Tag: torchwood archive

Site restored following a VMware crash

Lukas Rox EVE Online, Games, System Administration , , ,

In the middle of the night last week, Torchwood Archives, LMeve Database, Yearly Stats and Aideron Technologies instance of LMeve vanished from the internet.

But it wasn’t a DDOS attack.

It turns out hypervisors (such as VMware) sometimes crash, just like Windows does.

There was connection to neither the Linux system that powers my websites, nor to the VMware running under the hood. So at first it all looked like a good old fashioned hardware fault. It took a good while to restore, because my server is colocated in a different city, and due to real life I couldn’t just go there and investigate it locally.

Here’s where a remote KVM comes in handy. It’s a special device that acts as keyboard, mouse and monitor, but you can access it remotely by visiting a special web page.
KVM which was connected to my server died a week earlier and was sent to RMA…

With connectivity to Linux and VMware gone, and KVM unavailable, the only way was to have a look locally, by connecting keyboard and monitor directly to the server.

What did the datacenter techie see on my box? Bluescreen I hear you say. Close. But on VMware bluescreens are… Pink. So there was a Pinkscreen waiting there. A simple power restart was enough to restore all the services back online.20121120_124732093_iOS

P.S. My coleague from work says VMware Pinkscreens are not PINK, they are PURPLE.

Cockroach frigate design: fake or not?

Lukas Rox ((IC)), EVE Online, Games, Role-playing , , , ,

There have been rumours in the capsuleer community recently about a new vessel designed around Rogue Drones technology codenamed the ‘Cockroach’. There has been footage of this vessel (on which it is able to destroy a Control Tower along with a complete set of structures – please see here), but there has been no data on the ship itself. An anonymous source has published a file on galnet which seemed to be an industrial database backup. One of the hackers employed by the Torchwood Archive corporation has found the following record in forementioned file:

Cockroach class ship
Cockroach class ship

Cockroach

The specially adapted rogue drone scanning technology integrate into this unique frigate-sized platform is reserved for the exclusive use of the elite Equipment Certification and Anomaly Investigations Division (ECAID) agents. The femtometer wavelength scan resolution allows the pilot to virtually dissect and analyze any object at a subatomic scale, divining all flaws and defects with an uncanny level of quality. Flying one of these amazing ships is also a great mark of achievement. Any ECAID agent worthy of such a command can be said to have reached the pinnacle of his career and is worthy of all capsuleer’s deep respect.



There is also a record of a ship of this class destroyed about a year ago here. Unfortunately it is impossible to confirm if footage mentioned above was real or just a clever fake. A ship with such capabilities should easily be able to fend off a group of other ships.

((OOC: I found this ship while surfing through the inv_items table from EVE Data dump))