Something we haven't done much here on ShadeCrest is have periodic planned outage periods where the admins can do extended maintenance. I'd like to suggest that we start doing that. There are several things we can only do when the server is down completely. More details on what we plan on doing during this time but the purpose of this post is to ask: When do you think it's ok to have an extended maintenance window? Keep in mind we can't just say Tuesday at 2:00am to 8:00am (like MMOs for example) because let's be honest the majority of the staff is in the US and we have lives, jobs, and such and can't be doing hardcore maintenance in the middle of our sleeping hours. One of these things is doing a database cleanup activity which I've been wanting to do for some time. This includes deleting old database no longer needed, renaming databases to match a server_plugin convention, and making sure each plugin only has access to it's own data. Doing all of this will make the server more maintainable especially as we will now have 3 servers with lots of plugins, it will also in a minor way improve performance, and vastly improve the security of the server because each plugin with have it's own username / password to it's own data and the root username and password for MySQL will end up getting changed and kept under wraps (again for security reasons). Another thing we plan on doing is during this window removing old obsolete files on servers which are no longer in use, old worlds, basically old stuff which if cleaned up could result in a minor performance improvement. All these things are minor things but all them added up would result in a cleaner, well running server.
So, weekends are a bad time, as are Friday evenings., can't be early morning/late night, midday most of staff is probably working in real life, evenings have decent traffic... crap. The staff needs to get together and find out a time where a majority if not all are available. I'm wondering if it'd be a good plan to have a day once a month (an entire 24 hours) for staff to work on big stuff. Sorry I can't be much help.
It doesn't need to be 24 hours, it needs to be around 4-8 hours and not the entire staff because really the only staff who would be doing a lot of this work are Ndv, Erik, Dyno, and myself. It wouldn't be once a month, probably once every 2 weeks IF needed. At first we would need a larger window to get caught up on a large backlog of stuff that's not been maintained. After that it would be a much smaller window (2 hours max). One of the things I'd want done during the "regular" update time would be just making sure we have latest plugins, bukkit jars, etc.
I just had an idea: Only have 1 of our servers in extended downtime each week in a rotation. So for example survival might be down the first week of the month. Creative down the second week of the month. Vanilla down the third week of the month. FTB down the fifth week of the month. This ensures we're focused on the updates to one server at a time and players could play on the other servers during downtime. I dunno just an idea. Might be annoying to update a plugin for example over 3 weeks across 3 servers. Maybe it would be a good way to get past this initial catch up phase at least.
Sunday mornings (6-12)seems like a good opportunity. Many people wake up late or go to church providing less traffic and most staff get the day off for work.
I refuse to cooperate, every second I don't spend playing minecraft is a second I could be doing school work! This is a great idea.
I don't think it should be done on weekends. Especially on sundays. That's when we have the most people online.
we don't have as many people on Sunday morning then as Saturday and the staff work during the week Sunday should work for every one are you sarcastically insulting me?
Well being an adult here and not a teen, I think it should be whenever the staff get free time out of their busy schedules, I mean yea ppl will complain about it being down,but it's to help the server.
Saturday evenings REALLY late might be ok. Erik and I are both West Coast and we can start the maintenance window at 10:00PM - 2:00 AM PST on Saturdays. We're both night owls and prefer to update things late at night over REALLY early in the morning. Of course that might adversely affect EU folks since that will be early morning for them... 6am - 10am for GMT but again I don't that will affect them that much.
i dont think any britsh people whould be angry about not being able to play minecraft at 6am They've got their Tea anyways XD