Some random updates

Hello everyone,

Realmwalker wrote a comment on the last thread that was a nice summary of the latest, so I thought I would do a new post to highlight his points, with some minor updates/changes. Good work Realmwalker!

• Brian is in contact with at least one potential sponsor that will help with the game’s finances.
• Brian has contacted Verizon about the FiOS internet upgrade and I believe the upgrade has been ordered.
• D Man through the company he works for has come up with some really nice credit card rates for the CSFBL, which we are certain to take advantage of. We would like to thank D Man for all of his help (he also got at least one potential sponsor in contact with Brian), he really has gone above the call of duty.
• Last I knew, we are still working on picking up the server. Since only Brian among us lives in New York City where the server is, and since he works lots of hours with a good 2-3 hour commute each day, plus a family, it has proven difficult to arrange the pickup of the server from what will soon be our former ISP. Unfortunately this ISP is not in the easiest location to get to, else Brian would have already picked up the server. He is working on the arrangements though, be rest assured!
• Speaking of tonight, the community managers and developers are having a conference call tonight to get the latest updates on the situation, along with hashing out ideas for the credit system, and more.
• Finally, we are moving forward with the idea that the primary game itself is free, with a credit system that allows you to “purchase” add-ons for your franchise.

We will have more information for you either late tonight or first thing tomorrow morning, after we have our conference call tonight.

- Chris G.

Getting back online: How we’ll do it

I spoke with Verizon on Friday to find out what my options were to get a broadband connection at my home that will permit web hosting. It seems I can convert my residential FIOS line to a business-grade line with no restrictions without any changes in hardware or the need for a technician to come to my house (so they say at least!).

The good? It’ll be easy to get the new line up and running — within a week. It’ll also be a lot cheaper than colocation — $99 a month, which when you eliminate the existing cost of my $29/month home FIOS line (since the new line will replace it) that means the effective cost is $70/mo., a great deal. Finally, the server will be in my house, giving me “unlimited” access to it without having to pay $125/hr to do so.

The bad? No guaranteed service level, which means throughput may not be 2MB and there is no guarantee for uptime. Also, I still need to find time to go to Manhattan to remove the server from its current place of residence and figure out where to put it in my house. Finally, I’ll expect a small increase in my electric bill (as well as some extra noise coming from my storage room in the basement — the fans on the server sound like a jet engine before take-off).

I plan on calling Verizon on Monday to order this, and will try to make arrangements to get the server back in my possession some time next week. The good thing is that we’re making progress.

I’ll give you an update on other facets of the game and our other discussions over the past few days tomorrow.

Another very quick update

A couple quick things from the latest e-mail by Brian:

• What he is waiting for now: Brian is checking with Verizon to see how much it would cost to upgrade his FiOS internet so he can have a web server on it. Then he could just host the server at home, hopefully saving a little money in the process plus being able to check on it easier. This way also, he can in theory get the server back up relatively quickly once he gets it in his hands (assuming it isn’t a hardware issue).
• After that is solved: we will be going through the options to figure out what works best for the CSFBL and CSBB.

He also mentioned that D Man has offered a credit card processing package through his company at a much better rate then using PayPal.

Finally, it seems like Brian is a huge fan of the credits approach (example: $10 = 100 credits to spend as you like). Much easier to manage and easy for all of us users to understand as well

Of course, nothing is final and anything can change. But we are working on it.

- Chris G.

Minor update

Well two developers (babarfloyd and harborpirate) and I had a very nice chat where we think we hashed out the basic outline of what could be charged for in the CSFBL.

While I will not release the details until Brian has sat down and gone over it, I can say a few quick things:

• We all agree that there has to be a basic game that gets people “hooked” and would make them pay for extra features.
• We all agree that the basic game will function pretty much as today’s game, with some minor changes (example: sim rate, # of teams you own).
• We all agree that there will absolutely be no way we grant special features that would give a paying owner a anything close competitive edge over a non-paying owner. So no salary cap increases, draft perks, etc.
• We agree that we have to be realistic with how the prices work.
• We think we chose a bunch of additional features/perks that won’t require much extra coding, so in theory we could roll them out fairly quickly.

