Feldon At 11pm PDT on June 9th, 2010 (7am GMT on June 10th, 2010), several EQ2 servers were brought down for maintenance:
Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone, Mistmoore, Oasis, Runnyeye, Splitpaw, Innovation, Valor, Storms, Battlegrounds UK, Battlegrounds DE, and Battlegrounds FR
The original announcement indicated that maintenance would take 7 hours. All servers were up after ~13 hours, with a total downtime of ~15 hours for Runnyeye, Innovation, and some of the Battlegrounds servers.
So what was this maintenance all about? And did it include the US-UK Battlegrounds bridging we’ve been hearing about?
The Whys and Wherefors
From Rothgar:
The extended downtime was due to replacing some network infrastructure that was responsible for some of the recent outages. It had nothing to do with the game team or game itself, but while they were working on the network hardware in that datacenter, there could obviously be no connectivity to the servers.
This downtime had nothing to do with the hotfix. We simply decided to do the hotfix during the network outtage so you weren’t subjected to an additional downtime.
Somehow during this process, it was not communicated to the server/data center folks that in addition to doing the maintenance, and in addition to going ahead and patching the June 10th hotfix onto these servers, that a switch needed to be flipped to enable players on UK Battlegrounds servers to play against US Battlegrounds servers if the server versions are in sync. On that subject…
Ok, I just met with Kiara, Brasse and SmokeJumper to work out the details and make sure everyone was in the loop. First off, I’ll apologize to Kiara for not keeping community in the loop about these plans officially. As I mentioned in an earlier post, [the US-UK Battlegrounds bridging] was something we squeezed in around our normal priorities so it didn’t exist on any official plans or announcements and that’s why I failed to communicate the change to our community team. These are the risks we take when we try to work something in quickly.
Secondly, there was a miscommunication on the team which led to the “switch” not being flipped this morning during the downtime. We’re making those configuration changes now and hope to get it working without having to bounce any servers.
Just to re-iterate, no one was standing in the way of making this happen, we just risk more communication issues when attempting to do something outside of our regularly-scheduled tasks. I’ll try to be more clear in the future if something like this happens so that you understand that everything is being done in our best efforts.
Thanks for your patience!
So there you have it, the US-UK Battlegrounds bridging should hopefully be live tonight!