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Restarts and maintenance for Tuesday, May 20th
It's a relatively painless Tuesday Morning this time around for those who play in what are the early morning hours at Blizzard HQ. This time, most US servers will just recieve a quick rolling restart at 5 AM PDT, about half an hour from now, which should result in no more than 15 minutes of downtime. However, there are some servers that will get 2 hours of downtime: Agamaggan, Azshara, Baelgun, Dark Iron, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Greymane, Kalecgos, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Sargeras, Staghelm, Twisting Nether, Ursin, and Wildhammer. Also, here's something that should please a lot of Australian players: Their realms won't get the rolling restarts until 5AM AEST -- which translates to noon PDT. That should translate to lots of time for night owls to finish their raids before the restarts kick them off. So in that 15 minutes to 2 hours of down time you'll have to go through, or if you're stuck at school or work, here's a few WoW Insider articles from the last week that are worth checking out. First, last week's major news and views: The WoTLK Friends and Family Alpha is underway, and we have the leaked patch notes. A Vivendi earnings statement gave us the first real official word on WoTLK's expected release date. The Hunter Growl and Scare Beast changes from patch 2.4.2 didn't turn out so great after all. Raiders rejoice: M'uru got a little easier, and those nasty Archimonde and Eredar Twin bugs got a hotfix. Death and Taxes, the premiere US WoW raiding guild, disbanded. That set a few of us to pontificating on the problems of raid guild drama here and here. We covered a few more tidbits of WoTLK info, such as Death Knight "reruning." Check out sister site BigDownload's interview with Blizzard on that whole eSport thing. In Hybrid Theory, Alex soothes your fears about Death Knights taking your jobs. If these aren't enough for you, there's more after the break.
Rolling Restarts this morning, April 8th, 2008
It's Tuesday, and you know what that means - Maintenance. Luckily, it's a a relatively pain free maintenance day today, as there's nothing but rolling restarts on the menu starting at 5am PDT. Each realm is expected to be down for no more than 15 minutes. Of course, that still leaves you with 15 minutes of no World of Warcraft if this is your usual play time. And what's the easiest way to pass those 15 minutes than with a bit of WoW Insider? Make some quick plans for what to do on server up by checking out our Sunwell daily quest guides. Whether you're on Phase 2 or Phase 3, we have all the guides you need to get started when your server comes back up, plus Phase 4 guides for when you get those last few percentage points worth of dead elves turned in to get it unlocked. Speaking of dead elves, we have guides for the new PvP dailies as well. If you're a little tired of Sunwell stuff, how about a trip back to Zul'aman? Jennie Lees has written an in-depth guide to speed running Zul'aman that'll help you get one of the rarest and coolest looking mounts in game, the Amani War Bear -- if you can convince, cajole, or beat the other 9 people in your raid into giving it up to you, of course. Been a little off your game since 2.4? Check Hortus' list to see if it's just a nasty little bug that's getting you down. Hopefully, the rolling restarts go smoothly and we'll see you on the flipside. Either way, thanks for reading, and keep your browser here for all the latest news!
Rolling Restarts for Friday, March 28th
Hold onto the your wigs and keys, everyone, we're not quite done Ironing out the kinks from 2.4 yet. Bornakk's announced yet another run of rolling restarts, this time starting at 5 am PDT on Friday, March 28th. Each realm will be down for 15 minutes, and the entire process should take about an hour. The last round of restarts, as you recall, became a bit more complicated, but we'll see how they do this time. Either way, expect a bit of bumpiness if early morning on the US pacific coast is your usual play time. Bornakk doesn't mention if any hotfixes will be applied during the downtime, but we'll be checking to see if anything's different on the other side.
Short-notice Second Life restart, Thursday 17 January
Linden Lab is obviously still having trouble with load on back-end Second Life databases (highlighted by a short burst of stability problems this-afternoon). It seems they have some potential mitigation for the issue which will be deployed as a rolling restart tomorrow afternoon. The restart is supposed to take 6 hours from 2PM SLT (US Pacific) tomorrow, Thursday 17 January, but given the recent performance of rolling restarts, it potentially run longer than that (despite what we think is probably an already padded estimate).
Second Life: rolling restart, Wednesday 2 January
Linden Lab (who seem busier today than they did yesterday - but hey, it's an odd time of year) have scheduled a rolling restart of the Second Life grid for Wednesday morning, 2 January starting sometime between 10AM and 11AM SLT (US Pacific) - though, in our experience, a rolling restart almost never actually commences on time. It's not said what's being done, exactly. Some sim crashes fixed, and 'fixes related to age-verification' - which honestly could mean anything.
Very short notice rolling restart for the Second Life Grid
Linden Lab Lab have just announced that a rolling restart of Second Life simulators to fix inventory issues (that resulted in some inventory service failures yesterday) will be rolled out at 11AM SLT (US Pacific). That's a two hour rolling restart with 67 minutes notice. At two hours, it means it's one of the high-speed ones that restarts large numbers of regions at once in unpredictable patterns, and that usually spells large-scale disruption. Not a lot of warning - especially to people with meetings and events scheduled.
