New efforts!

[LadyVamp]

Me, too.  However, a bunch of 2012 hardware?   

How about a stack of Dell M620 blade servers?  Where I work, we have an army of those things of which about 3rd are from the 2012 era.  And yes they keep soldiering on.  Too new?  We also have a bunch of M720HDs which are even older.  Best I can do with them is use them for POCs.  They wouldn't take my suggestion of retiring them nor letting me hide them in my cube.

[rookery.]

Bested by a politician.  :gonk:

[LateNights]

Wouldn't happen. Surely he hates Supers. They give their time and effort for free, which makes them evil socialists, and he'd say the only reason they do it is because they can't get a real job.  :P

But, influence...

[LadyVamp]

Mapservers were dynamic?  Interesting...

An army of ants is far more resilient than a large, single bull.  Very likely mapservers were all dynamically built from a templated image.  Probably hosted on VMware ESX servers with a vCenter running them.  I would figure probably 1 VM per map, 2 domain controllers to handle login (indications were they were using windows 2003 servers or so wireshark seemed to think), and probably 2 sql servers clustered to store our toon data.  Another couple to handle the website and forums.  One more for the bug report server for the devs.  Another for trouble tickets from us users.  Probably a terminal server or two or VDI servers for the support teams.  A code repository server(git or subversion most likely) for the devs to manage the code.  Keep in mind the only servers that were likely real were the ESX hosts and possibly their vCenter.  I am assuming they used VMware.  Could have used RHEV (aka KVM) or even XEN though without a vCenter like server, XEN would have been harder to handle the dynamic mapservers.

That wouldn't include the servers needed to run the company like the finance server (payroll for ex), email, file server, internal web servers, project servers for dev work, firewall servers/appliances, load balancers, dns, dhcp, monitoring (ex nagios, dynatrace), the phone switches (some are basically linux servers), vmail, conference or online meeting servers.  I'm sure you get the idea.

[LadyVamp]

For reasons that are too hazy to recall well any more, I got interested in trying to track down the Ms. Liberty uniform worn by the Ms. Liberty trade show model.....The only question is where that warehouse is located.

If I had to guess, I would say some executive has it in his (wife's) closet, and she pulls it out for the special nights.  I know that it happened to all the Genie costumes from the I Dream of Genie shows.  They ended up being given to the wives of the broadcasting network's VPs.

[LadyVamp]

We have top men working on it right now. Top...men.

Thanks a lot.  Now I have Raiders of the Lost Ark theme song stuck in my head.

[LadyVamp]

It's the best little warehouse in Texas.

Oh.

Wait.

That was a. . . never mind.

Not you too.  Now I have the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme playing in my head with Ms. Mona played by Dollie Parton dancing to it.

[eabrace]

MOD POST

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=blog.thenewstribune.com%2Fpolitics%2Ffiles%2F2010%2F06%2Fsmelltest1-200x318.png

I smell politics in my forums.  Don't make me have to sanitize and start flushing posts.   >:(

[Arcana]

An army of ants is far more resilient than a large, single bull.  Very likely mapservers were all dynamically built from a templated image.  Probably hosted on VMware ESX servers with a vCenter running them.  I would figure probably 1 VM per map, 2 domain controllers to handle login (indications were they were using windows 2003 servers or so wireshark seemed to think), and probably 2 sql servers clustered to store our toon data.  Another couple to handle the website and forums.  One more for the bug report server for the devs.  Another for trouble tickets from us users.  Probably a terminal server or two or VDI servers for the support teams.  A code repository server(git or subversion most likely) for the devs to manage the code.  Keep in mind the only servers that were likely real were the ESX hosts and possibly their vCenter.  I am assuming they used VMware.  Could have used RHEV (aka KVM) or even XEN though without a vCenter like server, XEN would have been harder to handle the dynamic mapservers.

That wouldn't include the servers needed to run the company like the finance server (payroll for ex), email, file server, internal web servers, project servers for dev work, firewall servers/appliances, load balancers, dns, dhcp, monitoring (ex nagios, dynatrace), the phone switches (some are basically linux servers), vmail, conference or online meeting servers.  I'm sure you get the idea.

1.  Pretty sure City of Heroes used its own custom authentication software, probably written on top of a sqlserver database.  I don't think they used Active Directory to authenticate players.  You'd have to be totally insane to do that.  Active Directory is like the world's worst replicating database, and scaling it to handle hundreds of thousands of logins is a fools errand.  Not to mention expensive for no reason.

2.  Pretty sure Paragon wasn't using VDI for anything.  In the timeframes we're talking about VDI was slow, finicky, and not particularly useful to content creators.  It is still finicky and difficult and expensive to make high performance VDI.  Beyond that there's no particular advantage for Paragon employees to not just use local desktop workstations.  In some situations it can be useful to have remote VDI workstations that are local to your remote workloads, but that's not really the situation the Paragon devs were in.  They weren't really supposed to be directly logging into the production servers at all.

3.  Dynamic instancing of actual operating systems is something that does happen in large scale cloud applications, but it is not commonly done with Windows because it is often difficult to instance Windows dynamically quickly enough for these purposes.  It is possible, sure, but in Enterprise hypervisor environments like I assume NCSoft would have been hosting City of Heroes it is more likely that all the Windows guest servers they needed at any one particular time would be statically provisioned, and the software inside of them would be made dynamically scalable.

