AggroChat #300 – Three Hundredth Intro

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we sit down to record our three hundredth episode, and more or less are doing it the old fashioned way.  We had no notes and only a loose outline in Bel’s head and what ends up happening is one of the most enjoyable shows we have ever recorded.  We for the most part explain the long and contorted origins of AggroChat and how we wound up recording a podcast.  We’ve told bits and pieces of this tale before, but never in one entire sequence also talking about when various cast members joined the crew.  There are several points where we get derailed along the way, but I guess that is also par for the course.

Topics Discussed

  • The Origins of AggroChat
  • When Various Cast Members Joined
  • Our Most Listened Episode
  • A Bunch of Others Stuff
  • None of us Took Good Notes
The post AggroChat #300 – Three Hundredth Intro appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Why My Sites Went Dark

Tales of the Aggronaut circa May 2010
When Tales of the Aggronaut was born, I was in the fortuitous situation of knowing someone who worked for a web hosting provider. It was someone I hung out with on the regular and even occasionally raided with, so it was super simple for me to ping them via Google Chat when I needed help with something. However things happened and that friend left the web host, which caused me to see significantly degraded support and performance. It was around this time that they also went through a round of restructuring which saw me not only paying more for my hosting plan but also having to swallow bandwidth and disk space usage overages. The final straw that broke the camels back is that I went through a period where every morning the hosting environment would be too unstable for me to actually publish content. The problem with the arrangement with my original host is that when they first started out years ago they saw themselves as a multi tier hosting environment that would eventually play with the big dogs. However as time progressed they put more of their effort into Colocation and Disaster recovery data centers and effectively stopped selling any of the hosting plans. I only got to stay on the service because I had been with them so long at this point, but they were theoretically unwilling to offer much in the way of real support.
I ultimately made the jump when I needed to find hosting for the church my wife attends. Since we would be footing the bill for it, I wanted to find some place cheap, reliable and without the spectre of bandwidth overages and disk usage caps. I had used bad experiences with Arvixe and InMotion various work environments and after a bit of back and forth I finally landed on BlueHost. After seeing how generally good the service was I went through the process of moving my main sites over Aggronaut.com and Aggrochat.com, and for the most part everything has been pretty cromulent. Occasionally there would be some stability issues, but it would always resolve itself quickly. On May 19th that was not the case and I experienced what felt like a server outage. Between the hours of roughly 6 am to 10 am my sites were experiencing intermittent connectivity issues. They alternated between loading fine and getting an assortment of Connection Reset, Connection Closed and Connection Timed Out errors in the browser. At this same time the CPanel associated with the environment my sites were all hosted on was exhibiting the same behavior telling me that this was a server level thing and not a specific problem with my sites. This lead me through a Dantes Inferno-esc series of useless web chat sessions for two hours while this was going on. I ultimately went through four or five different chat agents as one would mysteriously get disconnected and another would immediately join in their place… causing me to ultimately start from square one in explaining my case. Finally the last of these said that they would escalate the issue to the server techs and that I should receive an email back explaining what was wrong. Within 15 minutes of ending this chat, the waters had calmed and I assumed that something must have been happening on their end ultimately putting it out of my mind.
Yesterday morning however I woke up to the nightmare scenario of seeing these littering my inbox. Sure enough when I hit any of my pages it threw a 404 error. I was completely dark to the world. I began freaking out, connected into CPanel and it seemed as though all of my files were still there and fine, and it was only after this that I noticed another email sitting in my inbox that arrived about 2 in the morning.
While reviewing your account regarding your website being down.  I noticed a few of your file permissions were strange and there was quite a bit of added files that were not named in a way that one would expect. This prompted me to run a malware scan. When the scan finished, it had found compromised files in your account, and in order to protect you, your website visitors and the stability/reputation of the server, we have temporarily suspended your account until the malware has been cleaned. 

