Roy
Content Type
Profiles
Articles
Updates
Projects
Twitch
Website Bugs/Suggestions
Guides
Newsletters
About GFL
Knowledge Base
Expenses/Hardware
Server Comparisons
Routing
Form Bugs
Community Representative Applications
Development Request
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Roy
-
-
-
Hi, Katie.
Hia!
Thanks.
-
Thanks for everything you've done, Cypher!
You better stay around in TS and such.
Thanks.
-
- Popular Post
- Popular Post
Hello, this is a major update for GFL. For the past two months, I’ve had no motivation to work on GFL. Recently, I’ve regained motivation to work on GFL again and I’m ready to talk about what I think we need to work on. Let’s begin!
Outside Advertising and Recruiting
The first topic I want to talk about is advertising and recruiting outside of GFL’s territory. As it currently stands, we are only advertising and recruiting within GFL’s territory such as our game servers and forums. While we should be advertising and recruiting in GFL’s territory, we also need to do a lot of it outside of GFL. Our player and community base is shrinking in size resulting in the process of advertising and recruiting inside of GFL becoming rather useless.How Can We Advertise Outside of GFL?
First, I believe we should write up a short message explaining what GFL is and why people should join our community. In this message, we should make it clear we are always looking for people to help make the community grow. It would simply be a short message that will attract people into the community.Second, we should find places where we can advertise this message without giving us a bad name. This will be simply getting our name out there. We should also be using our social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Steam to advertise GFL.
How Can We Recruit Outside of GFL?
I believe the best way to recruit outside of GFL is to spread the name to your friends and such. Perhaps we should have awards (e.g. badges) for players who recruit users into the community. Another idea (suggested by @CrusTi) would to have users who create an account using a referral link get VIP for one week along with the owner of the referral link. The maximum referrals for VIP would be three.TeamSpeak 3 and the Website
I believe we should advertise our TeamSpeak 3 server outside of GFL a lot more. As of right now, a majority of the users who go to our TS3 server are from our game servers. Since our game servers have been dying, our TS3 population has been slowly declining. While I do believe we should advertise and encourage people to go on our TS3 server more in our game servers, we should also be trying to grab people from outside of GFL. Once these users discover our TS3 server, they may see we have game servers along with a website and go visit them.
In the same vein, I believe we should do the same thing with our website. For instance, we could try expanding our general gaming discussion with specific game categories (instead of only having games we have divisions in). Basically, we should try to recruit users to our website outside of GFL.Back End Help and Progress
Recently, I’ve been backed up on work with the back end of GFL. There are many projects I’ve been wanting to work on but due to not having enough time and personal issues, I haven’t been able to complete them. Ever since the series of negative events back in April of 2016, I’ve had a very hard time trusting anybody with access to the back end of GFL. As of writing this post, only Amp and I have access to the back end. However, Amp is very busy and doesn’t have much time to work on the back end.With the amount of projects to work on and the fact that I will be getting busier with work, I will need help to get these things done. I am hoping I can find somebody in GFL who has the time, dedication, and experience to help complete these projects. With that said, they will obviously need to be trusted enough to be given access.
If I cannot find somebody inside of GFL to help with the back end, it may be worth hiring somebody to complete a couple of projects for us. However, I personally am not a fan of hiring developers to finish and complete our work.
Let’s talk about the progress with a couple of our current major projects.
[Linux] Game Server Back End For OVH Expansion
This project has been the highest priority in GFL. For a while now, we’ve been wanting to expand using OVH servers instead of NFO. The reasoning behind this has been stated multiple times in other update threads and here.We had a developer working on this for a few months now, although they unfortunately did not have the time to complete it recently. This project is now stuck without a developer. We are deciding whether we should complete this project or find another solution. I believe if we were to successfully complete this project, we would benefit from it. Of course, it will take a lot of time and dedication to complete this project.
Geolocation on OVH IPs
This is another project we need complete if we are going to move to OVH. @Ariistuujj and I have been working on contacting the geolocation companies (such as MaxMind) to get our new OVH IPs located in Germany. However, their support is unfortunately frustrating to deal with.@Ariistuujj and I will continue to try to find a solution to this problem. Hopefully it doesn’t take much longer.