I know, I didn’t really say much but in a way, I did say a lot. I hope that eases a lot of fears and excites all of you.

Last I heard from Brian today, he was looking into whether it was feasible (price wise) to host the server at his home again. For those of you who haven’t been here for long, the CSFBL’s server in its early years ran right from Brian’s home.

Anyways, that is all I have at the moment. Not sure if we will have another update tonight, that will depend on if Brian has anything new to share.

Keep submitting ideas, I have closed the other posts to comments since they were overflowing. Hopefully that will make it a little easier for everyone to keep track of the discussion.

Quick Update: Note that we do reserve the right to change any of this at any time…but I think it will be unlikely or at most will have very minor changes. The core ideas hopefully will remain the same.

- Chris G.

Thanks for the support

I wanted to say before I went to sleep the following.

Thank you for all of support. This hasn’t been a thrilling past couple of days for any of us, especially Brian. It really bothers him what has happened with the server. Whenever you have something special you created, you hate to see it break in front of your eyes.

I just sent an e-mail to Brian, the developers, and the community managers that basically summed up the 100+ ideas in the Post-Reboot post. I am curious to see what all of us on the ComputerSims staff think about the wonderful ideas you all presented. There are lot of ideas we haven’t thought about before that many of you made interesting cases for.

I don’t know what is in store for the next few days, weeks, months, etc. We will keep you up-to-date, no matter what. Decisions are probably going to be made fairly quickly, so we should be able to give you a general idea on what direction we are going soon. We have to move fairly quickly too to keep our user base together. The longer we wait, the harder it is to get things back to normal.

I also asked Brian if he wants a donation info on here. I am sure he will talk about that tomorrow.

All I know is, I miss the game already. We all do…

- Chris G.

Post-server reboot results, and moving forward

After a 10 minute discussion with a guy who I think is the manager of the network operations center (NOC), I finally got a guy to go down a reboot the server for the price of $125.00. The discussion that took place does not deserve further mention. The guys I work with overheard my half of the conversation and couldn’t believe what I was saying, so you can imagine what was coming from the other end of the receiver.

Anyway, the server rebooted, and I was able to get a login prompt again. (All remote work is done using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop.) I entered a username and password, then found the “Applying computer settings”window (or whatever Microsoft calls it). I waited a minute, and then the window abruptly closed.

I tried logging back in, and got the same results. Hmm…

I tried logging in a third time using a different user account, and this time got a message: “The system is shutting down.” About ten minutes later, the server was totally unresponsive — it doesn’t even respond to a ping request.

What does this mean? I have to get physical access to the server console to do anything at this point. This is not so easy these days, as I have a day job and the ISP is surely not going to have a guy sit around with me at 9PM at night while I fix a server — at least not without charging $125/hr.

The other solution is to simply pick up the server from the ISP and bring it home to work on it. For reasons explained above, this is the more viable solution. Once I get it, I can assess the damage and figure out what to do.

I’m going to contact the ISP (I’ll deal directly with the NOC manager at this point) and find out if there’s a time I can remove the server without having to pay $125/hr for someone to open a door for me. Hopefully I can arrange something with them that works with my schedule. If not, I’ll see if I can find someone to pick it up for me (I may have a few people who owe me a favor or two).

What do I think the damage is? I think the data is intact; certainly the database likely is. I’d bet that Windows is hosed. The disks were in a fault-tolerant RAID5 configuration, so it’s unlikely that we’d experience any kind of major data loss.

The options once the server comes back up:

1. Fix the server and put it back in the NOC. The pros with this: we’re back where we started. The cons: we’re back where we started. This setup costs about $275/mo. (not counting $125/hr fees for reboots), about 2/3 of which is the server lease, which is up in August 2007.
2. Fix the server and move the game to a dedicated server at a different ISP. I spoke with people at SoftLayer a while back, and they would certainly be a top consideration. The pros: excellent reputation and they manage the hardware. The cons: about $380/mo. for the server. Granted the server is more powerful than what we have today, but that’s close to $5,000 a year for a web site that brings in about $2,500 a year. You see the dilemma.