This is just a snippet of the email, but it gets to the important part. Immediately following this is an attempt to upsell me cleaning services through some group that they partner with advisement that there was now a “Malware.txt” file sitting in my site root that would explain what the scans found. My mind immediately went to the worst, because I have had to manually clean a site before. It is a slow and tedious process, but also I remembered that two days earlier I had gone through all of the processes to look for any possible signs of infection. I scoured directories looking for any new files that shouldn’t be there, so I was pretty certain my site was clean.
I download the text file and open it to see this. I feel like at this point I need to back track a bit to explain something. Having gone through the nonsense of having to manually clean a site before, I have both an Application Firewall and an Malware Scanner built into my WordPress installation. I regularly receive emails talking about various threats being blocked. What happens in this case is that the file gets dumped into a quarantine directory for me to inspect at my leisure and this directory is walled off from the world with a .htaccess file. These were the strange file permissions that the tech was talking about and these were the supposed Malware files that they were referring to. I was furious that they ran a scan, saw something… and immediately jumped to shutting off my account without making any attempt to interpret the resulting log files. There are lots of application firewalls available for WordPress at varying price points, and they all effectively do the same thing. There is a quarantine directory that intercepted files go to so that you can clean them if needed and restore them back to your site. This is something that a hosting environment should have encountered before, and they in fact offer similar tools that you can pay extra to have installed on your sites. Someone ran ClamAV, saw that there was a non zero number of files reported and jumped straight to account suspension. To make matters worse, the “rate how I did” link included in the email did not work and told me that it had timed out already… for an email I had only received 5 hours prior. This once again lead me to return to Web Chat support, which was as bad as I was two days prior. Effectively I was left with the answer of that it would take at least 24 hours for someone to come along, scan my site again, and restore it. After ranting to fellow bloggers on Twitter about this for awhile, I finally decided to try one last avenue… contacting the Twitter based support account. It claimed to be staffed from 7 am EDT to 2 am EDT, so I figured it was worth a shot. It took about an hour for someone to respond, but what transpired after that was a series of DMs with the main Bluehost account. I was surly as hell at this point because all I wanted to do was scream obscenities… but reading back through my responses I mostly kept my shit together.
I managed to get them to rescan my directory, and got back a messsage saying that I still had infections. This lead to what was ultimately the most hostile reply that I made during the entire exchange. “Seriously? Those went into the trash when I deleted them from before… do you not review these at all?” Apparently when I deleted all of the quarantined files earlier, they automatically went into a .trash folder in the root of my account. So now ClamAV was detecting them there, which again if someone were actually looking at the results other than checking for a non zero number, they would have been able to interpret that. Once I regained some composure, I made my way back into CPanel File Manager and emptied the .trash folder and got the support agent to scan my account again. To be fair, once I shifted away from using the Web Chat and over to Twitter support, the experience was fairly smooth all things considered. There is an inherent awkwardness of the delay built into asynchronous communication but I figure for all future questions I will go straight to the twitter option. The account was scanned once again and finally ClamAV returned a clean bill of health. The final step involved a frustrating sequence of me firing off authentication tokens via DM because again the delay of the medium caused the tokens to time out before the agent could verify them. At this point the Support Agent flipped a switch and restored everything back to its previous working condition. I still have no clue why their servers were unstable two days ago, and I likely never will. It was an extremely frustrating experience, but in the end once I switched over to Twitter support I managed to get a resolution. Bluehost is for the most part a fine hosting environment, and I have had more good luck with it than bad. However the support from the Web Chat is fairly abysmal. Any issues I have had before seem to magically resolve themselves shortly after getting off chat with someone who claims that they can’t help me. At the end of the day however you get what you pay for, and I am not paying much for this hosting so I guess I am getting the overall support I deserve. The twitter folks though are on point and I will be relying on them as my primary vehicle for support from this point forward. I could say “Well I Never!” in a huff and transfer hosting providers… but that is such a colossal pain in the ass to do so and I am super lazy. For now I am just going to move on having vented about this tale and call it good. The post Why My Sites Went Dark appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

