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White House Press Room - Day 1549

^{tl;dr : Sh*t happens, it affects the game, we go "WTF?!"}

Dateline: Thursday, February 16, 2012 (Day 1549)
Location: White House Press Room

Today's Agenda: Tech Report re Game Outages



What's Going On: A Layman's Explanation
^{Press Corps Director George Armstrong Custer}



More so yesterday, but still some today, we try to log into the game or navigate around, and we get this notice. Naturally, we're frustrated, and human nature before thought process has us bitching and blaming our benevolent game hosts.
Let's have a quick look at how the Internet works in general, and what is probably happening to cause these inconvenient game outages.



Data Centers are bigass buildings full of clean rooms containing rows of towers like these. These things are loaded with servers, about the size of an X-Box or a VCR, shoved into stacks of slots. On the backside they're connected by miles of wires, to each other, and then out of the building to what's called "the backbone."



The backbone of the Internet is much like our own backbone, in that it's a worldwide network of Data Centers connected like a nervous system by satellites and hard wires.
As depicted in the small top pic, sometimes "sh*t happens" like solar flares or earthquakes that are totally natural phenomenon no one can control.



But more often it's some discontented punkass spoiler with an axe to grind and the tech smarts to screw up the system. One person can send a command to several other computers, which in turn send data requests to a server which is running a website-- the command is "gimme more, more, more data, and keep giving data till the server smokes!"
When an organized group of such discontented punks do this, it's called a "Distributed Denial of Service Attack," or DDoS, which does precisely that-- overloads the system so it cannot provide service... to everyone on the system.



Back at the Data Center, techs can turn the customer's server off or even pull the servers right out of the rack, while others will reroute the service through backup servers.
But this is a duel between Service Techs and DDoS attackers, and at some point the relentless attacks outstrip the techs' ability to reroute and divert the incoming demand for data, the result on the consumer end (that's us) being a failure of our game website to be able to deliver the data to us.



We criticize eRep, and often rightly so, for their business practices and the intelligence of the programmers. Whether we play for free or pay for game enhancements, we expect a quality product and we expect to be treated with respect.
But this.. what's going on now.. is not eRep's fault.
It's probably not sunspots or we'd see the same kind of problem all over the Internet.
It's more likely something we see all too often-- someone, or some group, playing this game doesn't like how it's going for them, and is using their technical skills to screw everyone out of playing.



So while we're doing this (left photo), this is happening at eRep's business office (right pic).
Having owned a small web hosting company at one time, I know first hand the exorbitant cost of having those Data Center techs fight these DDoS attacks. It has the same effect as theft at a retail store-- where do you think they're going to make up those lost revenues? Layoffs and price hikes, because that's how business works. Less service for more money.

So thanks, whoever you DDoS punks are, for not only making game play suck today, but for causing the game to suck worse on into the future.



White House Classifieds

Help Wante😛 The Oblige Administration is looking for dedicated and qualified IT people for the Technology Department. Proficiency in IRC coding, spreadsheets, etc. Contact Chief of Staff Rainy Sunday.

Help Wante😛 The White House Press Corps is looking for dedicated and qualified writers for both permanent Staff and Guest Writers. Your own newspaper is your resume. Contact Press Corps Director George Armstrong Custer.



eNPR Oval Office Radio airs live every Tuesday and Thursday night, at 19:00 eRep (10 Eastern, 7 Pacific). Tune in to the radio show, join the text chat at #eNPR (on the Rizon server), and call in!

If you miss any live radio show, you can listen at your leisure, at eNPR Oval Office Radio.





"Much as we love to slam our benevolent game hosts, because they have shown such sheer genius in game development and customer service, this one is not their fault."

Read more from President Oblige in his own newspaper, Savior.



Recommended Reading:
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Press Corps Director George Armstrong Custer

:::

WHPR Day 1549 - Special Tech Report
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/1969115/1/20
A Close Look at the eRep Chickens





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