Overall
There are many other projects that need to be done with the back end including website upgrades and more. I’m going to be focusing on finding help so that these projects can be completed quicker and without stressing myself out.Division Updates
I would just like to give my personal opinions and updates on a few of our divisions.Counter-Strike: Source
As of right now, I believe we have a very dedicated team to our CS:S servers. Our DLs seem highly motivated to expand into CS:S and bring even more population to our servers. While I do really like and appreciate the motivation I see, we have to remember that CS:S is sadly dying.

The game reaches around 10K players as a peak. Back when we started heavily expanding into CS:S (early 2012), the game had many more players. It was therefore much easier to populate the servers; there aren’t as many players nowadays and it will be extremely difficult to expand into CS:S.I believe we should continue to focus on our current servers (Surf and Bunny Hop) along with adding one or two new servers to see how they go. If expanding into CS:S doesn’t work out, it is nobody’s fault. The game is nearly dead and most gaming communities would also likely fail if they tried expanding into the game.
To conclude, keep up the great work and hopefully it pays off, but don’t feel stressed if the expansion fails since like I said before, it’s very difficult to expand into CS:S.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Our CS:GO division has been stable. However, I do believe we need to push forward and start expanding and fixing a few of our current servers.Surf Timer
The first set of servers we need to revamp are our Surf Timer servers. We’ve been wanting to revamp these servers for quite some time now but due to my busy schedule, I haven’t had the time to work on the revamp and I’m not sure if I would like to be included in the revamp anymore. I believe the revamp on Surf Timer should be the highest priority in the CS:GO division when it comes to fixing servers.Bunny Hop
Although we revamped our Bunny Hop servers a while ago with a new timer, the server population did not increase. I believe we need to take further steps to bring in more population.FFA DeathMatch
Initially, I did not expect FFA DM to work out due to it being very similar to Valve’s DM servers. However, the server is doing quite well.
It fills up to around 20 - 30 players daily and I hope it keeps up. I believe there should be admins on the server trying to recruit players to our TS3 server and website (to apply for Membership). With that said, I would recommend trying an European FFA DM server in the future once we setup our OVH machine.
Overall, as said before, the division is stable, but we need to start expanding and fixing up servers that are suffering.
Garry’s Mod
As of right now, I believe our GMod division has the most potential out of all the other divisions we are in. However, I believe there are problems that have gone on for far too long without being fixed.Purge
Our Purge server used to be our most populated server in GMod. We used to reach 95/95 daily back in late-2014 and 2015. This server reached #4 on GameTracker but now look at it:
While I’m sure there are many theories on why the server is dying, I can say the one thing that needs to be fixed, which is the server’s drained performance. The server has been suffering from constant lag spikes for the past two years and nothing has been done about it. The prop spam protection addon made by myself was removed from the server because it was “malfunctioning”. The reason it was malfunctioning was due to the server lagging itself (the addon detects whether the server is lagging or not). Back when the server was launched (summer of 2014), while the addon wasn’t perfect, it was a great addition to the server and legitimately prevented most prop spammers from successfully lagging the server.It’s time to stop beating around the bush and start fixing the actual issues with the server. I took my time to go through and find addons that are most likely causing the lag spikes, but nothing has been done about them. It isn’t my job to fix the Purge server, the division leaders and server manager should be the ones fixing it. I’m willing to help but it cannot rely on me solely due to my busy schedule and other stuff I have to do for GFL along with the fact that it simply shouldn’t be my job.
Zombie Survival
While I haven’t done any investigations on Zombie Survival, I’ve heard that it is suffering from constant performance issues just like Purge. I would recommend installing FProfiler and find out which Lua scripts are taking the most resources. In my opinion, each GMod server should have this installed regardless of whether the server is lagging or not.This division has a lot of potential, but much more work and dedication needs to be expended. It has been nearly two years and nothing has changed. A majority of the top GMod servers aren’t suffering from performance issues because they took it upon themselves and ensured they had great server performance. It’s time we take that same approach. Once we expand into OVH, machine hardware won’t be limiting our server performance; the very poorly coded addons will and still do to this day.
Arma 3
I believe our Arma 3 division is going to be the next big division in GFL with the amount of potential it has. The only thing we are waiting for is the OVH machine. Arma 3 has the potential to bring in many players to our TS3 server and website along with driving in donations. Unfortunately, we are playing the waiting game with the OVH machine due to us needing a working back end.I will try to get the back end problem solved as soon as possible so we can start the setup on the Arma 3 server. I have no ETA on when this will happen.
