The old blog engine was fairly old. I haven’t updated to the latest version as I’m afraid it might break some things.

Recently, I noticed that some of my recent blog posts are not appearing properly. I’m the only who can view it, and only if I am logged-in. Also, I noticed some spam links being inserted into the “missing” posts.

I’ve updated everything to the latest version, to make things more secure as well. I’m glad it went problem-free, and only took a few minutes.

The most recent Flash update caused some connection issues with the games. Unfortunately, I was on vacation when the release was made, so players who have upgraded their Flash players (either automatically or manually) were unable to play the games for a few days now. A fix has been made today.

One of the servers (not the same one as last week) had another hardware issue today. My hosting provider needed to replace the power supply this time. This server hosts the main web site, so the entire site have been inaccessible for awhile. Total downtime is 37 minutes or so. Not as bad as last week’s problem, but with these recent issues, I really need to think of solutions.

While these issues are unavoidable (especially hardware problems), I think it can be improved to lessen the total downtime (or none at all). Not an easy task, as this requires multiple servers (that costs time and money to put into action), but I’m adding this in my list of things to prepare for. Anyway, the server is now back online.

One of the servers is currently experiencing problems in the network provider. 1/4 of the game rooms have been down for an hour now. It looks like it will take much more time to get the server back online, so I have temporarily moved things around to get all the game rooms working again.

All games should be ok now, however I will still be working on fixing the server that’s currently having issues. Nothing much I can do really, as the problem is on the network provider, but they said I might have to change IPs, so this requires some work. Hopefully the transition will be easy.

UPDATE: They have replaced the failing hardware (a router port), so the server is now back online. Thankfully, no changing of IPs required. Everything is now back to normal.

- updated one of the servers to support geo-targeting
- updated all game clients for a quick but significant security update

From my hosting provider:

“We are currently experiencing issues upstream from our Savvis IDC. Savvis was performing unscheduled maintainence on backbone devices which has caused a peering issue and severe or 100% packet loss for most hosts on the Savvis network.”

This explains the site problems that occurred today, lasting for about 3-4 hours. All my servers were affected, so players were unable to access the site and all the game rooms. There has been some uptime that lasted for a few minutes only, then it becomes inaccessible again. Connection has been experiencing intermittent issues.

Anyway, everything seems to be ok now, although the data center is still working on some things to make sure everything is fully restored back to normal.

One of the servers stopped responding awhile back, affecting 1/4 of the game rooms and site page loading. There was some downtime of about 30 minutes while waiting for the machine to be rebooted. It’s now back online and everything appears to be ok again. Sorry to those who have been affected and had to wait before being able to play again.

Fixed a geo-targeting feature in one of the servers that’s causing some significant slowdown in banner delivery, which in turn is also causing slower loading of main site pages sometimes (whenever this particular server is accessed). It’s strange because the problem only appeared now (I just noticed it today actually), while this geo-targerting feature has been added for quite some time now. Anyway, it’s been fixed.

There has been some network issues with my hosting provider that lasted for about an hour. It affected the loading of the main site pages, and 1/4 of the game rooms. They’ve fixed it now, and everything is back to normal. Sorry to those who have been affected.

I just realized this has been my first post in almost 5 months! And it’s even about a network issue. Haven’t been able to update the site much (other than some maintenance stuff), but I’m doing some progress elsewhere. Will keep everyone updated eventually…

The sign-in issues detailed in the previous post have been fixed… I hope. While the functionality remains the same and there is really no visible changes client side, the sign-in process has been completely revamped. Since players run different Flash versions on different OS varieties, sometimes certain incompatibilities arise which may be very hard to track. The new approach should eliminate such issues.

This actually required major code changes server-side, as the core design has to be changed. I’ve been planning these changes for quite awhile now, but I have been hesitant because it might introduce a lot of new issues. The modified game servers have been running for more than 24 hours now though, and so far, there doesn’t appear to be any problem. I only spotted one new minor potential issue, but it has been corrected already. So far, so good.

The new design actually has a few more significant benefits. I expect things to be a lot less resource intensive (basically, this can allow me to run more game servers per computer), and inter-server communication is now possible (previously, this has to be done partly client side which is prone to traffic delay and is not really very effective either). This also makes it easier to support some other planned new games. All the changes have been worthwhile I think.

Some other minor game updates also made it to yesterday’s changes:
- winners are now announced in the Spin-A-Bingo chat as well
- more compact announcement of winners in the bingo games
- place an icon beside the player names of the last game’s winner(s)
- minor client bug fixes (certain situations only e.g. with new sign-ups, not even sure if these are really existing problems, or just a result of the recent changes)