Joel and i have both been very busy, however, we do have news for you!
After we first deployed the server to the classroom, shortly after - the school break started. The server sat dormant for a while, and we wanted to give the server a checkup before it got deployed for the school year.
But checkups and some fine tuning was not all that we did. We also added automatic backups. Every day at about 4 AM, the server will go down, and perform a backup to a server we have at my apartment. 7 days worth of full backups are kept, the oldest discarded. Basically, if anything ever happens to the server, no data will be lost. We can rebuild the server with whatever parts we have, put the disk image of the server on the disk, run updates, plop the newest backup on the disk, and ship it out - a total of 4 hours at most.
What else did we do? general updates to the system, to bukkit, and to McMyAdmin - as well as a stress test. To stress test the server, we made a giant hole in the ground, very far away from the spawn point - and then filled it with TNT (5 thousand blocks). We detonated the TNT and waited for the server to settle. Good news! The server handled it like a champ. Once we were done doing that, we simply reverted to the last save before the explosion - so we left no evidence.
The server was shipped back out on Thursday, and with any luck, should be online by Monday.
Happy Crafting!
