getting rid of Update downtime

[KingKoz]

I have a suggestion. As a former admin of an ISP, I had a server with hot swappable hard drives. I worked offline making changes to the ISP's website on a totally separate server using one of the swappable HD's. That way, I was working on the latest version of the system and when I was done with changes, I swapped the HD into a test server (with the latest environment) not connected to the network so the changes made could be tested using the current environment. I am assuming here, but I assume that SSG (hopefully) is using a current copy of the environment on Lammannia to test the updates.

Rather than 3 (or so) lamma tests, why not plug the changes into a LIVE server (separated from the network) prior to releasing to the public. I for one, along with many of my friends that play,have endured update issues every update...including down times and rollback! Try a bit of testing with a copy of the live server prior to release. Rather than having the player base doing the testing for you. I would wager that over 50% of the people that logon to Lammannia (if not more) are just there to test their live toons with build changes or to play with all the best gear and weapons. I imaging the amount of feedback (not just DDO) the people that play on test servers is very little compared to the amount that play on Lamma.

[mikarddo]

I have a feeling the scale of things is rather different for DDO than hotswapping a few hard drives.

[ahpook]

They may not even have access to swap HDD even if they could be swapped. Swapping VMs would seem to be more practical than messing with HDDs IMHO.

There are several ways to remove the skin from this cat but I don't see SSG as having any desire to do any of that. They don't appear to experience enough pain to want to spend time and effort to improve on this front. If they did they would have solved or worked around the issue requiring weekly reboots. They should at least be providing players a boon every time the system is updated/rebooted. How about resetting all ransack/raid/dice timers every time the system starts up as a minimum.

[Arkat]

They may not even have access to swap HDD even if they could be swapped. Swapping VMs would seem to be more practical than messing with HDDs IMHO.

Yes, absolutely.