Dragon's Tale - a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG/Casino

[darkmule]

Not to be overly paranoid, but where's the Bitcoin wallet?  Could these rinky dink Third World scammers be robbing the site blind?

[teppy]

We split funds into a hot wallet which is on a machine that we have physical access to, a warm wallet that is on a machine not directly connected to the internet, and a cold wallet which is not connected at all. All three wallets are safe and in our control. No Bitcoins have ever been kept on the DDoSed machine.

What I don't have access to yet is the checkpoint (savegame) files for Dragon's Tale which are generated every 3 minutes while the game server runs. These are on a machine at the same colocation facility as the compute servers. Once I do have access, we'll have Dragon's Tale back up within 30 minutes. (Plenty of backup hardware in the US is always ready to go; I just need the most recent checkpoint file to flip the switch.)

Teppy
1-412-973-7914(c)

[Junko]

Thanks for the update. Glad to know our money is safe. Is that your phone number??

[anon2301]

Yes, that is his cell.

[darkmule]

We split funds into a hot wallet which is on a machine that we have physical access to, a warm wallet that is on a machine not directly connected to the internet, and a cold wallet which is not connected at all. All three wallets are safe and in our control. No Bitcoins have ever been kept on the DDoSed machine.

Thanks.  The money's all I care about.  The rest is mere inconvenience.

[anon2301]

While we wait, any chance you can setup a test server we can play around with to keep us distracted?

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

While we wait, any chance you can setup a test server we can play around with to keep us distracted?

Is there much point in that?

[anon2301]

It would be fun to be able to test betting strategies we wouldn't normally risk with real bitcoins.

[teppy]

Ok, finally got an email from their CEO who promised access to the server by Monday morning. I told him that a 72 hour downtime was unacceptable - waiting to hear back.

Our other game, A Tale in the Desert, has had less than 72 hours of unscheduled downtime, cumulative, on over 8 years.

[anon2301]

Can you post the emails?

[darkmule]

At the very least, many of us will have missed a day or two days of Feather Tree licenses if it really does last until Monday.

[teppy]

I've got access now, servers should be back up in 30 minutes or less.

Yeah, I'll of course reimburse for Feather Tree, herb licenses, etc. Also planning to do a nice freerolls tournament after we're back online for a day or so. I'll announce that here as well as in-game.

When the game first comes back online it will be in a no-withdrawals mode because I want to have my IT guy reconfigure the compute server<=>Wallet firewall to lock out the Costa Rica IPs. (I was getting suspicious of the ISP itself, and transferred most funds from the hot wallet machine which trusts the game server to the warm wallet. Sending from the warm wallet requires physical access to that machine,

[darkmule]

I've got access now, servers should be back up in 30 minutes or less.

<mr.burns>ex-cellent</mr.burns>

I agree that the ISP's behavior was seeming slightly suspicious.  Looks more like a competence issue at this point, but still. 

Personally, I missed no license stuff at this point, and only an hour of the end of an herb license (that I had already turned a profit on), so no biggie here.

See you on DT and thanks for keeping us updated!

[anon2301]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Bq2s-q3jU

SLWilson described ducks as "sort of a luck based game." 

[Ghorvelboz]

Oh, thanks.  It's back up.  I wish you luck Teppy, whoever is causing these problems for you must be some real low life.

[poly]

Was there any reason for the DDOS attack that you know of?

[Ascholten]

That's kind of foolish keeping backups in the same physical building.

What happens if a fire / typhoon / etc were to take out the building?

I wonder if this is a theft attempt or one of our illustrious governments trying to intervene.

Interesting that it is only happening here.  How many other 'casino's are hosted in costa rica and are they having the same type issues?

It seems to me the host should have known / asked these kinds of questions before, or Di should have made sure the knew and didn't just
Ok Go Daddy, that sounds wonderful!!!  Ill take your shitty package, your commercials are funny too etc  :x

Time will tell.

[teppy]

Yeah. The difficulty is that bandwidth out of Costa Rica is quite precious, and these files are huge. Doing offsite backups with any regularity would drastically increase our already high hosting costs. I'm looking into more exotic solutions like differential backups, and partial backups (players' level progress and a few other key pieces of data.) We already write backup files to different media (odd numbered backups go on one drive, even on another.) So aside from a "Katrina Level Event" (or malicious ISP!) we should be fine. We will need to buy some sort of DDoS protection service.

[teppy]

Withdrawals are back up, game is back 100% with the exception of the ability to buy Bitcoins on a credit card at ATMs. (Can't do that until the servers are back in Costa Rica due to silly US laws.)

[Junko]

Game is down for me again. Unable to connect to the client. Anyone else? I wonder what it could be this time?