Kyp

We may open things before end of day (unclear yet) but I would give a VERY HEALTHY WARNING that you DO NOT make use of any inventory/character transfer stuff til you hear from us, and even if it does come back up today, we are reserving the right to continue with outages until we have everything where we want it.

Not sure it would those are likely static pages, but speaking of things that might make people feel better.

Yeah kinda stuck with inv300 until I can remedy the patching problem so I can test it further. I can't quite get to the inv300 error because I had just reinstalled the game client prior to all of this and wasn't patched yet. Right now struggling with a quirk of the webhost platform that the new provider uses ("Plesk") and for whatever reason it seems to be hiding/not allowing clients to read what is in subfolders from where the patching site is. Researching but they are one of those companies that are trying to bill you as much as possible so they don't seem to have good public knowledge for how to resolve problems like this, or else my google-fu is getting rusty. Anyway, that's where we are. For today i've asked someone else to have a look if they get some time, but I have to be away for most of it. Saturdays are busy days.

Its fate is currently unclear, i'm not sure we had it backed up because it was considered a community maintained project that we were hosting. I don't want to say it's 100% dead, but at least thus far I do not have a .sql file for it, even though I may have the actual software from the disks we recovered. Some of our sql was hit, which is why we had to spend some time rebuilding databases, it could be that it met an unfortunate fate at the hands of the bad guys.

Not really a new version, per se. We're just having a lot of kinks as we discover some of the technologies we were using before were a little out of date, but that was ok because they were protected and behind firewall etc. The problem comes with modern versions of those tools and us trying to compile the server and it balking at some of the things we were doing, stable or not. The joys of computers and development. Get stable and content, then the next update of toolsets is a giant pain in the ass.

We are really getting there, I promise. I have a working server now (sort of). Some communications issues to work through yet, but we're getting further. That said, I'll add the caveat that even though we may get the game server up pretty soon, support functions may be limited for a while. Right now all that's really left is fixing the communications issue we're seeing with the wonderful thing that is networking and making sure the patching functionality is working and you'll be able to play again, I think.

We are currently missing a library file for the intel thread builder (intel tbb) package which is preventing the game server from building for us. This file is 'tbb_debug.lib'. I am looking for a version of this file to use so we can get to the next step. As soon as we get it to build, the game should be up shortly after that. The bright side of all this, it has taught us a little more about Disaster Recovery so there are some steps/post-mortem to go through but we're going out of our way to make it less able to be taken out like this in the future.

We are currently stuck with an issue where we're missing a dependency to build the server and are searching for what we need. We are inching ever closer to being able to bring things back up.

No but to be fair, there are plenty of situations where Windows is the right tool for the job, and others where a version of linux, freebsd or something entirely custom is the best approach. That said we use both Windows and Linux, and a custom solution or two.

Appreciate the vote of confidence. Simply put, game is not gone away, nor will stay gone. It'd be nice to have all the skill sets we need at the ready but people move on, and as C Del says, sometimes those skills are hard to come by and the infrastructure behind all this is more complicated than would be expected but it's necessary to protect your data/accounts/game experience. Right now it is as I last said, we're working through some differences with code to bring ourselves up to a current version of Microsoft's visual studio because we were using an older version for development and our code base is not currently compatible/able to be compiled and run. Once we solve those issues we should be able to bring the last stuff up including the dev and sunrise servers.

Only a little, but that said, we are getting close. Right now we're basically at the last step but it looks like we are going to have to upgrade from the version of Visual Studio we were using to the latest version and that unfortunately means a number of changes and errors with code to work through before the game server will run. (Thanks, Microsoft!). We are trying to locate the older installer to get it back to you sooner but so far this has been unsuccessful.

Yes not you, we have to get the game server set back up on top of the card pyramid, after that I expect any remaining issues will be cleared up. Any issues that you're still seeing are most likely to do with our architecture and we expect them resolved once that's back up.

Don't worry guys, we aren't upset. Just direct communication as asked.

Here's your update. Everything's done except getting the game servers functioning again along with the registration process being tested, to my knowledge at least. That's where we've got, unfortunately, it isn't as easy as you'd imagine coordinating all this with people who are volunteers and are not being paid. Nobody can be compelled to work on it, and some of the stuff requires different skillsets so we do it as people can make themselves available. This isn't a full blown corporation with people being paid salaries ignoring you, these are people with lives and choosing to give you their time here and there, as they can. The donations that are received go entirely to server bills and software/upgrade needs. From here on out I'll give a daily update of 'no news' since that's good news, right? As I've said before, we get it, you're bored. We're pretty bored too because most of our free time outside of crap we have to do in our own lives/homes etc. is being spent working on technical issues thanks to some 'people' deciding that they needed to teach everyone a lesson and blasting evil shit out like a firehose. You should instead probably be glad that we got it sealed off and corrected before the scripts came out to fix it because the attack that caused it got much worse and we might not have recovered anything at all, had that been the case. That said, no ill will from me/us to you, you can hate us if you like but we're doing what we can to get it back, and I'd mostly rather not just sit and write meaningless updates until there's something worth updating you about.

