First off, I would Like to thank Izzy for the outstanding dedication and hard work he has done to create and run such an awesome gaming establishment. Also, i would like to thank the Aloha staff for their hard work in achieving the best possible help and support to all those who love to play this awesome game. Just remember it takes alot of time, money, and passion to help keep this site and the servers up and running.
Now for the dirty…
As most of you know by now, yesterday the servers went down-sort of. They reset/rebooted themselves ok but with the error of not displaying them on the aos play page, spadille, etc. Usually there is no need for alarm when this happens, an admin just goes into the system and basically turns the broadcast switch off and back on (known as toggling) and it reappears on the play pages. Well, we did this but it would only turn them off, not on. You could still get into the servers, like i said but had to use another method. i.e. aos//xxxxxxxxxxxxx. Then izzy came on and was notified of the situation and he went to work to correct the issue. To make this as short as possble, He basically shut it down and it wouldnt turn back on. We realized we could get into the system but something was blocking the outgoing traffic to turn it back on. After many hours of trying diligently to restore our servers with the current data center, Izzy had to make a decision. This is quoted exactly from iz.
we basically have two options
which could be a few days from now
or schedule a move-out to vegas tomorrow
which means it will be hooked up on friday
if they actually ship it out tomorrow
stay and hope the new nic fixes these problems
So as you can see we have to rely on a part that may not fix a issue from a data center who should already have backups, fail safes, etc
(this may have been why the really laggy issue exp. on hallway and pinpoint were occuring)
To those who still dont follow, its a IP issue with the Data centers security protection and the constant data flow that we stream to them in all essance. So, Izzy decided to go back to Fiberhub where we were before, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
the servers should be shipped today and back up and running full throttle in a week. I say a week but Izzy stated by the end of this week if everything goes as planned, so fri/sat for those who dont wanna look at a calendar lol, and NO this did NOT stem from a DOS attack as some have stated. When izzy gets a chance he will give us more details as they come in but thought you all should know what was going on.
It’s gotta be annoying to have to move the servers back to were they where when the whole point of moving in the first place was to reduce lag and prevent this kind of thing.
That’s what happened. I was scared because I thought the servers DID get DDoS Attacked.
Data centers shouldn’t have ANY security protection. They should be an ISP in the sense that they give you your allocated bandwidth and IP in a controlled environment and that’s it. All of the security and protection should be up to the client unless they are paying for managed services. If Izzy was even thinking about it being a hardware issue I don’t see how changing data centers will help. There is a big hole in the story and I have a feeling the servers WONT be back up by the end of the week.
Anyway thanks Izzy. You must really like what you do if you are paying a data center to house your free game servers.
Thanks for the notice…I was wondering what was going on. 
as Mojo said, yesterday a decision was made to move back to the Vegas provider due to various issues with the LA provider such as the downtime we experienced yesterday and the day before. come to find out they were “monitoring” our traffic for suspicious activity, which ineffectively blocked outgoing UDP traffic from the ports used by pyspades. this was done without my permission and without any kind of notification. i’m still awaiting an explanation for this unnecessary action as i have already explained the legitimacy of our traffic to them several times in the past.
they have since stopped that nonsense and at the time of this writing all servers are online and i’m not seeing any issues. who knows how long this will last, though.
Mojo was nice enough to help put the move from LA to Vegas into action and ensure we stay there for some months to come. i decided to hold off on the move-out request for now so we can enjoy the servers over the weekend.
i’m debating whether to schedule the move-out on Monday or wait it out for the final 30 days of nonrefundable service. the LA provider is cheaper and they will soon replace the nic card on their firewall server to better handle our traffic (this may fix the lag some of you have been experiencing), but their attitude is pretty bad and i really don’t trust them anymore. moving means new AoS addresses and ~3 days downtime or longer if weekend overlaps.
what do you guys think we should do?
for ping comparisons:
LA IP 66.55.78.106
Vegas IP 199.47.208.101
I do not like the thought that we were being monitored. I got a better ping when it was in Vegas then again Vegas is close to my part of Canada. So moving back is a
WIN WIN
So i live in Sydney, Does that mean if you move it my ping will be higher or lower?
Go to Run>CMD
Then type “ping 66.55.78.106” into the command prompt
You’ll see a line that says “Average Ping”, that’s your average ping.
Then, type “ping 199.47.208.101” to ping the other IP.
Compare the pings.
I think you should move out as soon as you can
Thanks, PXYC
which is better for you, Virus?
Thanx for that PXYC.
Turns out Vegas is better for me, although it itsn’t much of a difference.
L.A.:
Ping statistics for 66.55.78.106:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 74ms, Maximum = 82ms, Average = 76ms
Vegas:
Ping statistics for 199.47.208.101:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 85ms, Maximum = 108ms, Average = 96ms
Glad to know the servers weren’t DDoS’d again.
Figured out something was up when the Babel server was missing from master. Somehow, word got spread out that it was… anyways, I’m happy to hear they’re moving back.
LA is faster for me.
Average for LA: 101 ms
Average for Veagas: 108
I don’t really care all that much though. 7ms isn’t a long time.
They shattered my aos playtime (and everyone elses for that matter) because they were “monitoring” w\out your permission? The answer is quite simple: move to vegas 
it could take some time but its sure as hell better then sticking with a provider that screwed the site and told no one what was going on >:(
Well, i think moving out is better, 4 lower than now