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Just wanted to post to say sorry about the brief outage. One of the PsB switches at the data center went out. It was a new switch purchased at the same time as the new server. It had only been in service for approx 5 months. They usually last almost forever. Weird...

Anyway, the the data center is loaning PsB a switch until I can ship a new one out to them. All is well in PsB land for now. Things might be a little slower until a new high speed replacement arrives.

Again, sorry for the outage.

-DeFain

Dear server admins and community friends.

A rather long news item but a very important one. We are finally able to report the impressive and important news about the new data server being purchased, configured and installed in the PsB server farm! It has taken us longer than expected to finally pull it all together. Even though we met the new server donation goal, we were still short approximately $1,200. This was due to last minute hardware specification changes. We felt it necessary to make the hardware improvements so the new server would better withstand the test of time.

To start out, we would again like to thank everyone who donated and for their generosity towards the server goal. That was quite outstanding! The money that was sent in is greatly appreciated and has been used in such a way that in the near future, the quality of services provided to you by PsB should greatly improve. Your donations are going to work for you right here at PsB!

It started out as a tough year looking back, with some bad luck thrown in to boot. In early 2008, we moved the PsB servers across the country to a new collocation facility with what we thought to be better DDoS protection. Along with moving costs, we lost two main hosting sponsors. Our old data center and sponsor, QwikHost, was unable to take the DDoS attacks. We were forced to move the servers out of their facility. Luckily, we found another sponsor pretty quick. They recommended a new data center in Texas. Just when we were settling in the new location, we realized the new DC couldn't handle our situation either. We had to move again. This time we found a well protected DC on our own. Unfortunately, during this last move, one of the servers was damaged. It has been on the fritz ever since. This is the server that is being replaced by the new server. And just when you think all that can go wrong has already gone wrong, something else happens. That new sponsor, goes out of business. PsB was on the ropes right about this time. Fortunately, with a lot of determination, brighter days were ahead of us.

There we were in a great new data center with no sponsor. That’s when ClanWarz came on board. Our luck had changed. With the new PunksBusted/Clanwarz team, we knew we were stable once more. We also knew that we could now move forward again but that all our plans and projects had been delayed by about a year.

The costs that PsB has suffered were not trivial, but everyone pitched in. Nobody gave up and for that, we are very thankful.

The server goal was set at and reached $3700 quickly after having drained the bank account. When we first set the goal amount, there was a set hardware path. However as real life would have it, new information came in just after we started the fund drive. We had to adjust so we could meet PsB's long term plan. We also took another look at our existing servers and costs to host them etc. We had to tweak the new server spec a little based on moving some services around to accommodate the new software that we have been developing, among other considerations. The new price came in a little higher for this server. That was the extra $1200 mentioned earlier. The hardware changes were necessary as it means a lot more computing ability down the road. It also means we can finally simi-retire the old damaged server mentioned above.

It is a tremendous cost to keep PsB running between hardware and collocation charges over a year. It's not like renting a web server that's for sure. It is unfortunate that most of what goes on is unseen, except for what you interact with directly. This is where we feel we must point out that Clanwarz is fully behind PsB's purpose and wants to help the community. They have done so quietly for many years now, even before they helped out with our hosting costs and this new server. Clanwarz has put their money down once again. Stepping up to the plate and topping up the funds that PsB needed for this new server and to get it racked. They simply said how can we help? Thanks to Clanwarz, PsB did not have to delay while we raised the extra donation amount. I'm sure everyone is more than happy about this and appreciates what Clanwarz has done to help, without fanfare, or asking for anything in return.

We want to emphasize to all of you that Clanwarz is a great company dedicated to help the admin and clan community and has done so repeatedly behind the scenes for a long time. PsB knows they are reliable and dedicated and therefore we have no problem asking you this: If you are considering a voice server especially or a game server, then click on the big Clanwarz link on our web page and have a look at what they have to offer. Clanwarz They have service just about everywhere in the world. If you need a Ventrilo server or Teamspeak server click those links. Check out the rest of their web site and see what we are talking about. Clanwarz has local service almost everywhere. Just look at all the locations; US, Europe and Asia. They also have game servers in as many locals as well.

Now to further news on what is happening here at PsB. The new server is racked. JiiPee and the crew are working hard on it. You may feel some delays, as he posted earlier, because vast amounts of data and some of our services are being moved around to different servers and sync'd up. The old server is a big 4u sized machine and has been removed from the rack to save on rack space costs. It has served us well, and will be used for an off-site backup server as well as for new duties of support and development work. It will still be used for a long time yet, just not on the front line at the DC. We will squeeze every ounce of work out of the old girl as we are able, for some time to come. We waste nothing. Her new home will be a spacious garage in the warm southern US with a broadband connection linked back to PsB. So there you go. Recycle, reuse and no waste.

