As was previously announced, Azure L2 is now officially over. All three of our servers have been given their farewell. What to do now?

Request for Ideas

I'm debating what exactly to do with the website/forums and this community. Many people have suggested I open another L2 server (e.g. a high rate), while another idea is to convert the website/forums into a general gaming community. A final option is to close everything, but I don't see the point in that.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Speak your mind, leave your comments, but please be respectful

Web Server Issue

The main web server is currently down due to an overheating/temperature issue making it run very poorly. This spare web server is temporarily up until we can repair the issue (Monday-Tuesday is my estimate).

Good news is, all sites but the forums and media.azuregaming.net will be fully online. Forums will be open but due to missing upload data that is not in sync with the main web server all uploads, such as photo albums and avatar changes will be disabled temporarily. Media files for the Trailer page are not currently available.

In addition, as a precautionary measure, donations and game account unbanning have also been disabled until we get the main web server back. I want to avoid any complications due to this not being setup the same way as our main web server.

Thanks for understanding.

Unplanned L2 Downtime

Ironically, the same time the web server had an issue Celes crashed after 40+ days of uptime and stayed down until I woke up and handled it.

I had changed the network card configuration, and because of anti-leak protection built into the server the hardware ID that is generated and used to check for a valid license changed. This caused the server to not restart. I apologize for that error, but it was unexpected and the crash was very poorly timed as well.

However, Celes is back online so feel free to play again.

On the night of January 14, 2010 we started a network-wide maintenance moving all our server data from SoftLayer back onto our own hardware in our new datacenter.

Things took longer than we expected, especially with getting L2 moved back over. I apologize for not making an announcement earlier, but I didn't expect the move to take this long.

What Happened?

Our SoftLayer servers ran off SQL Server 2008 while our hardware ran off SQL Server 2005. Due to the version, I was unable to do a normal backup and restore. I had to go through a long process of manually importing the database because the database was too big to import as a text file (4 GB and 7 GB in size). In the end, it took me about 18 hours to get everything fully imported and working correctly.

I lost items/my character is wrong!

This was a temporary issue while I was investigating why the server was not working right. All your items, characters, and other data is restored to exactly how it was before we started this move.

I got a message saying my account is disabled. Am I banned?

No, you are not banned. Our login database was also being imported and had corruption issues until I redid the backup and restored it manually. Your account should be working fine now!

Network Information

Are you unable to connect, or wondering what our new addresses are? Read on.

As always, our servers are marked by their DNS names auth.azurel2com, aerith.azurel2.com, nanaki.azurel2.com, and celes.azurel2.com. Just ping or trace them to find the actual IP.

I can't connect or login!

Make sure you open your hosts file and remove any entries for our DNS names. Our IP address is updated automatically so you do not need host entries--they'll make it impossible to log in!

Closing

If you have any other questions or an issue related to this maintenance, please leave a reply here and I'll take care of it.

Thanks for understanding. Have fun gaming.