The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 27, 2008

Official News page 1


FED2 HAS A BAD DAY

by Hazed

The game suffered an unexpected outage last Tuesday, when it failed to reappear after the morning reset. Alan was at work and although he could take a look at the server to figure out what the problem was, he could not fix it until he got home several hours later. Once he did, the game came back up again. Phew!

It turned out that the problem was a corrupted infrastructure file on one of the player planets. When the game loaded in the planet files as part of its start-up routine, it got to that file, couldn't handle the unexpected garbage in the file, so started over again. All Alan had to do to fix it was to edit the file to take out the lines in the middle where the corruption was. In the process, two of the warehouses on the planet had to be removed.

This leaves the question: what caused the corruption? While I am sure many players would own up to various types of corruption, in this case it wasn't anything that anybody did; the problem was on a planet where the owner hadn't logged on for at least a month. The truth is, we don't know why the file got corrupted, but will have to put it down to just one of those things that happen from time to time with computers. An unexpected power spike, perhaps. It could even have been a cosmic ray hitting the exact spot on the hard disk where that information was stored...

Whatever the ultimate cause, we apologize for the outage.


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