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haloman30

CU Updates #42 - Server Migrations and Modded MC

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Hey, everyone! A whole ton of stuff has been going on over the past few days. For the most part, it's just technical stuff - but there's still some genuine new features in some cases as well.

 

Dedicated Server 2: The Unexpected Sequel

First and foremost, the biggest technical change that's gonna enable a lot of stuff going forward is the migration to a new dedicated server. A little over a year ago, you may remember a post where I announced the migration to a brand new 32GB dedicated server that I was paying for myself. At the time, this was more than enough to handle all of our services with plenty of breathing room. However, as time went on, things started expanding.

 

First, we actually started hosting the MC server for another community called Ruin Community. For those unfamiliar with them, it's one of a few MC servers that I played on back in 2012 while browsing to try and find a good server to make my home - which eventually ended up being Chaotic United. The other two being Ruin Community and Legendary Island of the Lost Treasures. Ruin had closed well before the old CU did, but Legendary Island actually persisted into 2015 before it eventually closed.

 

However, as you all are most likely aware - I've got a compulsive attachment to things, and to the preservation of history. As they became available, I've been purchasing the domains associated with both Ruin and Legendary Island. In the offchance that some of the old members (or staff) wanted to try and check things out, I left a message with contact details on the homepage of Ruin's website. One day, I was contacted that the Ruin Community folk were attempting to re-unite and have a sort of reunion server to get everyone together again. Part of that effort was to host a private, whitelist-only MC server for the old Ruin folk - and I, being the one holding their original domain, happily offered to not only point the domain to their website, but also to point their Minecraft IP to their server as well as host it for them - no strings attached. I normally have a hard, unwavering rule about advertising other MC servers - as well as staff helping to host other servers - however, seeing as this was a server from my own childhood, it was a domain that I'd already owned for years prior, and that the server wasn't even a public server - I figured that this was a reasonable approach. If you do happen to be a member of the old Ruin Community and want to find them again, check our Partners page to join their Discord. Note that their server is NOT for any casual folk - it's intended for members of the original Ruin Community and nobody else.

 

Anyway, with that history lesson out of the way - the other, more significant expansion was the recent move to BungeeCord. I had far underestimated the resource requirements of moving to BungeeCord - and it was at this point that Modded MC had to actually be briefly shut down, as the 32GB dedicated server wasn't enough to handle Ruin, Modded, and all the Bungee servers. However, with Modded offline, everything else was able to run without issue.

 

That was, at least, until 1.17 - where for whatever reason, the server went from having 4-6GB free with all gamemodes online, to having 3-4 free with Minigames and the Waiting Room offline. Having modded shut off was one thing - as it never got a ton of attention. But having some of our gamemodes offline is a nonstarter. Theoretically I could tell Ruin to host their own server, but even then we'd still be at our limit - assuming that'd even do it. Plus, who else is going to be willing to either host a server with full access free of charge, or be willing to pay a monthly bill to keep a barely-played MC server up?

 

So, instead - we made the decision to upgrade. Our old server was a SoYouStart dedicated server with 32GB of memory. Our new one is a proper OVH server - with all the modern bells and whistles. Automatic bill renewal so I can't accidentally forget to pay the bill, newer and more modern features, and in our case - an upgrade to 64GB of memory. As of now, our MC server, Ruin's server, and the donation store have been fully moved over. And of course, with this newfound freedom, we've got some new things we can do - such as...

 

Return of Modded MC

Such as turning Age of Rebirth back online! Finally! Not much has changed since the last time it was started - however, since some users had previously destroyed any hope of normal progression through more EMC generation exploits, as well as the fact that it's been down since last year - we've opted to do a world reset. The previous world is currently in the process of being archived and uploaded to the download center, and once it is you'll be able to revisit the old world anytime.

 

Beta 1.7.3 Upgrades

In addition to bringing Modded MC back online, we've also done some upgrades and updates to our Beta 1.7.3 server. Up until now, the Beta server has been kind of the forgotten child of Chaotic United. It had no real integration with the rest of the community, and barely anyone ever played on it. Even features that have been standard on our main MC server either took far too long to come to Beta (land claiming), or simply never arrived at all (dynmap).

 

Well, thankfully, all that has finally changed.

 

A few days ago, a user who goes by leow showed up and, initially, abused a duplication glitch and spammed diamond blocks all over the place. However, rather than stopping there and calling it a day, he reached out to me and offered to point me on how to fix it.

 

Turns out there's a whole other world of Beta 1.7.3 servers that has been quietly brewing just out of my sight. There's a modern fork of CraftBukkit 1060 called Project Poseidon - which includes several feature enhancements, bugfixes, and optimizations. He also pointed me to a Discord centered around development for classic Minecraft - where I was able to track down and locate something I've been wanting to add to Beta for ages. Discord integration. Yes - as of now, we have a #b173-chatlogs channel on Discord, which works just like #mc-chatlogs and #rebirth-chatlogs - you can see when users join and leave, and you can see their chat messages and chat with them through that channel.

 

But that's not all. Since Poseidon is based on CB1060 instead of our previous CB1000 build, we were able to finally introduce dynmap to Beta 1.7.3. It works just like it does on the main server - where you can see different perspectives as well as see outlines of land claims and worldguards.

 

Another thing that we've done to hopefully ensure Beta runs as smooth as possible (as well as to allow for enough disk space for dynmap to work), is that we've moved it onto the new 64GB dedicated server. The old version of dynmap has no support for MySQL tile storage - and the VPS it was hosted on (which, fun fact - is the same VPS which hosted our own MC server for a while back during the Nuclear District days) only had 40GB of disk space - not enough for all those livemap tiles. Our dedicated server on the other hand has 2TB - which is more than enough to handle some livemap tiles.

 

With all these changes, we've also decided to perform a world reset for Beta as well. The last reset was in 2019, so it was well past time for a reset anyways. Along with that, we wanted to introduce a world border to help keep the filesize down (and to prevent people from going to the Far Lands and crashing the whole server) - and doing this on an existing world could have made existing builds inaccessible.

 

We plan to do a handful of other minor improvements over the coming days, most notably fixing the persistent crashing issue that happens after a while by having the server restart every 24 hours.

 

Valheim Migration

Lastly, and least notably, our Valheim server has been moved away from the old Microsoft Azure VPS and onto a new server. The IP address listed on the website and Discord has been updated, though no other significant changes have been made outside of that.

 


 

With all this stuff going on, we hope that all of this will be just the start of a new beginning for Chaotic United. Whether or not it'll end up being one is yet to be seen (history unfortunately doesn't bode well for that prediction) - but for now, expect this to be the first step of many yet to come.

 

Stay tuned.2

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