Call of Duty 4
I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4 quite often recently and wanted to setup a CoD 4 server on our new OVH box for some time now. However, I haven’t had the motivation to do so until now. I am looking forward to setting up a new CoD 4 server on our OVH machine soon.I’ve been playing on a server recently that I really like and I am going to try contacting the owner of the community to see if they would be interested in running their CoD 4 server under GFL (we give them server manager and such). Obviously, this would need to be discussed further with the Trusted group if it were to be considered.
Regardless, we will be trying a CoD 4 server on our new European OVH machine. It will most likely be a Hardcore “mixed” or TDM server. I will be the leader of the division and server once it’s started up.
Pirates, Vikings, & Knights II
While this division is very small, I just wanted to give a small update on it since I am currently the one managing it. Our PVKII server reached #1 on GameTracker under “Half Life 2 DeathMatch”. Despite that this isn’t a big accomplishment since there aren’t many popular servers under the HL2 DM game, it at least proves our PVKII server is getting some population.I am currently playing on the server often and I am going to add a few regulars on the server through Steam to talk to them about ideas, along with trying to recruit them to GFL and such. Updates to the server can be found here.
Mini-Divisions
A few updates ago I explained why mini-divisions will be important to GFL in the future. As of right now, I haven’t seen any progress made with mini-divisions. Initially, we were aiming to try a mini-division in Overwatch, but unfortunately that never worked out.Mini-divisions are still important for GFL to expand into and now that we have a strong team of community advisors, I believe it’s time to start expanding. Mini-divisions also fall under “Advertising/Recruiting outside of GFL” since we will be trying to grab users outside of our game servers and such. I want these divisions to be a priority to GFL.
H1Z1
Since Overwatch failed, I believe H1Z1 is the next game on the list. Although, from what I’ve heard, H1Z1 suffers from the same issue as Overwatch where there isn’t any clan system. Personally, I do believe we can have a successful H1Z1 mini-division, but that would take a lot of work.This mini-division will be discussed.
RuneScape
A RuneScape division has been wanted for quite some time now in GFL. @Benroyjam and @Leks wanted to manage this division, and I believe we should give them the chance. Fortunately, it doesn’t take any resources running a mini-division. Therefore, the only thing we would lose if we were to fail with this division is time. In my opinion, it’s definitely worth at least trying.Conclusion
While there are many other games we can start mini-divisions in, I just wanted to list those two games (H1Z1 and RuneScape). Our community advisors and Directorate are going to be coming together to get our mini-divisions future started. As said before, this is very important to GFL in the future. I am very excited for this!European Expansion
The next thing I wanted to talk about is expanding into Europe. As of right now, our NFO machine is very underloaded and we will be getting rid of that once we completely setup our OVH machine. Once our OVH machine is set up, we will be moving the servers to that machine and start expanding into even more servers.A couple years ago we started our European expansion and we did great. We had two completely full NFO machines at one point. Unfortunately, we only have one machine now which is highly underloaded. I still believe expanding into Europe is important to GFL since it fills in the inactive hours for American servers. Furthermore, TS3 is completely dead in the morning hours for Americans. If we were to expand into Europe and recruit many users to the forums and TS3, I feel our TS3 server could be a bit more active during those dead hours.
One division we did not expand correctly into for Europe is Garry’s Mod. Once we fix our current American servers in GMod, we should start setting up European GMod servers.
To conclude, expanding into Europe again should be a priority in the future once we fix our current game servers.
TeamSpeak 3 Population
The next thing I want to talk about is our TS3 server’s recent population. The population has been dying off and I feel not as many users go on our TS3 server compared to a year ago. The maximum I’ve seen us hit (even on the weekend) is around 50 - 60. We used to reach around 100 - 110 users.I feel one of the reasons our TS3 server isn’t as popular is because we don’t advertise it well outside of GFL and since our game servers are generally dying, not as many new users are connecting to the TS3 server. While I do believe we need to encourage players from our servers to join our TS3 server more, we also need to heavily advertise our TS3 server outside of GFL.
Our TS3 server is the main source of communication within GFL and therefore is very important to us. I’ve seen many gaming communities out there who are much smaller than GFL, but receive three times more population than we currently do on their TS3 server. This is likely because they advertise their TS3 server outside of their gaming community and truly make it public.
