tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

I am currently in the process of moving the server to a VPS on dailyvps.co.uk.

I've had the account there for a while to assess the stability, and as far as I can tell, we can expect somewhere in the range of 6-8 yearly downtimes of 4-5 hours each. This is better than at our current server, where router issues have blocked access to port 80 on several occasions, sometimes for days.

There are quite a lot of different services to move:

websites

databases

subversion repo

users

Most of the major setup of the target server has been completed - updating of php version, for instance, was quite tricky due to no readily available version of php5 for centOS on an x64 architecture. However, I'm pressed for time, and the server move will have to fit in my schedule along with family and work.

That last sentence basically meant: I'll get to it ;)

We recently got a question on the forum (http://www.tbamud.com/forum/thread/743) , asking if it could be possible to save variables over reboots.

Well, now you can! I've made a shoddy first hack at something to that end.

I'm not entirely sure the AVL implementation license (MIT) is compatible with the circle license, so I think it needs some rewriting before it can be incoorporated in a release. But hey, as long as it's downloaded separately, there's no problems.

After installing the patch and the tree.h file, you have acces to two new commands in your dg scripts:

persist varname

Stores the current value of the variable with the given name to disk. It is stored based on type (room/mob/object) and vnum - so several mobs sharing a script or trigger will currently have separate values stored.

%self.persisted(varname)%

is substitued with the value from persistent storage

Be advised that currently the code has not been thoroughly tested, does not contain a lot of comments or log statements.

At about 9:41 CET this morning (October 26th) a RAM-module failed in the builderacademy server.

As one might guess, this caused some pretty weird results in the system, one of which was a system lockup.

The server has been rebooted, and works as it is supposed to at the moment. The system makes sure it keeps running, and just doesn't use memory marked as bad. Thus, currently, the server runs on 511.9MB instead of 512MB. I expect a new RAM block to arrive within a reasonable timeframe.

As some of you may have noticed, the http://tbamud.com (and for us oldtimers, http://www.builderacademy.net) site was down due to issues with the mysql database.

I think it's fixed now, but I need feedback - if you see something out of the ordinary, be sure to send a mail my way (on welcor@builderacademy.net, of course).