06:21pm Feb24, 2006 

The weekend is upon us, time to dust the Abattoir.Net Server room...  It's been at least six months since the Server Room in LAN Central was ripped into and this week we almost had a core melt-down on our in-house RAID5 Media Server as temperature alarms started going off -- seems the CPU's heat sink had half a cat stuck in it.  As of Noon EST tomorrow (Feb25) all in-house servers will be taken off-line for regular maintenance and upgrades to the Server Room as we add several more UPS power back-ups.  Services impacted: MeatCAMs, Mail Server, WebMAIL, Portal Server, Entire SuperFTP Cluster, Media Server and our Quantum-Flux Generator -- This outage will not affect the Abattoir web site or Abattoir.BBs.  We regret the interruption in service and we'll move as quickly as a team of 4 geeks can, we are not anticipating more than a one hour window with some services coming back on-line as quickly as 30 minutes.  Thanks for your understanding.

 

08:35am Feb21, 2006 

Gee...  That took a long time.  Our 50th LAN Party "Fools" Edition to be held April 1st sold out and then some almost instantly and the Abattoir Hype Engine is in full gear.  Remember, just because the Reservation Page is full doesn't mean you can't get in, there's always the Spectator option, or put yourself on the Waiting List as there are always a few cancellations and persons on the Waiting List are taken on a first sign-up, first in basis.  There's rumours floating around about a possible "MiniBTM" prior to BTM50 to hold over all those itchy trigger fingers, keep an eye out in the forums for that.

The folks at EA Games decided to give us all a Valentine's Day gift...  On the 14th, EA Games pumped out a 357 meg patch for the popular Battlefield 2 which jammed-up their file servers so bad I thought I was downloading Linux; patch 1.2 was to carry fixes and balances but noise in the forums say they've fixed this and broke that...  Many are upset over some of the game play changes and as such, EA has announced a 1.21 patch to follow shortly.  Also on the 14th, the Ranked Server Administrators Assistant Director announced they've started hitting Battlefield 2 accounts that show signs of stat-padding, hacking or cheating.  Over 400 accounts were tagged and reset with the promises of many more to come -- one such account was our own Justin (Ness) Harney who installed the 1.2 patch and suddenly lost all his global rankings...  Email back and forth between EA Games Customer Support left the reason for the reset ambiguous and referred to the decision on the reset as non-appealable.  Looks like that little knife fight you had with friends 9 months ago can come back and bite you on the ass.  EA has promised to continue its sweeps in order to assure players their ranked server system maintains a fair and level playing field.

 

MeatMan Says:
"If you're new to Abattoir.Net and want to get to know what we're all about, sit back with a cup of joe or a brew and cruise through the ramblings of the past"


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