It’s time to make our TS3 server “truly” public and one other thing we’ll have to do with that is making sure we have an active team who will be able to kick/ban trolls since the public channels will be used often.
Other Ideas
TeamSpeak 3 Bots
I believe we should set up some official TS3 bots for our server.Introduction Bot
This bot would greet every user who connects to our TS3 server with a chat message with a few statistics as well. @Leks suggested this bot because it’s a good way to give important information to users who connect to our TS3 server. I would imagine users can disable this bot if they would like, but I haven’t looked into the details on the bot. With that said, the bot could also message all clients on the server when an event is going on.Radio Bots
I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a few music channels with bots that run a radio. Only bots would have talk power in these channels and clients can go in there just to relax and listen to the music.Financial Update
We’ve been doing very well financially for the past few months. We’ve went from almost running out of money ($200.00 as a balance at one point) in mid-2016 to over $3000.00 now!Here are the latest payments for MOTDGD Ad money:

We are also working on moving to OVH which will save us a lot of money! If this keeps up, this will enable us to continue doing giveaways and such along with just improving GFL in general.I would once again like to say a big thank you to all the Supporters/VIPs who have donated towards GFL. Without you, GFL would simply be dead. We will continue to do our best on building GFL up and providing a good gaming experience in our servers!
Personal Update
I would like to give a personal update. Spring is coming up and I will be becoming busier with my current job along with the other job I will likely be getting. However, I plan on still finding plenty of time for GFL. My goal is to “lead” everybody in the right direction in GFL. Therefore, while I may not have much time for GFL, the people who I am leading will..For the past six or so months, I haven’t had much motivation for GFL. Especially in the past one - two months, as I’ve been dealing with personal issues. However, recently, I’ve regained a lot of motivation for GFL.
I haven’t had this much motivation to work on GFL in a very long time. Since I’m starting to see how strong our higher-ups team actually is, I don’t think that motivation is going away anytime soon.
Yes, I’ve overall been struggling for the past few months with GFL, but things will be getting much better unless something unexpected occurs in my life. One thing I’ve concluded about GFL is that working on it truly makes me happy.
TL; DR
We need to start advertising and recruiting outside of GFL’s territory. We should be mostly advertising our TeamSpeak 3 server and website. This will overall make GFL grow and can be very powerful if done correctly!Recently, I’ve been backed up with back end things. The truth is, I need help with the back end and I am going to take the next few weeks looking for help (perhaps get a team of dedicated and trusted individuals to help with the back end). Once a majority of the back end projects are complete, GFL will be in great shape!
There are many things we need to work on within our divisions. The truth is, our divisions aren’t as popular as they once were long ago and we need to get that back. For CS:GO, focusing on revamping Surf Timer will be important. For GMod, we need to get the performance issues fixed for good. There are other divisions that also need work.
I explained a few months ago that mini-divisions are very important to GFL’s future. However, we still haven’t started on them. With the new team of community advisors, we need to start our mini-divisions’ future in GFL. I have high hopes that this will work out, as mini-divisions can greatly benefit the “advertising and recruiting outside of GFL” category.
We should also try a heavy expansion in Europe again after we successfully repair our current servers. Expanding into Europe is important for GFL because it fills in the dead hours for our American servers.
Our TeamSpeak 3 server’s population has been dropping recently. Since this is GFL’s main source of voice communication, I believe we need to start making it rise again. First, heavily advertising it outside of GFL’s territory will strongly help and it will make it more “public”. With that said, we should have a team ready to moderate trolls and such on our TS3 server.
For the past six months or so, I’ve been struggling to find motivation for GFL due to personal issues. However, I’ve recently regained a lot of motivation to work on GFL. Although I will be busy with work and such since spring is coming, my job will be to “lead” everybody in the community and we can all work together to bring GFL truly back stronger than ever.
Conclusion
To conclude, there are many things that need to be worked on in GFL. It’s no joke that we appear to be a small community compared to how popular GFL was back in the summer of 2015. The truth is that GFL has been going through many tough stages within the past year. Ever since the series of negative events occurred back in mid-2016, we’ve been rebuilding. We’ve been rebuilding the back end of GFL because our divisions have only been suffering. From what I’ve seen, there haven’t been any truly new successful servers. In fact, all I’ve seen is our servers dropping in population. Some of this isn’t entirely GFL’s fault, but I still believe we can be doing much better.To be honest, what brought back so much of my motivation for GFL is going on other gaming community websites to see how popular they are. To this day, I haven’t seen any other gaming communities with game servers as populated as GFL’s peak back in mid-2015. We’ve made so many big accomplishments in the past and GFL is a very “known” community.