This week's patch process not kind to Second Life
Yesterday saw the preparations for today's rolling Second Life update - an 'update to core systems' (Linden Lab have never really explained what that means, but we can reasonably assume we're talking central databases, monitoring systems and a chunk of the backbone code). The update caused assorted difficulties throughout the day yesterday, and apparently partial services outages through most of the morning this-morning, leading up to today's rolling restart of simulators.
Contentious Second Life update next week
Linden Lab have announced a server-side update to the Second Life grid that will take place across two days, specifically Tuesday 27 November, and Wednesday 28 November. The first day will see a core services update, followed by a rolling-restart of the grid simulators the next day. The upgrade is to support an upcoming feature in viewer 1.18.6 - and that's where things get a bit ... sticky.
Brace yourselves Second Lifers
The saga of the code updates in Second Life for 1.18.4 continues from Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday.At about 1:30p.m. Maurice Linden warned us that there will be rolling restarts across the grid. Unlike normal restarts (which sweep North to South) this rolling restart will be apparently at random presumably following something such as server number which is not related to geographical location. It is probably starting about now and will run for about 6 hours if recent experience is anything to go by. Friday afternoon code roll outs have a long and happy history as well of course. Good luck everyone![UPDATE: The rolling restart is due to start soon (4pm). It will run, therefore, until about 10pm. Ouch, let's hope it all goes smoothly.]
Second Life rolling restart underway
The rolling restart of Second Life to distribute the new server code has just started (at around 3pm SL Time). Previous experience suggests it's like to take about 6 hours, and it will run North to South, so you can skip North to miss it. However, many people in Second Life, or trying to get in, have reported that the central update which has been running since 10am has been rather bumpy, so this may be bumpier than expected too. Good luck everyone, see you on the other side![UPDATE: 9:15PM SLT - The rolling restart has finished, and Second Life grid operations are settling]
Tomorrow is yesterday - Second Life update rescheduled again
Hope you really didn't have any plans in Second Life this week. A lot of folks scurried to rebook events and meetings out of the way of Tuesday's update (sure the Grid as-a-whole might not restart, but it's a pain having the simulator you are in give a five minute warning in the middle of a class, a concert or a business meeting). Lots of Tuesday items were rebooked to Wednesday after the original short-notice announcement. Then Wednesday's things got rebooked to Thursday to avoid a rescheduled update. Now it looks like many of Thursday's events will be rebooked to Friday or next week as the update has been re-rescheduled for Thursday. There's plenty of grumbling reaching us here. Short version: Same timeslots - central services update at 10AM SLT (US Pacific) followed by a rolling restart between approximately 1PM and 5PM SLT - all taking place on Thursday 8 November, instead.
Short notice rolling restart to bring fresh server code
Second Life servers are being updated with fresh code tomorrow, Tuesday 6 November. There are two phases to the update, and neither one involves taking Second Life down or additional downloads. Phase one starts at 10AM SLT (US Pacific) and involves unspecified updates to unspecified central systems. We're told this may cause "slight delays to log-ins and to online notifications" (Stop laughing in the back there. We presume they mean in addition to normal).
Some downtime, some rolling restarts for this week's mainteinace
This week in server maintenance, most realms will have rolling restarts instead of downtime (these restarts will be starting at 5:00 AM PDT, and such things usually involve around 15 minutes of downtime per realm), but selected realms will have a longer than usual maintenance cycle starting at 3:00 AM PDT and lasting until 1:00 PM PDT. No word on what the additional downtime is for (perhaps this particular hardware simply needed a regular maintenance cycle this week?), but if you're playing on any of the following realms, expect downtime during this week's maintenance cycle. The list includes: Agamaggan, Alexstrasza, Alleria, Azshara, Baelgun, Balnazzar, Blackhand, Cho'gall, Dark Iron, Destromath, Dethecus, Detheroc, Emerald Dream, Garona, Gorgonnash, Greymane, Gul'dan, Hellscream, Illidan, Kael'thas, Kalecgos, Kirin Tor, Lightninghoof, Maelstrom, Malfurion, Moonrunner, Nazjatar, Ravencrest, Sargeras, Spinebreaker, Staghelm, Stormreaver, Twisting Nether, Ursin, Whisperwind, and Wildhammer.For those of you without downtime tonight, grats. For those of you with extended downtime... well, I can recommend some good books.
Rolling restarts for US realms Friday morning
Drysc informs us to expect rolling restarts for all US realms starting at 5:00 AM PST to apply a "minor hotfix." Downtime is expected to be minimal (around 15 minutes), and US players probably won't notice any interruption. But a hotfix? Blizzard's not said what they're fixing, which leaves us to guessing games as to the exact nature of the problem. However, poster Tuhljin seems to be on the right track when he points out that "if they won't tell you what the hotfix is for, at least part of it probably involves fixing an exploit." After all, they wouldn't keep us in the dark just for the fun of it... would they?
