Hello, greetings, and salutations everyone! I wanted to take the time to make a quick write up about what went on the past week with updates and changes to our systems!
Basically our current solution for hosting and maintain our game servers has been having some trouble keeping up with updates and security concerns this past year. I have been closely monitoring another solution from the original team that worked on what we were previously using that left due to creative difference with the project owner. I am pleased to have watched them go from an idea to a working product. I have waited until they were fully into a solid beta before I even began testing on a new environment. I am pleased to report that this past month they have indeed achieved the goals that I had set out before I wanted to test with them.
After successful testing, Christina and I made the decision to go ahead and move forward with the migration to the new system. Prior to the beginning of the 25th of February I set up the virtual machine what would play host to all the systems. Currently the machine is set up with 20 cores and 256GB of ram, with the possibility of expansion as the large server that hosts that VM has almost 1 TB of ram. Once the foundation was laid and the system was ready for setup, I took the now previous system offline and began transferring over all the game servers to the new host and mapping the IP address changes to the new public IP. Once the files for the games had been successfully transferred, I had to then migrate any SQL databases over to their new homes, and then finally put into place any necessary port forwarding the new host would need through the corporate firewall. With all the changes made to the host environments and verified port configs I was able to bring up the new environment to be public facing and return everything over to you awesome peoples!~
Other worthy upgrades that have happened in this upgrade cycle, and continue to be worked on, are the following:
- BACKUPS!!!~ I am pleased to say that with the reorg and cleanup, more frequent and automated backups are now possible and have been implemented! Gone are the days of… “Crap its broken and I have to start completely over”
- New and faster DNS resolving for all CSTMGames domains, this includes DDOS protections and caching for faster loading of pages.
- New unified login system and provider for secure auth for all systems that we have to log into as a group. This will provide, hopefully, faster login times and less of me having to reset passwords when something gets borked. That means faster repairs for you guys when Cassie inevitably breaks something again. 😛
- New status page. This one is still honestly being worked on as that is a LOT of work to get done and set up as I have to finish writing all the connectors that the system will need to talk with every little individual thing.
- New URL shortener. This one is also still being finished as I honestly decided to do this one as I was wiring this as I had to reset my password for the old one and that is a PROCESS… So this one is compatible with the new unified authentication system.
- Git Migration. GitHub has made us mad for the last time! I am pleased to announce as well that our code repositories for all of our projects, including FiveM, are now hosted in house! This has now taken our workflow from taking significant time to deploy to seconds, as they are now on the same network and there is no more time of data transit from GitHub to the deployment environment.
- Website updates. I finally got the time to get into the backend of the website and fix a bunch of things that have been bothering me lately and I am pleased with the outcome as well as the few new things that got sprinkled it, but you will have to find those yourself!
The only thing left to talk about is upcoming projects! I am currently working on a system for unifying the streaming environments for the stream team! This means that we will fully be able to resume our dual streams to both Twitch and Youtube, as well as provide features and new things in the future! Oh and there is something I am super excited for you all to see this Friday the 13th of March on stream but Ill let that be a secret you get to find out from the boss lady herself, Christina!
Thank you all for taking the time to read my ramblings. I hope to make more of these in the future to keep you all updated on what’s going on behind the scenes here at CSTMGames. If anyone has any other questions or if I didn’t make something clear, reach out to me in our Discord! Don’t be strangers, and Ill see you on the other side!~