[Haven't updated with older posts, so this is incomplete]
2020-12-26 play.watchcdda.net
As I announced on discord and with the server motd, please ssh into play.watchcdda.net port 3333 instead of watchcdda.net port 22 to log in. The old login will still work until January. No changes have been or will be made to accounts or saves.
2020-10-19 New Watchcdda Box
I have upgraded the server to a new machine. CPU is about the same, doubled RAM, added SSD. You can connect as normal, all data/accounts have been moved over.
2020-08-30 How to check Server Status
This website is hosted from a digitalocean server, and all connections are routed through the same server. If you are having issues connecting (such as a timeout), please check https://status.digitalocean.com/ and discord for more information.
2020-08-01 Multiplayer re-attach and bug fixes
Multiplayer sessions can now reattach. If you get disconnected (or cannot send input to the game), you can just log back in and play Cataclysm-Multiplayer, same as you could with exp and group, and you will be dropped back into your game with no progress lost. A few bugs were fixed including an issue with gnu screen variable expansion.
2020-07-26 Move to Temporary Server
I have moved watchcdda from a vm on my VPS to a docker container running on a server at home. This is in preparation for a move to a better server I will purchase, hopefully next week. Performance is improved even on the temporary server due to the reduced overhead from using docker. There are a few changes you can expect from this:
- Faster read/sleep/craft times
- Only experimental, 0.E, group, and multiplayer are available
- You may have to remove the watchcdda from known_hosts in order to connect.
Other than that, you shouldn't need to do anything differently. Just connect to watchcdda as normal. All saves and accounts are available, no data was lost. If you run into a problem for some reason, please contact me. I have backups in place. I plan on offering most of the other games as well in some form, separate from watchcdda, and am in the process of doing so. Currently nethack is available:
telnet r7st.guru 24 -l nethack
2020-02-25 JUL 2020 UPDATE
I have been far behind in updates on this site, sorry about that - just have been updating through discord. I have made a lot of changes that will be put in place soon after lots of testing. Watchcdda was having some performance issues from VM overhead, and the cost from the VPS is pretty steep. In order to solve these problems, I created a custom docker image for wcdda. This runs significantly faster than the VM. I am running this at home. I plan on scaling down the VPS and redirecting the login port to my apartment. Doing this through docker, I’ve found that the performance is much much better from initial testing. After this transition, you won't have to do anything and can continue playing, it should just be faster. You might have to remove the wcdda entry from known_hosts, but that should be it. New account creation currently prompts for a password after the account is created, just exit this and log in as your new user to set your password and continue as normal. Other than that, I haven't noticed a difference other than it is a lot faster. For now I have removed non-cdda games as they are not played often, and configuring the wcdda image to support them would be pretty time consuming. I can add them back on request.
If anyone is interested in helping with tests, the host will be r7st.guru and port 2222. Saves/accounts from testing WILL NOT be kept from the TESTING server after the full migration without specific requests. Some accounts/saves will already exist in the testing env. Worth checking if yours is there. There might be a few errors but you can just ignore them. Game errors will be associated with updates in experimental. Those can usually just be ignored too.
I also have decided not to keep enabling obsolete mods. Recently many obsolete mods were removed from experimental and that caused problems with saves that had them enabled. I can remove them from modinfo.json on request - that needs to be done manually.