Many of you probably remember audr09, our favorite admin-turned-griefer that eventually got banned, but then became the first member to get "tarded." He pops in every once in a while to say hi, and came on the other night and clearly confessed to his deeds. Here's his tale, in his own words!

2011-08-24 17:15:46 [INFO] audr09 logged in with entity id 805436 at ([world] 19981.1875, 64.0, 41.6875)
2011-08-24 17:15:48 [INFO] audr09 the tard: ethan
2011-08-24 17:15:59 [INFO] KingOfKarpathia_Ethan: wat tard
2011-08-24 17:16:04 [INFO] audr09 the tard: watch your mouth
2011-08-24 17:16:11 [INFO] KingOfKarpathia_Ethan: oscars a hover
2011-08-24 17:16:14 [INFO] KingOfKarpathia_Oscar: sorry tard!
2011-08-24 17:16:26 [INFO] audr09 the tard: its cool
2011-08-24 17:16:39 [INFO] audr09 the tard: seriously, where is everyone? is it just you two online?

Surf here, we updated bukkit and a bunch of our plugins today. Tell me if something broke, as always with updates stuff can break :( Thanks!

Well folks, the needs of the server are always changing and growing, and it's become time to promote some new Owners.

Please join us in congratulating sbrough10 as a new owner of the server!

Surf here, and I thought I'd take a minute to recap the events leading up to the downtime this last weekend. We've been experiencing lag and poor response from our host for a while, which contributed to the issues.

XxFlufferssxX and TnT_Lover had been playing on our server a bit, being noobs, not doing anything really bad...but apparently they were scouts for a team of avo-lovers (they weren't avo themselves...they get no ice cream).

Beginning 8/16/2011 at exactly 7:40 PM, these guys got on and started a full chat spam event. This caused issues server-side...as our log file has been having size issues over the last few weeks due to changes with servercraft...the file almost tripled in size in under 20 minutes. The server literally had trouble managing the process of writing changes to the log. A flood of noobs from this team came on, with the intent to spam and grief (with TnT_Lover saying he found an admin's house). This attack continued until 8:03 PM, when if I'm correct Gorg caught it happening from the backend and just slammed the server shut to gain control of the situation.

All would have been well, except there were still some issues. Due to the spam...the server tripped itself up on the log writes and when it tried to come back on, it hung. The server had begun running, but it never finished loading properly so we couldn't connect. Additionally, this crash cascaded to McMyAdmin which was querying the server for information, meaning McMyAdmin couldn't load either. The only way for us to reboot or control the server would have been to get the host to reboot it for us...which took close to 48 hours. If you read the log below, you'll see that this whole downtime the server was running in a very limited state (due to a java "out of memory" error), basically just repeating that something was wrong. The server initiation is actually through a console command, and the server tried to unsuccessfully execute that command 750,000 times! That means the log file was well over 1,000,000 lines long, and over 160 MB in size. No wonder the server had trouble loading it!

Since then, we've banned everyone involved in the attack. Also, I'm looking into some spam-control plugins, something where if it detects the same message 5+ times in a row it auto-bans or something. I may have to write it myself. Either way, we learned a bunch from this and a combination of no owners immediately available, plus our increasingly unreliable host, contributed to the downtime. I posted the ENTIRE abridged log of the incident below, full with usernames and IP addresses of the attackers. You'll see I cleaned up the epic repeating spam messages, it's an interesting read.

Surf here, let's be honest, the server is EATING DICK with all the lag recently. I haven't been able to connect all weekend. I went into the backend to take a look at some stuff (Brief geek moment: this host used to parse out the log file once a week so it wasn't always writing to a huge file, but they suddenly stopped doing that in july, I thought that having a 45MB log file was lagging us, but we don't have permission to edit the file! I stopped the server to delete the file) and had to stop the server briefly...now it won't come back on.

I've submitted tickets to our host from my support account, and IMGArY has submitted tickets on the main server account as well, and we're not getting responses. I have all of our configs and copies of our map...if this goes on for much longer we'll consider all of our options.

UPDATE: It came back on, but is as slow as ever. Still waiting

UPDATE 2: On Tuesday night, team avo came on and were chat spamming, then gorg shut down the server to get control of the situation. Now, we can't get into the backend...on team avo's forum they're talking about hacking with mcmyadmin exploits. Tickets submitted.

UPDATE 3: We're back online for now, PLAY!