We will be having some 'scheduled' downtime on this upcoming Tuesday, December 5th.

Downtime Begins: Tuesday, December 5th at 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Estimated Duration: 1-3 Hours

At this time, I do not know exactly when this maintenance will occur on Tuesday. This maintenance requires their datacenter team to take our server offline and replace one of its disk drives, as they have detected errors occurring on one of them. Their datacenter team isn't able to schedule this type of maintenance to a specific time, so unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to give a more accurate time of when this will occur. Hopefully, though, it's sometime in the morning.

The good news is that I probably can just leave the site running and then when they go to do their work, they'll just shut the server down and the site will go offline. It should be a quick swap, as all they have to do is take the bad drive out, put the new drive in, and then the RAID array will automatically propagate on the new drive. And then we're good to go.

If I get more information, I will update this post and let you guys know. For now though, this is the only information I have.

I apologize for the inconvenience. At least this was caught early before anything catastrophic happened.

the new server is running so much more smooth. Like yeah there are errors and images that are broken but they were fixed pretty quickly. I think we all can deal with a little bit of downtime to fix whatever else is happening. I love that this site is so transparent about issues and fixing them. Neopets is having a bit of trouble atm and there is zero communication and neopets subreddit is going nuts. I am glad you are very much not like that

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=107615&page=1#2 Author: Katty Time Posted: 12/2/2023 at 11:58 PM the new server is running so much more smooth. Like yeah there are errors and images that are broken but they were fixed pretty quickly. I think we all can deal with a little bit of downtime to fix whatever else is happening. I love that this site is so transparent about issues and fixing them. Neopets is having a bit of trouble atm and there is zero communication and neopets subreddit is going nuts. I am glad you are very much not like that

Hehe. I am always happy to keep you guys 'in the know'. The on-site errors have had nothing to do with the new server - that's just because I decided to take this opportunity to finally push us to PHP 8.0 (version 8.2). So, there was a lot of issues related to that by going from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2. The new server itself isn't responsible at all for that.

The current disk errors may be the reason for intermittent lag and whatnot. Our server's main disk drives are two drives in a RAID 1 array - this means that they mirror each other. This is for redundancy incase of... well, exactly what's happening to our server. If one disk fails, the server can continue operating using the other disk. However, if one of the disks is having issues, it definitely could be causing lag and whatnot as the RAID array is trying to keep the disks in sync when one is struggling.

The intermittent lag might also be related to other things. But gotta just try and fix things one issue at a time to eventually figure it out.

its a good idea to have a backup that is running at the same time so that if anything happens you dont need to roll back hours of db changes. Oh lordy that happened once to a site i was playing and the players lost something like 72 hours of gameplay cause the server wasnt updating. They lost alot of players over that. Im glad you are already thinking ahead so nothing like that happens to sylestia

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=107615&page=1#4 Author: Katty Time Posted: 12/3/2023 at 2:35 AM its a good idea to have a backup that is running at the same time so that if anything happens you dont need to roll back hours of db changes. Oh lordy that happened once to a site i was playing and the players lost something like 72 hours of gameplay cause the server wasnt updating. They lost alot of players over that. Im glad you are already thinking ahead so nothing like that happens to sylestia

At this point, we have two separate backups running - each every 24 hours alternating every 12 hours. And then once per day, one of the backups is stored to an additional location on my personal PC + my Google Drive account.

And then, as mentioned above, our main disk drives run in RAID 1 mirroring each other, so if anything happens to one drive, we still have the other as an immediate backup.

And the maintenance is done! They were able to swap out the bad drive and replace it without having to take the server offline.

So, assuming nothing unforeseen pops up today/tomorrow, we should be good to go!