State of things right now: We're *allllmost* there. We are working on getting our dev and gm tools back up so you can be supported, as soon as this happens, barring a few minor changes for our new firewalls and setting up the game server program on the servers (easy, once the underpinnings are there) and you should be ready to roll again. It's been a fun month, I know. We're sorry but we're gonna try to learn some things from this so it won't repeat in the future. I will update the main post when we're ready for the final steps just know it truly shouldn't be that much longer. This is the last 'difficult' task that leaves things hard to estimate.

Hadn't had this report from anyone so far other than you, so before we add it to a list for investigations are you absolutely certain you're logging into the account that you think you are, if you have multiple?

Hi folks, This may or may not be visible to you yet but you may notice that the portal has come back up. We strongly recommend (read: Just don't.) that you DO NOT make any alterations to your game account data until we are happy with testing. You could send us back to the drawing board if you're not careful. Don't be that guy/girl.

You're welcome but that was mostly for my sanity because it kept pointing me at things i'd already seen with the reminders.

No anger here, just cold emotionless 'it is what it is'. Hopefully no hard feelings.

Well, that it may be but I'm not going to commit to exact timelines until they're actually reasonable and possible. This database business will take the time it takes, even if that's longer than anyone would like. I assure you, while you are bored without the game, we (for the few of us who can do this level of it) are tearing our own hair out and would like to get back to our lives, never hurts to remember that the donations do not go to paying anyone other than 3rd party vendors, so they are volunteering free time for fixing things in these types of scenarios. So you can rest assured that it will be done as soon as it can be, but you'll have to accept that I'm not going to quote a timeline and stick us on something for people to be more upset down the line for making a promise I/we can't necessarily keep. For what it's worth, I wouldn't do this in a professional setting either, I would keep reiterating that I couldn't yet quote a time and if it meant a company would end our contract, then that's just what it means. It's far better to take the time to do a thing right than it is to rush, I've found few exceptions for that in my time. I'd like nothing more than for the rest of the databases to just take 10 minutes, but right now for example I'm working through format issues with your game account data and if say.. it went wrong and became corrupt then everyone would end up starting over or we'd have to begin the process of importing this data and working through it again. This is ***By Far*** the largest of the databases involved with the game clocking in ~1.92GB, so it's taking some time to work through. Hopefully the lessons and fixes we make for this will make other issues disappear before those are imported because mostly what we are dealing with is differences between the version of database we had vs. the version we have now.

We'd been trying to keep up with things on Facebook too but I'm just going to centralize things we know and what we're doing here and link it back there going forward. If you have questions, feel free to post, we'll answer as soon as we can. High level on things that happened and where we're going: We were attacked by a broadly spread "spray" attack known as esxiArgs, which is a ransomware for the VMWare environment older than a certain version. It exploited a service in older versions of VMWare if it could reach it to gain admin authority and thus control of the disks. Fortunately, we got an early version of this ransomware and it was possible to retrieve the vast majority of our data What we decided: It was time for a new host, and to leave the last host because while this is also on us, there is really no reason keeping this level of service up to date shouldn't have been easier. We acquired a new host and a new separate web hosting plan in order to help reduce costs AND server maintenance outside of improvements to the game. We have migrated our data here. We had to build out the new environment and protective mechanisms and tested Because what we were hit with was a security issue with a version of our software, we decided that as part of this we would upgrade all of the major software involved. This led to some issues with the database imports. We are working through these issues. After the databases are restored and available the sites should mostly be online (already in physical place they're just missing databases, we will check them out and confirm the state passes and some testing is done. Once all is confirmed we'll be setting up the game server again. The Game Server, the part you care about of course , it's dependent on those websites / DBs in the previous two steps... so as soon as these are done we should be able to bring the game server itself up pretty quickly. The promises of 'real quick' aged about as well as I expected, the game is back up for now. STAY AWAY from Item, Character, Account transfers using the portal for now, or you may live to regret it. We reserve the right for continued outages as necessary to repair things but we're back to stable(ish) GRIPE THREAD:

Furiously working on databases and back ends of the various web sites (web... it really is) and trying to get those back up and ready to roll with every spare moment so we can get the game rolling again. Also getting our new servers hammered out, which just finished up with the basic operating system configurations. We're getting there. Of course I don't think this fits the theme of the post...

It is definitely getting there, at any rate.

oh yeah, definitely has happened before. I get it, protect yourself. Zero trust is always a good thing if you can get there, but we have no plans to purchase and maintain a code signing cert to sign these applications at present because it's definitely not a constant problem.

I would tell Avast to set an exception over all the related folders for Net7 and the E&B client. Avast can get overzealous about blocking applications that are not code signed. While the E&B executable itself is signed, basically nothing else is because it's an extra expense and maintaining a public cert for that purpose when the exceptions will eliminate it trying to do that. It's trying to protect you from yourself so you're not just running some code from the internet.