Hi all,
As promised, this post will outline the plan to migrate our Minecraft server, website, and wiki from our old machine named “Gamma” to our new machine named “Epsilon”. The migration is happening this week, so please read the entirety of this post carefully.
The Important Parts
The Minecraft Server on Gamma will be shutting down at approximately 10:00 AM PST on Tuesday, December 27, 2016. After the last backup is downloaded from Gamma, Gamma will be brought back online with all protection plugins disabled. No further world saves or backups will be done to Gamma from this point forward. Players will be free to grief and reign destruction on Gamma, but if Gamma crashes or is unrecoverable, there will no attempts to restore the server.
The Minecraft Server on Epsilon will be brought online at approximately 12:00 PM PST on Thursday, December 29, 2016 9:00 AM PST on Friday, December 30, 2016. Epsilon will be upgraded to Minecraft 1.11.2 with updated plugins, and the new world map will be expanded from a radius of 10000 blocks to 18000 blocks. This effectively increases the new world size by almost 3.3 times the old size. Also, the lab world will be quadrupled in size from a radius of 2000 blocks to 4000 blocks.
Please also note that the Mumble Server on Gamma will be shutdown permanently shortly before the migration starts. For your voice-chat needs, please move over to our Discord server. If you are not on the Discord server, please ask a staff member for an invite.
Schedule
Here is a rough schedule of how things will go down over the next few days:
December 27
- Before 10 AM PST, the Mumble Server will be shutdown.
- At 10 AM PST, the server will be whitelisted and restarted to prepare for the backup. The wiki will also be set to read-only mode at this time.
- Backups of the Minecraft server, website, and wiki will be transferred from Gamma to Epsilon. This transfer is expected to take a few hours.
- Once the backup has started downloading, Gamma will come back online with protection plugins and world saves disabled. Mayhem and destruction will ensue.
- Once the backup is uploaded to Epsilon, the new Minecraft server will be setup and will begin generating chunks for the new world expansion. This is expected to take at least 24 hours to complete.
- While chunk generation is running, the Epsilon website and wiki will be setup.
December 28
- Once chunk generation is complete on the Epsilon Minecraft server, the server and plugins will be updated to Minecraft 1.11.2. Some final testing will be done to ensure things are working.
- If the Epsilon Minecraft server, dynmap, website, and wiki are all working by this date, the minecartrapidtransit.net domain will be changed to point from the Gamma machine to the Epsilon machine. The wiki may be opened for editing again at this time.
- A flat dynmap render of the New World will be made to allow players to be able to navigate the expanded world.
December 29
- Dynmap render continues.
December 30
- At 9 AM PST, the new Minecraft server on Epsilon will be opened to the public. More chaos and landgrabbing will ensue.
Joining the Epsilon Minecraft Server
Please note the following on while on the Epsilon Minecraft server:
- Remember to login to Epsilon using a Minecraft 1.11.2 client. You will use the same minecartrapidtransit.net URL to connect to the server when it opens.
- The render distance on Epsilon will be temporarily set to 10 chunks instead of 15. This is to help accommodate the expected surge of players rushing to claim new land in the expanded new world. If necessary, this distance may be reduced further if the lag becomes too unelevbearable. The player limit for Epsilon will remain at 40 for the time being.
- Elytra wings are currently banned. In beta testing, we found that their speed ends up loading too many chunks at one time. This ban will be re-considered at a future date.
- The Lottery plugin has been disabled. It does not work at all with Minecraft 1.11. We will be looking for a replacement for this plugin in the future.
- The new FastAsyncWorldEdit plugin that we were testing has been disabled. We found that it was causing issues with pasting or rotating schematics, so we will try to find an alternative later. For now, WorldEdits will continue to cause server-wide lag when executed.
- The EElevator plugin is working, but the “ding” sound when an EElevator arrives at a floor has been disabled since it causes the EElevator to not work.
- The uCars plugin is working with no immediate bugs. Previously reported bugs such as the double placement of uCars or the speed boosts not working have now been fixed.
When the migration begins on Tuesday, another website post will be made with the latest status of all MRT services. Be sure to also follow the official MRT Twitter account to get the latest updates.
Thanks,
Frumple