Faith, loss, hope -- an announcement

[Kailyn]

Dear friends,

I have some important news to share with you which I've been keeping quiet for quite a long time now. Possibly as soon as next week, but more likely in 2 1/2 weeks or so, I'm expecting a baby boy. I'll be taking maternity leave from the date of the birth through the end of the summer. Doc will be taking over administratively during that time, with the support and assistance of the rest of the demi+, of course.

Please don't feel offended that I've waited so long to share such a major piece of news. I know you all probably remember the loss of my daughter in September 2010 -- the posts are still on the board, actually. What you don't know, because I hadn't felt up to sharing it in public, is that she wasn't the only one. I've lost 4 babies in the past 2 years, including another daughter, Emily, lost at almost exactly the same time along as Faith, due to an autoimmune condition only diagnosed after the 3rd loss. We wanted to wait as long as possible before sharing our news this time, just in case. Even most of our family and friends didn't know until just over a month ago. At this point, however, there's every reason to expect everything to be just fine. Treatment has been a bear, but it's done its job perfectly this time, and my son has suffered none of the ill effects his siblings did; he appears to be perfectly healthy. We constantly talk about him as "our miracle baby." As you can imagine, we feel tremendously blessed and are greatly looking forward to welcoming him into the family.

In completely unrelated news, it doesn't appear that our lag issues are readily fixable, so we'll probably be changing hosting sites soon. The transition should be pretty seamless from a player's perspective. We're still hashing out the details but will let you know once a plan is finalized.

Thank you, everyone, for all of your love, support, and prayers for our family over the past couple of years. You've been wonderful, and I look forward to sharing a birth announcement with you sometime very soon.

Dina
(Kailyn)

[Kailyn]

Followup, copied from where I originally wrote it on the social board this morning.


Thanks for the mailed grats, friends And since I'm getting the same questions a fair bit, I thought it might be helpful to answer them on the board as well.

What are you going to name him? A: We have it narrowed down to a few names, but you'll have to wait for the birth announcement for the final decision, I think.

When is the 'end of the summer'? (Complete with reminder that it's summer in the southern hemisphere when it's winter in the northern hemisphere, lol.) A: I meant that I'll be back in August (possibly) or at the beginning of September at the latest. The precise timing will depend on how well the baby is sleeping and how hard it turns out to be integrating caring for a newborn with homeschooling my oldest. But all told, I only expect to be gone for roughly 4 months, not indefinitely in a Phineas-and-Ferb-like endless summer vacation

Who do I mail for (x)? A: Austinpowers will of course still be doing his usual codework. Mail him with any code issues or questions. He has no desire (and not a lot of time) to deal with day to day administration, though, so mail Doc with things like password requests, name change requests (he won't mind doing those while I'm away), and anything that requires extensive log searching. Mail Ego with area improvement suggestions/ideas or area proposals, and also with any quest requests other than the gauntlets, for which you should mail Ching. Mail Silverking with any web board related questions or issues. I'll put all of this in the motd with email addresses for easy reference, too.

When we make the transition to the new hosting site, which will probably happen while I'm away, Doc and Austinpowers will be working together to make the shift, so be sure to cc both of them if you run across issues that need addressed.

Thanks again, everyone

Dina (Kailyn)

[Austinpowers]

Hi All,
Congratz Kailyn! So happy for you. The past few months, have been the busiest I have ever been. It has taken me 3 months to remodel my condo. It has cost me 15k so far, and pushed me financially. I have taken a much larger role with JPMorganChase. Most may not know I am a network engineer, but 2-3 months ago, I was given wireless (SME) and was asked to take part in 2 Gigantic Pilots. We are partnered with CIsco in this effort, and one of the efforts is port level security. I am not alowed to go into detail, but lets just say, your either trusted (and get company resources) or your not, and we just send you out to the internet. It is a great honor, and will bring me to the promise land which is product engineering or design.

