It's Monday again ... and the new Tranquility is about to rise

It's been an interesting week resulting in the dreaded Monday being back again (I really really don't like Mondays). The focus was on testing Blood and installing and testing all the new hardware for the new Tranquility cluster.

It's all moving forward, which is good, but we would have liked to get Blood deployed before the hardware upgrades because it includes a lot of fixes. You can't always get what you want, though, and in this case the Gods of Time and Bugs were not on our side.

Last night we rallied almost 5000 people over to the new Tranquility hardware, which was awesome, to say the least. This was the first day where 90% of the final hardware was in place. We really got the hammering we needed, and we found a lot of setup problems which we're ironing out now.

We found some minor connectivity issues. Load balancing of proxies was a bit awkward, only 8 of 28 proxy nodes were accepting connections, some of our management tools didn't like the new network setup, and so on and so forth. It's also worthy of mention that the database being used here is the Sisi test database - the monster is, of course, still running TQ. All in all, the issues are ones that we want to see cropping up now rather than on Tuesday :)

I'm aware that many of the testers didn't get the experience they were seeking, mainly because all of Empire was now 0.0 due to the pirate invasion. Although we asked people to not pod, quite a lot were not listening ... so I went around searching for podders to pod (mwahaha) but ended up being taken out by a massive BoB squad.

However, this was entirely intentional and done to encourage people to come over to the new TQ. We've never done this before, and we thought "shoot devs in Titans" was getting a bit old. We found out fast enough, however, that it wasn't that old at all (at least I did, that's my second Titan down the drain). Hopefully, we can do this tonight again at around 20:00 GMT!

In any case, I'd like to point out that the market is continually seeded with ships and equipment for 100 ISK a piece, so the loss was easy to replace (Hey, I lost a Titan AND an Enigma).

In other news, them new Bloodlines look good. I have more time to blog and fla** on the forums and I'll be going to the Gathering in Las Vegas next month \o/

We're all very excited for tomorrow. We're doing the last preparations for the upgrades, which we believe will address the lag in most respects. I realize a lot of people lagged in Rens, Jita and Oursulaert last night, but there were about 1600 people there so I'm not surprised. We also have some cards up our sleeves to address that but, for now, lets just hope the upgrades tomorrow will go smoothly.

I wonder if we can borrow a tank to move the SQL servers to the new hosting center tomorrow ...