Although we’ve taken very big hits in the past year, I have no doubt that we can come back stronger than ever. Mini-divisions will be a big part of GFL’s future and there are many higher-ups very motivated to not only get GFL’s overall population back to where it was, but go beyond and make GFL a much stronger community. In the event that I build a team of trusted and dedicated individuals to help me work on the back end, we will work on repairing any servers that require technical work.
Overall, GFL has a lot of potential and it’s time to start pushing forward. Summer is once again approaching and we need to make it much better than last summer.
Thank you for reading!
-

Thanks.
-
3-6-17
- Added an AFK Manager plugin (starts kicking players at 22 or above players).
To Do
- Find out how to unlock the server's maximum players so we can go up to 32 (if players would like to).
- Add Third Person mode.
Thanks.
-
All PVKII's changelogs will be posted in here.
Thanks.
-

Thanks.
-
Here's me getting ready for work today.

Don't question my phone case
Thanks.
-
32 minutes ago, Syrus said:
It's running on one of our machines; the machine's processor is the Intel Xeon 1271v3 @ 3.6 GHz.
The machine isn't overloaded either.
Thanks.
-
For the weeks I missed:

Thanks.
-
- Popular Post
- Popular Post
Hello everybody, I would just like to give a personal update on myself. Recently, I've been extremely busy with things and it won't be stopping anytime soon. I've had a lot of people message me recently and I've been doing my best to answer them. However, there are often times they won't receive a response back. I do apologize for this and I will list the reasons why I am busy below.
New Job Opportunity
As a few of you know, I currently work at Home Depot as a Lot Tech. I've been working there since November 1st. Recently, a certain somebody has offered me a job at doing something I truly want to do. I do not want Home Depot to be my "career" and I personally do not enjoy working there (the things I do and such aren't something I want to do as a career). With that said, working there is literally severely affecting my health negatively (read below). Therefore, I gladly accepted the offer and while I am not 100% sure I will be getting the job, there is a high chance. This job offers much more money than Home Depot and I will be working from home.
The next few weeks I will be working hard to increase the chances of getting the job. This includes learning new things and so on (again, in stuff I WANT to learn). I consider this job a possible career.
I will still have time for GFL after I start this job, but the job will be full-time.
My "Health" Issues
I personally don't like talking about my health issues but since it has became bad recently and there is a high chance I will be away from GFL for a bit, I would like to notify everybody. Currently, I believe I have a very bad hernia located on the most "sensitive" location for males. I've had this issue for a couple years now but due to personal reasons, I only recently saw the doctor to confirm what it was. I need surgery ASAP and I am doing my best to schedule an appointment but due to personal reasons, it has been difficult to get this scheduled.
With that said, the work I'm doing at Home Depot is literally the worse thing I can do for this hernia. This is another reason I really want to get this new possible job (if I'm working during the Spring @ Home Depot with this hernia, I will run into major issues).
Other than that, I still need to get other issues checked out (e.g. major stomach issues and so on). After I get surgery, I do not expect to be available for at least a couple days. I will give more information once my appointment is scheduled (hopefully very soon).
Overall, I just wanted to briefly go over what has been going on for me personally. The Directorate and I still have many plans for GFL but some of these plans on my side may have to go on-hold for a little bit while I fix up my personal issues and straighten out my life.
Thank you for understanding!
-
After monitoring performance for the past few days on our VDS, I've made the decision to just keep our dedicated machine and cancel our VDS. I am currently moving servers from the VDS back to the machine.
I was on Surf RPG DM (EU) two days ago and noticed constant lag spikes (this was the exact issue we had in the past with NFO VDSs). As I said in another update, I asked NFO to move us to a more powerful VDS but that hasn't helped performance much. If we were to keep the VDS, we would have to upgrade the core count regardless (we would easily reach 100% overall CPU at this rate with four cores).
Hopefully we will not have to keep this machine after this month since we should have moved to OVH by then.
Thanks.
-
28-1-17
- HLStatsX now works again.
