Archive for April, 2007

Quadcores, Instant Setup Game Servers, Woo!

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

On Thursday our third and fourth Intel Quadcore machines arrived from Dell! These sexy (expensive) beasts are being used for almost all new game server customers, which, might I add, are now being setup instantly! Olly was lucky enough to have the privilege of taking the new servers out of their boxes and putting them into the racks; no wonder he’s been so happy recently ;)

You complained, INX-Gaming heard you!
We’ve been dropping a few hints here and there and a few rumors have been flying around about this! The main, if not only reason people complain about INX is that the game servers take too long to setup. And quite right too; we agree that an average wait of 3 days is far too long! So, following on from our successful instant setup voice servers, we present to you instant setup game servers!

After trialing our automatic game server setup system for over a week now, we are confident that we have ironed out all the bugs and that everything is running fine. Many thanks to the customers who signed up during the trial period; we know there have been a few hickups but thankfully it’s all smooth sailing from here. The far majority of new customers are setup on our new Quadcore servers for maximum performance; and of course, all orders are setup instantly.

With so many things now automated, we have far more time to concentrate on the ‘true’ support requests (as Olly put it). In the past week we’ve seen the release of the long awaited re-install feature alongside the amazing fix-me tool. Many customers have mentioned just how helpful both of these tools are, and how the fix-me tool in particular has been a real life-saver!

If you haven’t already got an INX-Gaming server, we cannot force you to buy one, but after reading about all the industry-leading features we have to offer, you would be mad not to!

Carl
Online Services Manager

A Welcome Nightmare

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

After receiving two rather patronising emails from Del Monte this morning, I decided it was time to investigate. Why were game server customers not receiving their welcome emails?

I installed Sendmail in a hurry on Agatha (our 2nd web server) a short while ago via a RPM debian install. It failed to start first time, so after some sendmail.mc tweaking, it happily started. We did not need it before, you see, as there were no applications running on the machine that needed the facility to send outgoing mail. Now, however, we have automatic game server installations on the go, and as such customers need their welcome emails with control panel login info and the sort. Del Monte tested the system and found he didn’t receive his welcome email. He was not happpy.

After looking through the Sendmail config files, and finding that there were no obvious issues, I decided to look at the mail.log file. I was greeted with 3453 lines of deferred 127.0.0.1 relay denied, connection refused errors. Joy.
You can telnet to the machine locally, the hostnames are correctly configured, the access.db file is set to relay local mail and the config files are all set. So what on earth is causing the increasingly large mail queue to fail to send?

Thanks goes out to Rob at Bluesquare for fixing this one! It seems a blind squirrel does sometimes find a nut ;o)
All emails in the queue (mainly customer welcome emails) have now been sent successfully. Apologies to customers kept waiting in the dark!

This is what Rob had to say:
By default the local submission agent (as configured in submit.cf/submit.mc) talks to localhost on port 573, but it wasn’t set up to listen on that port. I went into /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and added another daemon options line to set up another MTA port on 573 on localhost and then ran ‘make’ to regenerate sendmail.cf

Carl