Donations are back!

After some head scratching and discussions, we’ve re-opened donations!  I’ve been trying to not take your money without a good reason as to why I’m taking it, and apart from the 30-odd-hours I spent writing all the new backend stuff for Donations, we’ve also got a brand new cluster of servers.

Yes, I’ve been spending your money on Minecraft. I know you expect me to blow it all on Blackjack and Hookers, but it turns out, computers are EXPENSIVE.

Admittedly, we now do own a massively large amount of computing power.  About 200 CPU cores, and 700GB of RAM, spread out over 25 HP Blades.  This is all good, but this has now exposed my next issue – we don’t have enough fast storage!

So my next purchase is going to be 18 500G-ish SSDs, and 3 servers to put them in, to act as our new Swift storage cluster.  Oh, did I mention we’re also now running on OpenStack?

Yeah, we’re nerding it all up here.  Anyway. Enjoy! And feel free to hit that Donations link up there and throw a few dollars our way 😎

 

New map on Friday! (…or sooner?!)

Hi guys!

The new map is here! It’s finally a real thing! We’ve been working hard to do the backend work required to get things going on the 1.8 map. It’s pretty exciting, and we’re going to be able to let people on this Friday evening! It’ll be happening at 6:30 AEST. Wooo! (That’s Brisbane time, by the way. NSW/Vic will be 7:30PM, SA is 7:00PM. I have no idea what kind of wacky time it will be in WA.).

Also, all you cool kids that have been donating to us all through the temp map period get an extra bonus: You can jump on the server and take a look around on Thursday night. I’ll be opening up the server to DONATORS ONLY at about 6:30PM AEST, and letting you play until 10:30PM AEST, Thursday night.

Thanks for playing on MCAU.

<3 hug.

Test server for 1.8

Hey guys!

There’s a test server up for 1.8, it’s got no plugins (because they’re not available yet!) but it’s up and ready to go. If you want to log in and have a play, feel free, just remember that there’s no regions or anything, so you’ll probably get griefed. We’ll ban people who suck, but we’re not able to do too much else.

Check it out by connecting to TEMP.MCAU.ORG

Cheers!
<3 hug