- MOTD now displays properly (https MOTD links are broken in CS:GO for some reason).
Thanks!
-
February 13th - February 19th

Thanks.
-
- Popular Post
- Popular Post
Hello everybody, it comes with great pride to announce the newest member of the Directorate (BoD). I would like to congratulate @Snoopy on his promotion to director.
We chose Snoopy because he is very hardworking and dedicated to GFL. He has many plans for GFL including improving the Directorate’s communication with the community and more. We believe he deserves a chance at the position.
Thanks!
-
13 hours ago, Vauff said:
Would securing the FastDL stop web access to the file listing/files? I know me and a few others on the ZE server use it to go in and download maps manually for a few different situations. Such as seeing if a map has been tested before, to download a map that's going to be tested while the previous map is being played to not have to sit and wait, mass re-downloading maps on the server after a CS:GO/OS reinstall (we even have a spreadsheet with download links for doing that). It would be a shame to lose these features.
We would still have this feature
9 hours ago, CrusTi said:Thanks for all the information! Very helpful in understanding whats going on.
@Roy do you know why the { } and [ ] characters are switching around. Any reason for this or is it just me.
TBH, it makes a LOT more sense once you become a manager.
What do you mean by switching the {} and [] characters?
Thanks!
-
- Popular Post
- Popular Post
Hello everybody, I just wanted to give an update on the back-end of GFL and what I’ve been working on. I will be making another update very soon that involves many front-end subjects and changes.
OVH GameServer (EU)
As a few of you know, we’ve purchased an OVH GameServer machine on the 17th of this month. I did this so we can get started on setting up the back-end (security and such).I have been working on it with the help of Amp (@setup.sh). Due to Amp’s busy schedule, it is difficult to find time to work on the new machine together. However, we are close to being done our part.
Afterwards, we will most likely be testing things until @KILLER-Banana finishes the Linux back-end. I am very excited about this new machine! We are basically paying for better hardware for a much lower price than NFO. As long as we can ensure our geo-location is set to somewhere in Germany (read the “Geo-Location” section for more information), we should stand an equal or better chance at receiving population on OVH than NFO.
Overall, I hope this machine brings new life to our European division. I look forward to expanding into other servers once we get this machine online.
Our OVH IP’s Geo-Location
I’ve been studying how geo-locations work for some time now. After taking a look at how the Steam Master Server chooses servers, I found that it highly depends on your geo-location. Therefore, ensuring our IP’s geo-location is set to a popular area is very important.We have tried OVH’s European locations out in the past and the servers we had there never received population. This was the same case with other server owners I know. Once we would try the servers out on NFO, they would populate instantly. At the time, I didn’t know how the Steam Master Server worked.
On the 17th, we purchased eight permanent IPs for our OVH GS machine. While ordering these IPs, there was an option to set the “geo-location” of the IP. We set the IPs to Germany in hopes the IPs would be set to somewhere in Germany. However, that was not the case. Using a website such as IPFingerPrints, the IPs were located in Paris, France.
After contacting OVH about this, they said the IPs were purchased from a Germany geo-localised pool from RIPE. For those that do not know, RIPE is a Regional Internet Registry (also known as “RIR”) for Europe, The Middle East, and Central Asia.
@Ariistuujj and I spent hours yesterday (25th) trying to figure out how to set the geo-location of our OVH IPs. Originally, we thought this would be done through RIPE by setting the “geolocation” and “language” attributes for the IP. However, after further investigation, it turns out RIPE does not provide geo-location services. It is the same case with ARIN (the RIR we will use once we expand into the US with OVH). Instead, there are several companies that provide geo-location services. The two we are interested in are MaxMind and IP2Location. We will be contacting both of these companies to see if we can get our IP’s geo-location set to Germany. We will likely need to contact OVH and claim ownership over our IPs via RIPE (e.g. OVH assigning the IPs to an “organization” we create).
With that said, I am unsure what geo-location database Steam Master Server uses to receive the geo-location of an IP. I’ve sent an e-mail to Valve on the 25th in hopes to get some insight on how the Steam Master Server works, however, as expected, no response (yet). According to this Mailing List thread, they use IP2Location and MaxMind (the ones we’re interested in). However,I haven’t seen any proof yet.