There will be slow incremental benefits that you will see as the new server is brought fully online. One more or less in the immediate future is that you will notice things get faster. We also can now go back and focus on all those new admin tools, new features, website upgrades and especially cleanup of old legacy stuff with some major rewriting of that software. The main rewrite is a huge job that will take months to fully complete. It goes to the heart of our system, so it has to be done with great care before it is integrated over our main live system. Terabytes of data have been saved since day one PsB went online. It is more information than all other anti-cheat sites out there by an order of magnitude.

It has been over 7 years that PsB has been running and some rewrites have been in the works to advance PsB capabilities for some time. What is happening to our proprietary software will change hopefully and completely alter how PsB operates. Everything from getting a contributing account to how we collect information from servers. It will make our security, accuracy and verification far more sophisticated and advanced beyond anything yet available when completed. We are just now completing Phase One which included this new server. The next major phase will require many months of work with the small coding resources we have. They will work hard however because they, like you, also believe in what PsB does and specifically how we do it. We'll post important milestones in the news as they go live. You will notice in a few months that the website will change a little and evolve. However, most of the work will not be visually apparent because it will be happening to the systems behind the scenes.

Last but not least and very important: We will open a new funding drive for some of the less expensive items PsB needs to upgrade or parts that need to be changed out. Things like a new switch that is running out of room. A new KVM card for one of the servers needs replacing. Some ram upgrades and some HDD additions. There may be the need for a smaller server late in the year to handle some new work but it is not required to be as powerful or as expensive as the main servers.


PsB is strong and the future is bright!

Kindest Regards,
The PunksBusted Team

Welcome Rep6. Community generosity made it possible.

I will do some maintenance right now and it will continue to until monday. There willl be some huge data transfer going on right now, so there might be slowdown on website.

Oh and yes this does have something to do with new server. More about it will be announced soon.

=======

UPDATE

Soon I will start final mysql database transfer. This means that scanner, mysql server and our website will be offline about 3-5h ETA is based to last few database syncs I have made and I hope it will goes much quicker when mysql server isn't in duty. So offline time can be much shorter. But maximum time should be 5h

There is more that 200GB data I need to transfer over 1G net connection. Not all data is transferred, only what has changed after last sync.

Heres countdown link when we go offline:
http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/custom...009&hour=17

EDIT: This won't affect streaming.

Dear Fellow PsB Members and Friends,

The new server goal has been met! $3,700!!!

I am happy to announce that we have reached our donations goal in record time! PsB has gathered enough money to order a brand new data server! You guys are awesome and this should finally enable PsB to go forward with our long-term plans. At this time, the staff is busy designing the new server with all of the required hardware and parts that will be needed to ensure quality service to all the members for a long while. The staff is also in the process of putting together a crack team of coders to complete the many projects that were on hold while we lacked the needed horsepower and storage space.

More news on the progress to come shortly...

Ubisoft has contracted with Even Balance, Inc. to integrate our PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat software into the online game known as Far Cry 2™.

From the beginning, PsB's mission has been to thwart the efforts of cheaters, while protecting the rights and interests of players. Our goal-- to become the gold standard in the online gaming community for anti-cheat support and cheat detection. This week brought a milestone in our fight. We have reached 100,000 cheater bans. Although these numbers could be higher, if we add in the lengthy list of checks for which we kick but do not ban, we believe our commitment to the players and the accuracy we strive to achieve keeps many false bans off our list. The extra steps taken to ensure the accuracy of all bans is just a part of what makes PsB unique. Thanks to all the administrators, contributors, and players who have helped us reach this goal from the beginning, now, and into the future.

We did suffer some network issues I don't have any exact details but I believe it was router failure. It wasn't anything we could do. Whole datacenter was affected.
This also means that from last night some of the streaming data is lost because our log repository wasn't available at some times.

Lets hope that all is fixed now.

I wanted to welcome the Altimate Gaming League to the PunksBusted family. Recently they announced mandatory streaming to PunksBusted. Welcome to the fight guys!

PunksBusted has recently been in talks with CoD League and is happy to announce that CoD League now has mandatory streaming to PsB. Welcome to the fight guys!

Activision has contracted with Even Balance, Inc. to integrate PunkBuster™ Anti-Cheat software into the game Call of Duty®: World at War™ developed by Treyarch. Activision and Call of Duty are registered trademarks and World at War is a trademark of Activision Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.