I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ll keep mentioning it to remind people. Linux.conf.au is a massive conference that I go to every year, and a good chuck of the admins and mods are going to be there too. And you’re welcome to come, too!

So. Put this in your calendar now:  28 January to 2 February, 2013

It’s in Canberra (which is easy, if annoyingly canberran, to get to from anywhere), and we’ll have a Minecraft BOF (Birds of a Feather) there where we’ll chat about running a big server, what things we’ve learnt, and what we’re planning on doing.

There will also be pizza, and huge amounts of geeking.

Note that, whilst it’s called Linux.conf.au, it’s not just about Linux. Last year we had (to pick some at random) Arduino talks, How girls can be better represented in IT, computer-controlled model aeroplanes, how pacemakers are closed source, how to make more accessible websites (for the blind) and how to hack your brain. It was awesome. And this year is going to be awesome too.

Normally we _can_ request accommodation to be physically near each other, and I’ll probably bring along our own minecraft server to play with too.   As it gets closer, I’ll post some more announcements here.

This is now in Canberra. The trip was a total success, with only a mild problem with remote console access causing a bit of heartache.

However, there was a fair bit of good feedback in relation to the PvP server, so we may leave it up. If anyone has any comments for or against, please feel free to comment here

(Also, I’ve left the ‘Track Rob’ page up on http://pvp.mcau.org, so you can follow me on my way back to Brisbane to pull everything ELSE out of the datacenter up there)

If you want to get in ahead of the rush, you can connect to ‘pvp.mcau.org’. Because, on Monday, that server will replace the existing one whilst it’s on its way down to Canberra.  And yes, it’s PvP.

And it’s running Factions.

This does mean there’s a lot less rules.  We’ve also spent a fair bit of time setting up a ‘Help’ area. It’s 3 storeys high, with several bazillion signs inside it, explaining how factions works, and what you can do.

It’s possible that this temporary Factions server may stay around as a second server, once the machine has been moved to Canberra. I’ll need some feedback on what you guys think!

As in, I will be driving to Brisbane, turning off the server, putting it in my van, and then driving straight to Canberra. This does mean that we’ll be offline for almost an entire day. The trip is 1200km, but there are issues getting into the new datacenter outside of business hours.  So I’m assuming we’ll have the server back up the day AFTER it goes down.

In the interim, we’ll fire up the old server (a Dell 1950) and have that running in Brisbane until the new server is live.  The website will be a link to the live location of the server (or, at least, my mobile) if I can find a decent app that will let me publically share my location. There’s a latitude ‘widget’ that I can place on the page, but it seems a bit limited.

Edit: Found one. http://www.instamapper.com

AFTER THE MOVE: We’re going to make mcau more fun (as per the previous post). I gotta say, I was VERY impressed with this comment – and almost all of it is doable.

It seems to have been less fun since the 1.8 update. So. What do you guys suggest we can do to make MCAU fun again?

Suggestions I’ve heard:

• Role Playing Minecraft (eg, you can become a character in a minecraft world)
• Totally separate server for Creative, rather than just a different world
• Change some rules (allow eggs? I really don’t want to do that..)
• Different plugins
• I don’t know?

Post. Comment. Suggest!