route and we need more cache memory in the future, we throw those cards away and buy new ones. Is it just me, or would that bother anyone else?

Originally Posted by badplayer

Yea but....this is an EQ server. Two redundant boxes plus two $800 raid cards is just a lot of money. Could get this done so much easier without the expensive raid cards.

Ok, so we can set up a cheaper system. I think that has been covered repeatedly in this and other threads. But even then, it's only one system. The existing PEQ server, which lags horribly sometimes, cost about $1,200 (if my information is correct). So in theory, we could buy two like that for $2,400 and then have spent $2,400 on something that still lags horribly sometimes.

Or we can buy something better and eliminate the lag problem while we are at it. And if we are going to buy something better, why not get something that is expandable so we won't have to throw those systems away in a year when we exceed the capabilities of those systems to handle the load PEQ puts on them?

As to why we need to buy two, I already explained that in this thread. I feel no need to repeat that here.

Originally Posted by Jaqua

we can talk all day about how we are going to donate yadda yadda. with all this talk of donations and the absurdity of having a server with no access and the only access it has is a man who has pretty much dissappeared. This is sounding alot like a scam now. A day maybe 2 back online yeah.. 3 days going into four ok.. it seems a bit excessive especially when money is being asked for.

Thats not to say that I wouldnt donate but with all this talk about server costs yadda yadda.. hell with 1 grand you could buy a decent server pc with enough power to run its not like we see 500+ people a night anyway.. max we get these days is about 250 if that

You think this sounds like a scam now. I really don't know what to say to this. I guess don't donate if that is the way you feel. The service will still be free to all of you.

As to the time it has been down, what is a more reasonable response time for free hosting? The co-lo facility is providing their service for free because FNW used to work for them so they are doing it as a favor for an ex-employee. But given the service is being given away for free, the fact that they do anything at all to help when we have problems is nice of them.

FNW travels for his new job. Last I heard, he was out of town. Although he put in a reboot request, if the server did not come up properly after the reboot, he will have to deal with it in person when he is back in town. Should we expect him to fly back home sooner to deal with this in a more timely manner? Or should we expect that the hosting company is going to diagnose problems with the system and fix it for us (since clearly they aren't giving us enough for free already)?

Yes, the situation sucks. But we are getting what we are paying for. If you don't like the way it is right now, do something to change the situation. That's what we are trying to do.

And again, someone stating what it would cost to build a server that will run PEQ. This time its $1,000. Interesting that the old server, that cost $1,200, sometimes can barely keep up with the demands on it. But somehow, a $1,000 server will handle it all just fine. Course, then you'll have to find hosting for it since my offer to host requires dual servers for redundancy. But that should be easy to find. Everyone wants to spend money on hosting a free service, don't they?

Yes, I'm getting sarcastic due to my irritation with the constant battle over this. We are doing the best we feel that we can. CD and I spend six months discussing this back and forth before we settled on this. Do you think we didn't consider the alternatives? I can't even tell you how many different configurations we went through before we settled on this one.

We aren't asking for all of the money right now. In fact, we aren't asking for money at all. Were just stating where donated money will go and the reasons why someone might want to donate. If we got no donations at all, we would continue things as they are, doing the best we can.

If you feel you can suggest something better, spec out two identical systems (or a single system and let us know who will pay for the hosting) and explain how they cover the disk IO latency issue and have good expandability so we don't have to throw away hardware in the future. We'd be happy to look at such a setup. But please stop throwing out dollar amounts without a system spec behind it. We need hard info if we are to look at alternatives.

Originally Posted by Rogean

I've set Gaeorn up with a server on our farm. Hes working on setting it up but I think cavedude has the only backup of the database, so we still have to wait until Tuesday.

This is assuming CD comes up with a way to set this up where he is comfortable with it. We can't expect him to maintain something that is awkward or difficult for him in some way. However, I fully expect this could be used until we get the new servers set up. But ultimately it is up to CD and his discretion. I am making sure this system is ready for him when he gets back on Tuesday in the event he wishes to make use of it.

Even when CD is back on Tuesday, remember that his backups may not be right up to the time that PEQ went down. So it may be a choice of rolling back to an earlier backup or waiting until the current PEQ server is available to him again. I only say this so people understand why there may be further delays before PEQ is available for play again. It all depends on what CD has and how quickly it could be put into use.

[Ellyeni]

/cheer Gaeorn


Sad the server is still down but I call PEQ home and thoroughly appreciate what everyone does to provide EQ for free and also what they are doing to try and get it back up and running. I made a donation after the last downtime a few weeks ago and that was the first downtime I had experienced since I started playing in February. As previously posted by CD when PEQ crashed last time the server had been up for over 400 days straight which is a huge effort for being free.

Yes we have a reset for a few minutes each night which is required tho annoying to us Oceanic players...... but you could probably guarantee that those short downtimes don't equal the downtimes that you pay a monthly fee for on Live when they do their upgrades and coding changes etc. Oddly noone seems to complain about paying for that downtime .......

Come back PEQ we miss you /hug