Thread: Update 5.2 Release Notes

Well, its been about 14 hours since the servers finally came back online, but unfortunately we do not have any release notes available.
Yes, I know about the post in the bullroarer forums, but as that is the beta forum with everything still "subject to change" it would be nice to see details.
Perhaps its not a huge issue, but it would be nice to have available.

That's because that wasn't a patch yesterday. That was regularly scheduled maintenance. Not sure why you thought it was a patch.

they might of thought it was a patch cause the dev took all day to do nothing

Originally Posted by Boridre

they might of thought it was a patch cause the dev took all day to do nothing

no, the Inet at Turbine Headquarter was unplugged ... someone didnt payed the bill I guess

Originally Posted by Boridre

they might of thought it was a patch cause the dev took all day to do nothing

This situation has occurred with my car when I take it in for maintenance. We did the maintenance Yula. Your car will not start. It going to take us a while to figure out what is wrong. Once we know what is wrong, it will take additional time to fix it.

Originally Posted by Boridre

they might of thought it was a patch cause the dev took all day to do nothing

Originally Posted by hitomo_x3

no, the Inet at Turbine Headquarter was unplugged ... someone didnt payed the bill I guess

Managing a Server Farm that has to be up 24/7/365 with 99.5%+ uptime is no easy feat in this day and age as software continuously needs to patched to secure it from vulnerabilities and significant version updates need to be rolled out, and hardware which constantly needs to be upgraded to meet growing demands. Most months the Monthly Maintenance goes like clockwork...and a provider doesn't often need the full scheduled window of downtime. However, there are months where hardware upgrades are more significant, or software patches take longer to install than anticipated, or sometimes things don't go the way you were expecting and you have to roll-back and try again (and sometimes again, and again until finally a patch installs the way it should), and sometimes even a software vendor deprecates something that your entire infrastructure depended upon without documenting it in their Release Notes and which didn't show up as a problem on your test-bed leaving the SysAdmin(s) frantically having to determine the cause of the problem and promptly devise a creative work-around to get everything running properly and stable again without rolling back and compromising security.

Actually it doesn't surprise me that this month's Maintenance took longer than usual. I manage Server Farms in four Data Centers and this month's Maintenance for me (tonight) will be the longest Maintenance Window I have ever had to take in several years...and I'm just rolling out Security Patches and Critical Version Updates to software! There were so many major vulnerabilities in every platform this past month that everything network-wide has to be uninstalled, recompiled, reinstalled, and reconfigured before being brought back online in order to complete the Security Update; from DNS Servers to Firewalls to Intrusion Detection to Databases to Operating Systems and even every platform that runs on those Operating Systems, such as PHP, Perl, Python, Java, and .NET (.NET patches are the absolute worst as they literally take *FOREVER* in an unattended install...okay, I'm exaggerating...but they alone do take significantly longer than any other upgrade generally, and oftentimes longer than all other upgrades combined)...then there is the matter of letting Load-Balanced and/or Redundant Systems resync after these changes, which the bigger you are the longer they take (in some scenarios you can take everything back online before the resync process is complete but performance will take a noticeable hit until the process is complete).

Personally, I would have worried had Turbine's Monthly Maintenance went quickly this month as it would have meant they weren't patching everything in their infrastructure that really needs to be patched to ensure security and stability.

Being a SysAdmin is a thankless job. No one notices when everything goes squeaky clean and there isn't any unexpected downtime (other than Regional Outages between your customer and your Data Centers which are outside of your control)...but people sure as heck notice and get upset when Scheduled Monthly Maintenance takes longer than it should, not realizing that it is entirely out of the SysAdmin(s) control how long it takes (or realizing that 99.5% uptime still equates to 43.8 hours a year of downtime for the industry average).

Originally Posted by Boridre

they might of thought it was a patch cause the dev took all day to do nothing

How refreshing to get the informed perspective of an expert.