We’re at a crossroads, folks, and I need your feedback. Keeping CSFBL running is something I can no longer fund out of my pocket. I want to keep the game running, but I can’t go in without having a reasonable level of confidence that I’m not going to be out $2,500 per year.

Considering all this, how interested or willing would you be with the following proposals?

1. Player renames can be purchased for as low as $1.00. (Players with one or more years experience would cost more, on a sliding scale.)
2. Trades would only be allowed between players who have donated at least $5.00 in the past 6 months, or $10.00 in the past 12 months. (Credit would go back to the start of 2006.)
3. >> What are your suggestions? Let us know and I’ll add them here. <<

I’d like to hear other suggestions for features that you guys would be willing to pay for. I’m looking towards adding features that add fun and functionality to the game — and that you’d be willing to pay a nominal fee for. I don’t want you to give something for nothing, but the things asked for should be reasonable.

Thanks for your continued support and patience.

RSS Feed for this blog

For those of you who use a RSS reader to keep track of your favorite web sites, you may want to add the feed for this blog to it. That way you can automatically be kept up-to-date as we add new posts to this blog.

The feed is: http://computersims.wordpress.com/feed/

Of course, old habits of typing in csfbl.com instead of waiting for your RSS reader to load will still work.

In the future, I suspect Brian will keep this blog around just in case the site goes down again. It is useful to have.

For those of you who want to try out RSS readers, try Google Reader. It is absolutely fantastic. I have 300 sites I keep track of using just Google Reader. It allows me to pass a little time too while the CSFBL is down.

And just in case you were wondering, no the site isn’t back up yet

- Chris G.

The error message screenshot

Are you curious as to what the error message that comes up when you try to log in to the server? Here it is, in all its evil Microsoft glory…

Such a typical Microsoft error. I remember the first time I saw the legendary “memory could not be ‘read’” message, and just loved it. Is that the best description of an error that Microsoft could come up with?

I did a quick Google search for this error. Although nothing was conclusive, some posts do not sound very reassuring.

Still no word back from my ISP. I’m going to tell them to just go ahead and do it and bill me for the hour. Let’s see what happens. At this point I need to know whether or not I should be scheduling time to take delivery of the server in order to repair it and figure out what the next step is going to be.

Outage Update: 12:00AM

Not much to report beyond what Chris reported earlier. My ISP hasn’t gotten back to me, and I don’t expect them to do so until tomorrow. So much for service.

These issues bring a number of larger CSFBL woes to light. We’ve talked a lot about these in the past, and I do want to take this opportunity to talk about them more… Just not right now. Let’s see what happens tomorrow morning, and we’ll take it from there.

Thanks to everyone for their patience. I’ll keep you in the loop as best I can!

CSFBL Outage: Update as of 5:45 PM EST on 1/23/2007

As all of you know, the CSFBL web site and forums went down yesterday sometime during the afternoon. I have created this blog to keep our users up-to-date on what we know about the outage. Here is what we know so far:

• Brian tried to remote into the server. However it gives off an error message about “winlogon.exe” and promptly boots him from the server. As a result, Brian can’t reboot the server himself.
• Brian hopes that a simple reboot will fix the problem. However, the crash could also be the sign of something much deeper that is wrong (corrupted Windows installation, hardware issue, etc.). We simply don’t know yet.
• Brian contacted the ISP where the server is hosted about having them reboot it. They promptly (about 10 hours later) returned his e-mail saying it would take $125 a hour to do it. Brian promptly replied how many hours it would take to press the power button twice and the ISP said that with travel time it would come to about a hour. Earliest they can do it is tomorrow.
• Brian is currently waiting for a reply from the ISP about whether he can go there in person and if there is any cost to do this. In the past, there hasn’t been, so he is slightly optimistic.

As of right now, Brian is waiting to hear from the ISP about whether he can go in himself and reboot the server for free.

Currently there is no ETA on when the CSFBL will be back up. We are crossing our fingers that it will be sometime this weekend, but it all depends on whether the crash is something a simple reboot will fix, or if it is much worse. Brian also has to find the time to get to the ISP, which isn’t simple if any of you know how driving in NYC is like.

Brian will be posting on here shortly with some more details and with some questions for our users.

- Chris