Invited a few previous World veterans to the server for testing: ukgamer, RKB53 and emp_zealoth. Also had relative newbie HeadshotmasterDCS to Minecraft come over a take a look around.

Like probably a lot of CraftBukkit servers right now I’m using the Essentials and Whitelist plugins. I particularly impressed with Essentials for covering so many things in one plugin. As the plugin’s author stated that these are more stop-gaps that are intended to be overridden by other plugins later down the line but i’d say there’s not much need TBH!

As the server is Whitelisted, even other Veteran players will have to re-apply to be on the list as I don’t have an authoritative list from the “old” server that’s up to date.

Also, the “old” server will be bought back online at some point but only to transfers structures over to the new world which will be the one that gets backed up from this point forward.

hMod was already flagged for suspension.
Bukkit is being primed to take over the reigns.
Notch updates the Minecraft Server…

*bang*

Every server owner is left with no update to hMod and no replacement as yet in the form of Bukkit.

This means that the fun and games we’ve all been enjoying for the last few months has been put on hold for quiet sometime.

The server [b]is[/b] up at time of writing with all monsters disabled as we don’t want creepers griefing the world but is also ‘whitelisted’ meaning is not public and only existing players will be able to access the server.

The game you love gets an update; Your keen to play with the new toys or simply feel that extra performance boost and you can’t, why? Because the trickle cascade of updates has only just begun.

Well it’s Beta time for Minecraft, it’s been a while coming but for me who’s relatively new (link) it’s been quiet a ride with the regular alpha updates.

Of course those Alpha changes where small and frequent so updates to the hMod () plugin framework only took 24 hours, sometimes sooner.

This time around the guys behind hMod will have quiet some work to do coding and testing so it’s no surprise that Shadow386 released a statement saying that:

… An update will be released on the 24th, or 25th, depending on what needs to be fixed. Plenty of plugins will be broken… You can go here to keep an eye on progress of the teams’ updates.
http://ishmodupdated.com/

So with the next weekend written in your diary, this’ll be roughly the date I’ll be looking to update the server and see what’s what.

That said with the latest client update this should mark the beginning of updates being optional. Personally whilst i’m for ‘choice’ in general I don’t believe having an option to skip an update is generally a good thing.

The only thing I can see would be beneficial is if the latest client is more buggy or flat broken than the previous. Of course this also means that if I update the server and you decide to not update your client, you’d simple get a ‘outdated client’ message and not join.

My recommendation and reminder to people is that Notch is actively producing an Alpha so many such things will be broken or buggy in varying degrees so this should be somewhat expected and because this server relies on the hMod we’re always going to have on-going downtimes of 24 hours while I wait for an hMod update.

The good thing is Notch now if you spot any wibbbles, bugs or want to show your praise for Minecraft you now can!

getsatisfaction.com/mojang

And here are my little contributions:
getsatisfaction.com/people/ethzero

Thankfully the server update to 0.2.5_01 was *not* mandatory, nice as it’s has a happy little bug that’s kinda important to Minecraft: Mining blocks = graceful server shutdown.

Hmm. Well it’s a novel way of shutting down the server. It’s almost like the very World blocks *are* the running code of the server and reminded me of when id Software released the source of Doom and David Koppenhofer made psDoom where you can literally kill running processes!

This has inspired me in thinking who I could do a process monitor plugin in Minecraft using blocks in graph form to represent CPU load, memory etc similar to the the excellent htop:

So this mean at time of writing whilst the server is “up” it’s inaccessible.

UPDATE: Sorry guys, the plan was to have the server up without plugins as the server has a whitelist. Or so I thought. Notch’s 0.2.5 server update has killed the whitelist feature so I can’t keep the idiots out.

Of course the irony was I had to learn a fair bit about the Java environment due to CentOS 5′s slightly fucked relationship with OpenJDK and the separate ‘Rhino‘ package that does the Javascript bit in as much as the relation is broken, meaning any .java code ain’t gonna compile.

The follow is what I’ve post to the hMod forum on the topic of trying to get this to work:

After many hours of digging around and subsequent clean up and testing I’ve managed to get Rhino installed on a CentOS 5 box and compiled some demo code.

I must stress this did not solve JSApi not working but this proves that Rhino from the Fedora-EPEL repo combined with a missing package can ultimately give you a box with the ability to compile and execute Java+Rhino code.

As I know bugger all about Java I’m going to leave this is an execise for others to get Rhino working for JSApi but at least your kit will be good if this issue is fixed.

First check that your shell environment is correct as I found my CLASSPATH wasn’t set.
With reference to http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/howto/basic/classpath.shtml

I used: export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:.:/usr/share/java/*

Now grab the RhinoTest and see what the state of your kit is now:
Download: https://github.com/ethzero/Test-Repo/blob/master/RhinoTest.java
Test: javac RhinoTest.java && java RhinoTest

If this produces the familiar, continue on:
[quote]You have no scripting engines! Install Rhino![/quote]

yum install rhino
Places Rhino in /usr/share/java

Now the key to linking Rhino with the OpenJDK
Download: https://scripting.dev.java.net/files/documents/4957/37592/jsr223-engines.tar.gz
Extract: javascript/build/js-engine.jar
Copy: cp -a js-engine.jar /usr/share/java

Now lets re-compile the RhinoTest:
Test: javac RhinoTest.java && java RhinoTest

This *should* produce something like:

=========================
The following 2 scripting engines were found

Engine name: Mozilla Rhino
        Version: 1.6 release 2
        Language: EmbeddedECMAScript
        Engine supports the following extensions:
                ejs
        Engine has the following short names:
                ejs
                EmbeddedJavaScript
                embeddedjavascript
=========================
Engine name: Mozilla Rhino
        Version: 1.6R7
        Language: ECMAScript
        Engine supports the following extensions:
                js
        Engine has the following short names:
                rhino-nonjdk
                js
                rhino
                JavaScript
                javascript
                ECMAScript
                ecmascript
=========================
Hello, World

Now i’ll caveat the following by saying, yes I’m painfully aware (thanks ukgamer!) of all of the crapulous spelling mistakes and well, not really grammatical errors, in my blog posts more a case of my thought process running 1.5x faster than I can type resulting in missing/double words words.

So, the application entitled… hmm, well “(No Subject)” but I feel the author’s email client may have assisted them with this goes on to say:

hi eth0 me and my Friends share account called Aaronrox69 and you seem to be the only server we cann connect but where not on white list
dont worry only 3 of us share the account

so im wondering if i can go on the whitelist plz…

plz mail back.

I’ve taken the liberty to embolden the key points that raise little alarm bells (although, yes it’d be slightly quicker just to embolden the entire lot):

Whilst I appreciate that 9.95 EUR can be a stretch for some and indeed almost enterprising that a group of people clubbed together to acquire this account, it doesn’t exclude the possibility these 3 guys share a stolen account. And best, I could never deal with the entity know as ‘Aaronrox69′ on an individual basis.

“69″, brilliant. *golf clap*

I want to avoid being overly harsh if this is a legit request, but as this community is based on it’s mutual trust and confidence of it’s members this really put this request really quite low on the grand scale of things:

Sorry guy(s), better luck next time!

Thankfully this was restored effortlessly with the ‘Alternative World backup method‘ that I put in to place a little over a week ago.

In order to protect the community members I’ve taken the precaution to ‘whitelist‘ the server. Not to worry, we’re still accepting people in to our server but it’ll have to be by referral of a member.

I’ve tried to mitigate the issues by removing all non-essential plugins and disabled ones not optimised for hMod:125/notch server 0.24