I'm sure you've all noticed that our SA-MP server has been down for quite some time, and there has been little official word on what is actually happening. I apologize for the huge delay, but here's the deal:

The Novocaine server and the Partyserver (both of which have been made possible by Cam; be sure to thank him if you see him!) have been under a DDoS attack by a script kiddie that goes by the name of "netzeek" (Be sure to verbally punch him in the gulliver if you see him.) Cam has been working tirelessly in his efforts to get all of the problems sorted out, but he was unable to put a stop to the problems. He's now had to entirely block incoming and outgoing connections.

So where do things stand now? Well, it's been decided that our best plan of action will be to have our server moved over to a new rig. All of our databases, player information, etc has been backed up; so don't worry about losing your stats. Cam managed to find an extremely good deal on a server for us.. So maybe this really is a blessing in disguise. For comparison, the old box had a couple of outdated Intel Xeon CPUs @ 3.0GHz (two processing cores) and 2gb of RAM. The new rig will be running an Intel Xeon X3210 @ 2.13GHz (four processing cores) with 4GB of RAM. This doesn't sound like a massive increase, but the new quad core CPU has a much more advanced archatecture which equates to a HUGE increase in effective processing power.

Cam has also recently made a post on our forums about the status of the server, so go check it out and give him your thanks. Here's what he said:

"As many of you know, if Partyserver goes down, NoV has to go down with it in the case of DDoS attacks. This is what happened last week. I made every effort to block it at NIC level, however that was not sufficient enough so I had to get all the traffic null routed. This means no traffic can enter, or leave at the router's level. This is why I bought an expensive dedicated server from Ubiquity. I received it on Saturday, however, I have been having some hardware failures, which are getting resolved as we speak. It's on a really powerful system. It's a Dell R200 with an Intel Quad Core with 4GB of RAM for those of you that are interested in the server specs.

I hope to have Partyserver and NoV up this week. I will keep you all updated.

[UPDATE 10/13/2008 9:00PM CDT]

I've been in contact with the data center. They are still researching into the hardware problem, apparently they had a similar case like mine in the past. They also reinstalled CentOS, but the wrong version of it, which I found out the hard way when I tried to start putting stuff on the server. Time to wipe the HDD again for the third time since Sunday and stick CentOS5 on there..."

So, as you can see, we've already got things rolling. It's just a matter of ironing out a couple of problems. It won't be long now.

Just hang in there. Novocaine will be back soon, and better than ever.

Source: http://www.novclan.com