CLOK BBS

The CLOK server will be brought offline for transition to new services this Saturday morning. I hope to have services restored Saturday evening or Sunday morning at the latest.

Update: The original post has been edited to reflect the correct date of JUNE 26th, not MARCH 26th. Sorry!

Due to some personal health issues, I'm not anywhere nearly as prepared for this transition as I should be, it'll have to be postponed to next weekend. (July 3rd)

J, please take care of you. We completely understand and I am sending hugs and good vibes your way.

So, rather than having a set day where I'm going to say "CLOK is going to be down for a whole day while I move the server", I'm going to set up the new servers parallel to the existing one, make a copy of everything, thoroughly test it out and make sure it works, and then when we're ready, copy over the most recent live data from CLOK and have Rias (owner of the contrarium.net domain) update his DNS entries for the clok subdomain.

What this means is bottom line, there won't really be any significant down time this weekend. I'm going to start working on it this weekend. I'll be uber motivated to finish it, because I'm currently paying for both the new server and old server. But I'm not going to shut down CLOK for a whole day/weekend/whatever while I do it.

I get this Monday off as a holiday, plus I'm also taking paid time off work Friday and Tuesday, so I'll have five days to play around with it and hopefully get everything set up. However, I am both refactoring the CLOK code from Python 2.7 to Python 3, and also setting up a private network and gateway to isolate the CLOK website/BBS and Wiki Databases from the actual CLOK server, so that the ONLY resources running on the CLOK server will be CLOK. I don't really have a bunch of experience doing this, and while I understand the concept and there are plenty of guides online, I can't really say for certain it'll be ready within that 5 day window while I'm on vacation.

Plus I'm selfish and will probably be spending a good chunk of my vacation playing Disgaea 6 and Mario Golf. :-D But I will work on this as well. I'll keep y'all updated with how things are going here.

Thanks for doing all this, J. It doesn't sound selfish at all to play games and spend time with family/friends on a vacation. Have fun!

For those interested, I spent a couple hours this morning getting my VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) network configured and successfully routed traffic from my internal game server through my public gateway. Yay, progress.

Next step:
Figure out how to route HTTP/HTTPS traffic from the gateway to a web server and Port 4000 traffic to the game server (right now it just points ALL traffic to the game server).

I've decided to put this project on hold for now. I would rather be working on releasing new content and improvements to CLOK, the kind that are actually visible and meaningful to the player base, rather than chasing after a shiny new server.

I've run into roadblock after roadblock in setting up the new server, and it's detracted too much of my time when I'd much rather be working on making the world of CLOK more fun and enjoyable to play in.

I'll move to a new server if I'm over forced to by my current hosting provider, but as I've been running CLOK on a server with them for so many years without an issue, I will continue to utilize their services.