Overall, as said before, having a good geo-location will be important while expanding with OVH. I along with @Ariistuujj will do our best to ensure our IPs get correctly set to Germany!
External Backup Machine
Having an external backup machine has been on my to-do-list for quite some time now. However, I am getting closer to doing this. At the moment, we have daily backups along with manual backups by myself. I am looking into buying a backup machine where we can store automatic backups. I believe we will have 15-minute SQL backups on this machine along with daily FTP backups.At the moment, we are looking into purchasing the “HOST-32L” ($77.00/m option) from this page. While $77.00/m seems expensive for a backup machine, I believe it will be worth it. 6TB of space along with OVH monitoring the disk, 8-thread processor, and 32GB of ram at $77.00/m is a great price in my opinion.
I will continue to look for cheaper options that will suit our needs. However, if there are none, we will go with this option! I will most likely be making the backup scripts from scratch using bash (unless there are scripts already made to suit our needs).
NFO VDS
Recently, I decided that replacing our NFO FrankFurt machine with a NFO VDS until we move to OVH would be the best choice. This would save us around $130.00/m. After looking at the machine’s graphs, I just saw no point in keeping the machine:
After moving a couple servers to the VDS, I noticed that we were put on a slow-ish processor (compared to our machine’s processor). This along with virtualization would cause poorer performance than the machine. I ticketed NFO about moving us to a stronger VDS that includes a processor with better single-core/thread performance than the old VDS’s processor. They had a VDS available with a processor slightly stronger. Therefore, they moved us over.We are now on a VDS with the “Xeon E5-2690v2 (Ivy Bridge-E 3.0ghz)” processor. I still plan on moving our servers over to this VDS and cancelling our machine. In the end, this is a temporary solution until we move to OVH.
FastDL Revamp
Another thing I want to do is revamp our FastDL VPS. This includes better security and blocking out non-GFL servers from using it. At the moment, this is a low priority since other servers using our FastDL doesn’t cost us any extra money (we have unlimited bandwidth with OVH). I hope to get this done in the next couple months.Overall
There is obviously a lot going on in the back-end of GFL. In the near future I will be posting many things involving the front-end!Thanks for reading!
-
I have decided to go with moving our servers to a NFO VDS.

Recently, we have only been hitting around 30% peak CPU daily. I felt temporarily purchasing a NFO VDS until we move to OVH would be the best option (this would also save us money as well).
Thanks.
-
February 6th - February 12th

Thanks.
-
On 1/17/2017 at 8:18 PM, Argyros said:
@Roy
You can save money by using your own Windows Server License on OVH.I'm not sure what you mean. We aren't planning to use Windows for OVH (only NFO). If we got an NFO VDS, since it would have to be managed (in-order for the server IPs to stay, etc), we wouldn't be able to use our own Windows license, etc.
Also, I purchased the OVH GameServer machine ($80.00/m) and eight IPs for our game servers and such ($24.00) yesterday. Since it will take a while to setup, I decided to purchase it now and set it up along with perform many tests.
Thanks!
-
17 minutes ago, Wilford_brimleyy said:
You're quite accurate.
Thanks.
-
14 minutes ago, JerryHatTrick said:
Here is my gripe, and I hope it can be resolved easily;
I have permanent VIP, which means I never have to donate to GFL again.
However, I want to donate from time to time, because I'm a firm believer in supporting the servers you play on.
The problem is, if I donate using the current system, I have my status changed (just recently to "Supporter"), and when that expires, I lose my VIP status & have to ask for it to be restored. Others also seem to have this issue.
If there is an alternative method, I may be missing it. But it's a concern, for me anyway.
I believe @denros is looking into this issue sometime this week. The system currently doesn't check if the user is a higher rank. Therefore, if you purchase Supporter as a VIP, your rank will be overwritten.
This will be changed hopefully soon!
Thanks for the support!
-
Hello, just wanted to let everybody know the Knowledge Base forum has been moved to the Supporters+ section and all Supporters+ can view it. This sub-forum should help with some of @Roy's updates.
This sub-forum is used to give information to our Supporters+ about certain things (e.g. NFO vs OVH) from a Higher-Up's point of view.
Feel free to browse through the sub-forum!
Thanks.














Taking a break
in Good Byes & Resignations
Posted
Thank you for everything you've done @denros!
Remember I'm always here for you if you need me!
Thanks.