Even though it has been three weeks since I posted “development continues!” I haven’t actually worked on Gamocosm until today :P :/ I’m doing research on distributed systems and multilayer performance with a professor and graduate student, so I’ve sorta been distracted the first few weeks of work. But here is the first real update in many months - Gamocosm now creates new servers with Fedora 21 (the lastest release as of writing). Some sysadmin things had to be updated and improved in the SSH setup server worker.

For months I’d sometimes get emails about failures in the SSH worker: “WARNING: Your password has expired.” I could never reproduce it, and chage -l said the password was never set to expire. Today I found this thread though, which says it’s related to connection sharing. I don’t know what’s the best way to deal with this, as I do need connection sharing (for speed anyways), but I suspect it has to do with users creating/destroying servers in a short ammount of time. I did inspect and refactor so that timeout blocks happen inside on host do ... blocks instead of the other way around, which I think might help, or at least possibly fix a race condition which hasn’t shown up yet with timeout (which is unsafe).

I’ve wanted to and been considering adding support for generic servers (so Gamocosm just starts, stops, backs up, and destroys servers - no Minecraft or MCSW stuff), but have held off because I’ll need to add a lot of special case checks. It’s not that bad, but for example, I got to make sure it never tries to do ping MCSW, and only only part of the action panel is needed.

Finally, I’m considering (~75% likely) renaming Gamocosm :P since 2 of the 2 people who commented say it’s a bad/not-memorable name xD Sigh, it’s annoying to rebrand, but I’m quite happy with the progress and stability so far, and will likely do a bigger public push soon.

I see people joining IRC and I always miss them by a few hours or a day. The best way to reach me is via GitHub! I feel like I should enable comments… it seems like the best way to facilitate communication is to provide many options.