Recent News

By Alara: Here's an update on what's going on this week.

Alexander is visiting MAGFest this week! HOORAY! I wish I were there too. I told him to try to attend the Demoparty, because I hear those thing are pretty underground and cool.

I completely screwed up the server on Tuesday while running a suggested upgrade to MariaDB 10.1. Turns out Debian (and Raspbian) has a demo OS release out which when upgrading to that (because I thought they followed the same major release schedule as Ubuntu, Windows 10, etc.), completely borked the system as far as MySQL, Apache, and PHP goes. Basically my LAMP install bit the dust. So I am spending the remainder of this week refreshing ALL of Raspbian from scratch.

This includes upgrading to a RPi3+ which I've been hoarding at home as well as migrating to HDD-Only mode (this is apparently programmable in the RPi3's internal flash, so you can pull the SD card and it will still function)! Additionally I got Raspbian Stretch installed by default, as well as MariaDB 10.1 running as the base SQL server.

Compiling PennMUSH last night was a real pain. Turns out it couldn't guess that the SQL client libraries were located in /usr/include/mysql, and so I followed PennMUSH's SQL instructions to "specify mysql_config via --with-mysql=" but did not realize that was supposed to point to /usr/bin/mysql_config. I thought it was supposed to be /etc/mysql/my.cnf or something!

Well, after that was clarified around 11pm, the engine FINALLY compiled and I spent the next hour merging MUSH configs in with the newest distributions.

Outstanding issue: All old web hosts are currently under construction. I need to reintegrate all the old website files and reconfigure SSL (probably will just generate new certs from scratch, rather than try to recover the old ones, since certbot is free). Additionally, I need to get cron back up and running in order to properly perform daily backups and other periodic activities.

MUSH-wise I decided to turn on the config option to warn on all rooms disconnected from #0 rather than on rooms without exits leading ino them. This means there were about 50 rooms this morning that were complaining about disconnects and unfloating. I am slowly working my way through them which leads to today's big(ish) in-game update:

The Sky is now mapped! I thought for sure I had already gotten this, but apparently not. Plus working my way through disconnected rooms, I ran into a few old grid projects which I'm going to gradually open up. A few are easter-eggy, so I don't want to spoil everything by giving you all details here. Just have to go searching, or in ten more years, randomly run across them!
--Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:41:46 MST