Pitboss Redundancy Discussion

[scooter]

In the attempt to launch PB77, we ran into a big issue - namely Ramk hasn't been heard from in awhile. I reached out to Zulan, and he told me he hasn't been able to get in touch with him either. I'm really hoping everything is OK and Ramk is simply having an excellent internet-free vacation, and he'll soon return to make this thread irrelevant. However, the brief conversation from the PB77 signup thread I think sums it up quickly.

As for actual Civ, I'm like a day or two away from opening a CivGeneral discussion on some sort of Plan B for Pitboss. Because as of right now, we have no way to play any new Pitboss games. Seems like a fairly important issue to begin sorting out. But I'm hesitant to jump the gun.

I know this is a tech thread for a game, so I am hesitent to jump into a discussion on a more general point, but as a forum we realistically do want to have a back up plan for PB games. That alone is worth discussing so it's not unwise to open the general discussion in the general forum, even if Ramk turns up this evening well tanned and rested.

The TL;DR is we currently have no way of launching PB games, and the ETA on fixing that is a complete unknown.


We should start thinking about alternative options for hosting Pitboss in case we 1) need it now, or 2) need it in the future. Whether we're looking at #1 or #2 right now is pretty unknown. But given that Civ Pitboss is more or less the lifeblood of this forum currently, it seems like a pressing issue.


So, it's not all bad news. There's a couple bits of good news.


1) Zulan is around, and the currently used server is under his control. The issue here is that the actual administration of games is not really his thing. There is potential here that Zulan simply adds another person to help administer games, and everything eventually goes smoothly. If you think you or another member might be the right person for this (technically savvy, well-known reputation for trustworthiness and availability), it's worth discussing it below. One option that ought to be on the table is nominating such a person to Zulan directly, though he's under no obligation to actually do this. It seems like good practice to have 2 people capable of administering games in general.


2) The tools Zulan and Ramk have been using to run these are all open-source and freely available on Github (https://github.com/civ4-mp). This includes all the various PB server bugfixes, the fixes that make mods work better, and the Python console tools Ramk uses for advanced access.


3) PBSpy is running fine and is capable of tracking for games hosted elsewhere, at least as far as I can tell.



From an RB perspective, if we could find an alternative method of actually hosting the PB server, we could replicate the rest of the setup with a little bit of effort thanks to #2 and #3. Of course, this is all easier said than done. However, if you have thoughts on the logistics of making that happen, or you have thoughts on the idea mentioned in #1 above, please speak up below. Or if you have any other suggestions really, this is the place to discuss.

[Krill]

I cannot offer any form of skill or knowledge, but can I just ask what sort of hardware, and internet connection, is needed?

[scooter]

I cannot offer any form of skill or knowledge, but can I just ask what sort of hardware, and internet connection, is needed?

I'm hoping someone with more knowledge will weigh in here. Technically I think anyone with a spare windows machine and steady internet/power connection could host a game. It's not particularly hardware-demanding. There's probably a large-ish time effort up-front to get everything running properly, but it's entirely doable to run something like this out of your house. Internet connection is more about being consistently available than blazing fast, though it's possible I'm underestimating some of the late-game logins.

[T-hawk]

That's how we did it early on before the push to dedicated hosting. Sunrise089 had a spare windows machine under his desk and firewall port forwarding knowledge, and all the Pitbosses hosted there went down whenever he had thunderstorms. There's no reason any of that wouldn't still work, as far as Civ is concerned it's still just a direct IP connection, no lobby or anything. Of course the single-point-of-failure problem is at its maximum this way.

[superdeath]

Yeah... i have no tech knowledge on how to set any of that up. Id be willing to just buy a monthly server or something to run the PB's on. Wish i knew more tech wise, fully willing to do whatever outside of that.

[scooter]

That's how we did it early on before the push to dedicated hosting. Sunrise089 had a spare windows machine under his desk and firewall port forwarding knowledge, and all the Pitbosses hosted there went down whenever he had thunderstorms. There's no reason any of that wouldn't still work, as far as Civ is concerned it's still just a direct IP connection, no lobby or anything. Of course the single-point-of-failure problem is at its maximum this way.

Yeah, this can absolutely work. It just takes a combination of someone willing to put in the effort as well as having the technical ability to do it. And obviously it's less robust. But if you're reading this and check all the boxes, it's worth considering.


Hosting plans can be had that would deal with the robustness. This was the solution in the Caledorn era. This can work - there are relatively inexpensive hosting options out there that would fit the bill I think. This would require a couple things.



1) Someone willing to be responsible for the bill, and hopefully a few generous users to chip in (I would).


2) Someone with the technical expertise and spare time to do the backend work getting it running, managing it, and hopefully some redundancy for them.

[Mjmd]

Zulan already has the server set up (which we should be better about donating to), so what we really need is someone willing to learn how to host games on it.

[scooter]

Zulan already has the server set up (which we should be better about donating to), so what we really need is someone willing to learn how to host games on it.

I'm going to ask him about this, but in the past he didn't really want to give out additional access, so I've been hesitant to push too hard. He may be more willing now that it's causing a hangup. But the catch is I'm not sure who to even nominate to him here. We used to have a ton of sysadmin-y types, but they aren't really around anymore. I could figure it out, but I don't really want to be involved with launching a game I'm participating in, which is the first "job" to do here. Possible he may have a good option on the German forum.


Main purpose in creating this thread is it's not ideal that there's still this single point of failure.

[Mjmd]

Well ideally there would be two people. One on the German forum to set up our games and then one person on our forum to set up theirs.

[Krill]

When we talk about redundancy, that must include the scenario that we lose access to Zulans server, for any reason. We should also plan to offer these resources to the German community in the same way that they have shared with us.

We need:

• Two servers capable of hosting a dozen large PB games simultaneously (let's plan for the worst)
  
  
• Two admins capable of accessing both server (do we need this, or just two admins, each with access to one server?)
  
  
• All of the same functionality of how to use the open source tools (and have them set up on the back up server, so run a test set up and see where that goes?)
  
  
• Access to the relevant save files (essentially, what if the server goes down hard and can't be brought back up? If we can log into each game, then we can simply take a save and rehost).

Thinking this through, do we need DDNS set up for the second server? Everything else seems like it is just set up on the relevant machine. I'm in the process of setting up a home lab so I may be in a position to be a backup host, but I'd probably be using a VM to host, and I'm already out of my depth simply writing this sentence.