Valve redux

So after I finally completed that little rant about Valve and their apparent lack of redundancy, I try to login to steam. It gave me an error, but this one is not the same as the others, apparently I cant type my password. Again I enter the password, sucess!

I then promptly go back to the steam forums, a friendly sticky telling us of the current work being done to move the servers to a different facility is underway, and that apparently I was one of the lucky ~50% that have already been restored.

So a cudos to Valve in getting a solution to the issue, but it still took you long enough.

Surprisingly enough, this is turning out to be a annual thing, as the power outage today has the same cause as the one of last year. Sad to see that a lesson was not learned.

On the other hand, I do have a good idea as to why Valve only has the one set of "master" servers to perform the login authentication, security. By having a second set the possiblity of leaking the account data is of a greater chance, although if the servers were powered off, or simply kept off the net the chances of that happening would be minimal.

Valve, y?

So After getting back from class, I decide that I need to play a nice relaxing couple hours of HL2ep1. Well sadly things did not turn out to be in my favour.

First, I come home to a locked up machine, totally unresponsive but a simple fix none the less. After getting back into the familar confines of XP, I am greeted by multiple "We have recovered from a serious error" messages. I'll investigate those later.

Then to my surprise Steam pops up, requesting my logon information. This brings a little wonder to me as steam has always been a good little app that does its thing in the background. I disreguard the request as I take a couple mins to probe my machine for reasons to the failure.

I go back to the steam client and enter my credentials. "Steam is having troubles connecting to the Steam servers". WTFBBQ!?! Thinking that the issue is on my end I do some simple connectivity tests, lo and behold I see no reason I am receiving that message. So I tried in vain a couple more times. Now I am ticked.

So I wander over to the steampowered website, and hit up the forums. They take forever to load, this is not normal. I think to myself, oh shit...

Well turns out the "master" servers which apparently handle the login information have been affected by a power outage caused by this bugger of a storm going through the washington/oregon states. So 1 for me.

Now this brought to mind the question, Valve why are all the login servers in one place? From a network standpoint this is a major no-no, especially since Valve's Steam service runs world-wide. A single point of failure. So where are the secondary servers that are in some sort of hot/cold standby, prepared for such an event? So far no where to be found ><

Last day of this year

Booyah! So today is the last day of school for the year @ NAIT and my NSSA course. It has been well so far, building upon the knowledge that I built in my earlier years of tinkering and experimentation.

So far I have completed the following:
CCNA p1 (subnetting, CIDR, etc)
tcpip protocols
A+
70-270
70-290
70-291
70-293

Currently in the following:
Linux+
70-294

I am proud to say that the completed courses have been with flying colours.

Later,
James

**NOTE: I just noticed that for some reason the course page states part time, however that is incorrect as it is indeed a full time course.**

Let the Blog begin

Hey, decided to actually go ahead and make a blog.

This should prove an interesting endevour as updating things is not always my cup of tea.

James