A Discord Problem

Me and the Wumpus at Pax South 2017
Today has been one hell of a day, and tomorrow I will regale you all with the tale. However this evening I am going to actually bang out the topic that I originally was going to write about. This is a topic that was inspired personally by Chestnut, who was in turn inspired by GamingSF. Both are posts worth reading so you should totally check those out. Both tell a tale that I find very familiar about how they struggle with establishing a method of using Discord on a regular basis. Personally I find the whole experience of discord and having so many fragmented servers to be a little on the overwhelming side. However first let me show you the level of problem that I am personally dealing with.
A Sea of Server Icons
This image does not represent all of the servers that I have joined. At this very moment I am sitting in 57 different servers, all with their own structures and rules and overlaps between my friend base. Some are social in nature, others are associated with game testing programs I am part of, and others are associated with various projects that I have supported over the years. The biggest challenge with all of this is that they vary in activity, stratification of infrastructure and community focus. There are a few that I have focused on interacting with specifically, but even they overwhelm me as I never can seem to be truly “present” in any of them.
The Blaugust Discord
The saddest part for me is that I feel like I am failing to keep up with even the discords that I started like the one associated with Blaugust. I try my best to keep tabs on the Moogle’s Pom Tavern and Geek to Geek media network but fail miserably at both of those goals. The weird thing is that I am fairly active on Slack with the AggroChat Podcast crew and I use Microsoft Teams all day every day to keep in touch with my coworkers during this time of Quarantine. For whatever reason whoever I have struggled to really find a place for Discord in my life. Maybe if AggroChat were primarily located there it would be a bit easier, but whatever the case I have it up and running in the background but find I only dip my toes into the water on occasion or if I am specifically trying to play games with a specific group that uses it for voice communication.
Snipping from the Chat Mixtape feature request
I think for me, in order for me to really use it well… I need a feature that doesn’t exist yet or nor likely ever will. In general I only care about the general chat channel on a given server, and I wish there was a way to create a “virtual server” of sorts that blended together more than one server. I posted this on the feature request but it didn’t gain much traction, in part because I decided to call it a Chat Mixtape, which is a thoroughly 80’s reference. I just find it too cumbersome to really try and be active in more than one server, but at the same time I find it really hard to jettison older servers in the odd chance that I might need to interact with them. The 57 servers represents what I am in now after having culled a large number of them over the years. On paper Discord is everything I want in a chat client, but in practice I just find it hard to attach for the purpose of anything other than the occasional voice chat session. Do you also find yourself struggling to stay connected and engaged with Discord? Drop me a comment with your own thoughts, or maybe tell me how you stay “present” on the platform. The post A Discord Problem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Dark Amaterasu Get

I appear to have fallen into a new normal with Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I logged in, ran a Praetorium with Grace and then spent the rest of the night running Hidden Gorge. I finally feel like I understand the general mechanics of that battleground. I realize that probably isn’t what they are actually called in Final Fantasy XIV, but battleground is a portable mechanic and something that most folks understand. Essentially as far as I can tell there are a bunch of mechanics you need to pay attention to, which is ultimately the sign of a good game mode. There is no one single objective but several other things that you really should be paying attention to rather than just pushing forward with all of your might.
At a high level it is in fact about destroying the opposing teams towers which drops the shield around their main tower and then taking it out. However there is a side mechanic surrounding collecting ceruleum in the center of the map, which is used to allow each side to spawn war machines that can be used to push the north or south lane more effectively. Every so often a train will spawn and rush to the depot in the center of the map. Whoever hold this platform captures the supplies which will either give your team a buff, or cause one of a handful of things to happen which are generally positive for your team. There are also Goblin Mercenaries that you can recruit to fight for your team, meaning there are a bunch of different ways you can help your team be more efficient, but at the end of the day it is still about knocking down three towers and winning the match.
All in all it is a fairly relaxing way to farm a bunch of the Irregular Tomestones of Law needed to get goodies from the event. There is also a really nifty sky mech mount available for 20,000 Wolf Marks so it has the side effect of me also slowly working on that number since I have picked up the armor set that I really wanted some time ago. The matches last a maximum of 20 minutes, and can go considerably faster if one side steamrolls the other side. What I like about it however is that it is predictable and like clockwork I am gaining another 50 poetics, 500 or 1000 wolf marks depending on win condition, and 5 Irregular Tomestones. There are however a handful of players that apparently really care about this mode, and I feel bad for us damned dirty casuals ruining their fun. However for the most part it is super chill, just make sure you go to the Wolves Den to set your PVP Bars before going in the first time.
As far as the spoils of the event go, I have already picked up two mounts. The first of which was the horse that drops from Shiva. I could of course farm this, but it is way easier to just spent 30 tokens and pick it up. From this same mount series the Ifrit mount is also available, and I hope to grab it as well.
Of the expensive mounts I went for the “Dark Amaterasu” mount, which should make Ash happy. Essentially I have now farmed up 80 tokens and decided to split it for a cheap 30 token mount and an expensive 50 token mount. There are several more that I want to get, but I mostly focused the two I wanted the most. I admit the Shiva mount is entirely for the music that plays in the background while you ride it. The post Dark Amaterasu Get appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.