Now on to the next topic. We are moving our beloved Jedi to a new hardware platform. Let me put forward how large and effort it is for the admin, especially Doc and Myself. Doc and I had to rebuild a Virtual Machine which houses 1Terabyte of drive space for Jedi. We then had to put security at the forefront, and when we designed this out, we came up with a solution.


The jedi box is more then just dedicated to Jedi. It houses several websites, several Email hosts, and storage for many people. The storage of peoples lives and personal stuff is gigantic. My problem has been how to get this all over with not brining the game to a crawl. I have been trying to do this at night, but mostly when I see no one is on the game.

I had to migrate DNS. Which Jedi hosts for itself.
I had to migrate 15-20 Email domains. Which in itself has multiple aliases and all of the Jedi Mud emails and aliases.
I had to migrate 15-20 web sites.
I had to move over 200-300G of drive informatoin (still doing).
Now of course, there is always going to be the hacker, spammer, general nuisense....
I have put a full security suite in for DOS, DDOS, Brute force, website DOS and DDOS, Spammers, and a Jedi First Virus protection.
I followed this up with Email protection from spam, dos, virus, unwanted emails from past history. I have put in file level security, htaccess security, and website protections.

I have Jedi Sitting behind a hardware firewall and now a software firewall.

A first for jedi, webmail and chat services for the admin. A master website which is for game maintence. Meaning the admin have a way to get the game back up without having to go through all the crap we go through now.

I have not told anyone this one, but I will now. There is also an APP for android which will let us monitor the game status. Hence if the game locks, goes down, the OS dies, it will let our phones know.

I did all of this for the players. I have had no sleep for 4 weeks now. to some of you this means absolutely nothing, to others, you know how much this game means to me and all of us.

JediMUD 5.8 and 6.0. While this has been only for a bit, I fully on intend on taking all the bug information for 5.8 and get this ready for release. Now with a this awesome platform, I can develop at will and not feel so tied down.

Jedimud will have backups. I have another server which will go out and backup databases, and key directories.

What HARDWARE am I talking about.

I own my own ESXi server. I have 5 Virtual machines or 5 different servers running on it.
It has 16G of memory, an 8 core AMD processor sitting on the best motherboard available for 8 core processors. I have a total of 30 Terabytes of storage.

I am running it on ubuntu Server. I probably will add LDAP at some point and hit my Windows Domain controller. That windows server also houses my Cisco ACS server, which controls my websites (also sitting on the JediBox) which gives access to my CCIE Cisco Lab.

The entire Os is virtualized, and I use Vhosts to secure and segment the websites, DNS, MySQL server, and email. DNS is secured via DNS SEC. I have 3 spam filters running, 2 Virus scanners, 3 spam blockers running, and 3 firewalls up and all running together.

My network is 18M, but sits on my Gigabit Professional datacenter switches. I use VLANS to segment my traffic. My ESXI server has a 40G network back plain with 4G throughput out to my WAN.

I am very versed in Unix and Cisco. I use them every day, so it was a matter of time before the decision was made.

WE MADE THIS DECISION FOR THE PLAYERS. It cost us money out of pocket, and will for DNS services and cost of static IP's.


I promise, once we make the move, either this weekend or next weekend. I actively work towards 5.8 moving forward and out.

WE also purchased a second domain to help with testing, and providing a redudant DNS segment for us.


If you have suggestions, or comments, or just want to be part of what we are hoping to provide everyone, feel free to send us a message or post here.


Have a great day everyone!

Austinpowers/Cunning or Scotty if you prefer

[Kailyn]

Our miracle baby, Rowan Sean, was born at 2:30am this past Sunday morning -- the best Mother's Day present we could ever have asked for. He was 6 lbs 7 oz, 18 1/2 inches long, and is perfectly healthy in every way. We are truly blessed!

I'll see you all toward the end of the summer Good luck with the transition to the new hosting site!