[Surelle]

MOD POST

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=blog.thenewstribune.com%2Fpolitics%2Ffiles%2F2010%2F06%2Fsmelltest1-200x318.png

I smell politics in my forums.  Don't make me have to sanitize and start flushing posts.   >:(

ZOMG, you got a laugh out of me with that one!   ;D

[Felderburg]

Wouldn't happen. Surely he hates Supers. They give their time and effort for free, which makes them evil socialists, and he'd say the only reason they do it is because they can't get a real job.  :P

Issue 13 took care of that: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Day_Jobs

If I had to guess, I would say some executive has it in his (wife's) closet, and she pulls it out for the special nights.  I know that it happened to all the Genie costumes from the I Dream of Genie shows.  They ended up being given to the wives of the broadcasting network's VPs.

That's kind of weird...

[Taceus Jiwede]

If I had to guess, I would say some executive has it in his (wife's) closet, and she pulls it out for the special nights.  I know that it happened to all the Genie costumes from the I Dream of Genie shows.  They ended up being given to the wives of the broadcasting network's VPs.

That's kind of weird...

Its also kinda hilarious.  Thinking that somewhere in the world there is some kinky role-playing with an old Ms. Liberty outfit used for marketing is just like...the best thing I have heard all week.  Well second best, the best is hearing that something similar happened with the "I dream of genie" costumes.  Good stuff.

[Sinistar]

Thanks a lot.  Now I have Raiders of the Lost Ark theme song stuck in my head.

Well this might get it unstuck,  Hollywood is planning for 2019 another Indiana Jones with Harrison "Methusela" Ford back in the role.

[slickriptide]

Well this might get it unstuck,  Hollywood is planning for 2019 another Indiana Jones with Harrison "Methusela" Ford back in the role.

Now he's old enough to lose his eye and segue into the crotchety old grandpa role for Young Indian Jones Chronicles!

[Mister Hassenpheffer]

It's the best little warehouse in Texas.

Oh.

Wait.

That was a. . . never mind.

GAH! I  -had- an sg named Warehouse 242...

Everyone , including myself did not see Warehouse.

...Hindsight.

[Minotaur]

GAH! I  -had- an sg named Warehouse 242...

Everyone , including myself did not see Warehouse.

...Hindsight.

My NW guildleader is a Dutch girl who has trouble pronouncing warehouse (a building in our base) where she pronounces the first vowel as if it was the oa in oar. This gives much hilarity to all the English and Americans on TS.

[blacksly]

Marco Rubio already beat you to that one.

I cannot believe you used that topic and the word "beat" in the same sentence.

[CrimsonCapacitor]

If I had to guess, I would say some executive has it in his (wife's) closet, and she pulls it out for the special nights.  I know that it happened to all the Genie costumes from the I Dream of Genie shows.  They ended up being given to the wives of the broadcasting network's VPs.

Yet another thing I learned on the forums that I really wish I hadn't.

[LadyVamp]

1.  Pretty sure City of Heroes used its own custom authentication software, probably written on top of a sqlserver database.  I don't think they used Active Directory to authenticate players.  You'd have to be totally insane to do that.  Active Directory is like the world's worst replicating database, and scaling it to handle hundreds of thousands of logins is a fools errand.  Not to mention expensive for no reason.

2.  Pretty sure Paragon wasn't using VDI for anything.  In the timeframes we're talking about VDI was slow, finicky, and not particularly useful to content creators.  It is still finicky and difficult and expensive to make high performance VDI.  Beyond that there's no particular advantage for Paragon employees to not just use local desktop workstations.  In some situations it can be useful to have remote VDI workstations that are local to your remote workloads, but that's not really the situation the Paragon devs were in.  They weren't really supposed to be directly logging into the production servers at all.

3.  Dynamic instancing of actual operating systems is something that does happen in large scale cloud applications, but it is not commonly done with Windows because it is often difficult to instance Windows dynamically quickly enough for these purposes.  It is possible, sure, but in Enterprise hypervisor environments like I assume NCSoft would have been hosting City of Heroes it is more likely that all the Windows guest servers they needed at any one particular time would be statically provisioned, and the software inside of them would be made dynamically scalable.

1.  If I had to guess, they probably used a mixed OS environment.  Probably Linux for the map servers or perhaps JVMs on static Windows servers with ADDS doing the auth.  I do know I saw some packets that decoded to something AD related going between the game client and some server at NCsoft.  Not many and always during login.  I doubt they custom rolled an authentication system.  Even back then, too many choices.  Some of them quite good.  You had NDS, NTLM, ADDS, Kerberos, LDAP, YP/NIS just to name a few.  No I don't consider NTLM or ADDS to be good when going over the internet, but they valid are choices.

As a side note, I always found it curious that much of the traffic was encrypted between the game client and the map servers.

2.  I was making an assumption that their level 1 support team was probably not in the USA.  Many companies outsourced their level 1 to India, Canada, and The Philippines to name a few countries .  That usually translated into Terminal Services, Citrix, VNC, VDI or something like it.  That's how we do it today and how we did it for years where I work.  I know the onsite people never used any kind of remote systems when on site.  That would be pretty foolish.  Then again they did shutdown CoH....

3.  Either they used linux for the map servers or something like a JVM on Windows servers.  If it was Windows with JVMs, they'd very likely be static VMs with the JVMs being dynamic.  Very easy to spin up Linux VMs on the back of some hypervisor.  Not so easy with Windows though today it's a lot easier than back when CoH was alive.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Now he's old enough to lose his eye and segue into the crotchety old grandpa role for Young Indian Jones Chronicles!

He's an Elder Class now though, which probably means he can do even more impossible stunts than he could 40 years ago...  :roll: