News Items 0-429
Fortress Forever Finally ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 16:54
Read all about it here: http://www.fortress-forever.com/

Server up at 72.9.155.4:27025
 
Counter-Strike Source Deathmatch Servers ... Posted by Motu Monday, September 3, 2007 at 0:18   Comments
Here are the IPs for our two CS:S Deathmatch servers:

Deathmatch CS:S #1: 72.9.155.179:27015
Deathmatch CS:S #2: 72.9.155.4:27015

Enjoy...
 
Another server IP change ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 0:01   Comments
I expected this to happen later this month, but our box is actually being moved by this weekend. The 69.93.247.xx servers will be relocated to 72.9.155.xx
This includes the following servers:

GunGame CS:S @ GibGames - 69.93.247.4:27015 --> 72.9.155.4:27015
GibGames.com HL2DM - 69.93.247.4:27016 --> 72.9.155.4:27016

GibGames.com TFC #2 - 69.93.247.178:27025 --> 72.9.155.178:27025
GibGames.com NS 3.2 - 69.93.247.178:27035 --> 72.9.155.178:27035

GibGames.com ET Dallas - 69.93.247.179:27960 --> 72.9.155.179:27960

For those below, all control panel and FTP info will remain the same - only the IP portion of them will change to match the new IP of the game server.

Digital Death - 24/7 Avalanche - 69.93.247.5:27015 --> 72.9.155.5:27015

Housewares:Extreme Rile Mod! - 69.93.247.179:28960 --> 72.9.155.179:28960

Polly's =DM8 Cracker Shack= - 69.93.247.178:27910 --> 72.9.155.178:27910

** UPDATE - These servers are moving tomorrow (4-11) in the middle of the day. This web server is ALSO being moved, so it may be inaccessible for a spell while DNS udpates.

 
Deathmatch CS:S Server Added ... Posted by Motu Friday, March 23, 2007 at 0:51
A new CS:S Deathmatch server was setup at 72.9.158.15:27015. Check it out and let us know how it is. You can post your comments on the forum.
 
Network changes ... Posted by Potsie Friday, March 9, 2007 at 11:05
Unfortunately I have to cut costs further which means we're closing San Jose. This means all the 216.224.120.x servers will go away in the next few days. The good news is that they've all been copied to an existing Dallas server. You can find these at 72.9.158.14. The server in Dallas is on a very well routed network and is as powerful as, if not more than, the one in San Jose.
 
GunGame Server for Counter-Strike Source ... Posted by Motu Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 19:27
Gibgames CS:S Gungame: 69.93.247.4:27015

We've been tweaking settings and testing new maps over the last two months. Come check it out and post your feedback in the forums. We're always looking for new map ideas.

Enjoy.
 
Another year already ... Posted by Potsie Friday, December 15, 2006 at 0:05   Comments
I'd post a bunch of sentimental stuff about the holidays and my favorite charities and such, but all you need to do is look three posts down. The year has changed, but not much else. We're a lot less active on the news posts and servers and there've been people coming and going as always, but the sentiment remains the same - share the love, play nicely and donate to a deserving charity for the holiday season.
Also a big Thank You to Volcano God for his dedication over the years. He is moving on to new career endeavors and a new home in Texas and we all wish him the best of luck. I raise a beer in your honor my good friend!
Peace.
 
The slow pace of change ... Posted by Potsie Monday, November 6, 2006 at 13:25   Comments
As you've no doubt seen, we don't post much news around here lately. Part of that was due to the lack of anything newsworthy and the other part was that the news script has been broken for most of the year and I just now fixed it. This kind of slow response is the result of many changes in my business and personal life which mean that I just don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this community anymore. Still, it continues to survive thanks to the devotion of the community and the countless hours spent by our terrific admin staff. To all of you, a hearty "Thanks!"
On the news front, you've probably seen that we shut down a lot of the older ports. As hard as it was to do, they just weren't being used as much as they once were and had become a financial drain. We're now at a point where I'm about as lean as we can get in terms of costs and servers. We should be able to sustain this size for quite a while. If there is a game or service you think we should run, speak up in the forums. While it probably won't happen overnight, we do take input from the community seriously.
Fixing this news tool was my one accomplishment for the day, so I'd better sign off before I break something.
Cheers!
 
More CS 1.6 Admin added to the team. ... Posted by Volcano God Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 23:02   Comments
Not that we do much news here at GibGames, but I thought it was high time to move on from the Christmas news. :-)

I would like to welcome |A-ApoC|QuixSilver and cFu**lome to the CS 1.6 team. We're constantly battling lamers/cheaters and needed to back-fill a few vacancies and after an admin vote Quick and lome got the most votes from the admin team.


 
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, December 24, 2005 at 10:46
It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here, but I did want to take a minute and extend my wishes to everyone for a safe and happy holiday - whichever it is you may celebrate. What do they call it now? Christmahaunakwanzaaka?
As usual GibGames donated money to Operation Uplink. If you're looking for a last minute donation/tax write off what better way than to allow one of our troops make a call home to speak to a loved one?
It's been an interesting year with us trimming back to "hobby status" for the most part and finding it harder to throw extra time and money at this place, but it's managed to survive nonetheless. This is entirely due to the efforts of our admin staff and supporters who have donated their time and money to keep this place running. To each of you I extend a heartfelt "thank you!"
Be careful with the eggnog and if you go out drinking on New Years please don't get behind the wheel of a car. It's not worth the risk to you or those around you.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!
 
Please welcome 2 new CS 1.6 admin! ... Posted by Volcano God Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 22:52   Comments
Our IRC channel is always busy with cheater reports and persons screaming "some admin!" We hear your complaints about cheaters/lamers and actively monitor the servers and try to maintain good admin coverage. In doing so I've decided (with votes/threats from senior admin) to add 2 more persons to the team.

With that said, please welcome JumbOlaya and China_strike to the CS1.6 admin crew!
 
CS 1.6 Admin Manger Change ... Posted by Volcano God Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 22:45   Comments
After many great years of service at Gibgames, Draco has decided to step down and focus on his new wife and life a bit! ;) His dedication to Gibgames and the CS1.6 community will be missed greatly. Draco will continue to be the point-man for CS-S, so watch your heads!

With that said, I've volunteered to take the helm and watch over the CS1.6 ports in conjunction with TFC. For any future CS1.6 issues, feature request, or ban challenges, please contact me @ volcanogod_at_gibgames.com.
 
Changes tonight ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 30, 2005 at 19:54   Comments
Just a reminder that the IPs are changing - many of them in a short while from now. If your favorite server seems to have disappeared, check the matrix below for the new IP.
 
The IPs they are a changin' ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, September 20, 2005 at 16:08   Comments
Time again to change IP addresses. This time it's not due to a relocation of the servers - rather a bona-fide ARIN assigned subnet that allows for greater flexibility in the future.
Here is how the new IPs will be mapping:

208.37.26.130 -> 216.224.120.100
208.37.26.131 -> 216.224.120.101
208.37.26.132 -> 216.224.120.102
208.37.26.133 -> 216.224.120.103
208.37.26.134 -> 216.224.120.104
208.37.26.135 -> 216.224.120.105
208.37.26.136 -> 216.224.120.106
208.37.26.137 -> 216.224.120.107
208.37.26.138 -> 216.224.120.108
208.37.26.139 -> 216.224.120.109
208.37.26.140 -> 216.224.120.110

208.37.26.150 -> 216.224.120.120
208.37.26.151 -> 216.224.120.121
208.37.26.152 -> 216.224.120.122
208.37.26.153 -> 216.224.120.123
208.37.26.154 -> 216.224.120.124
208.37.26.155 -> 216.224.120.125

208.37.31.165 -> 216.224.120.75

208.37.31.170 -> 216.224.120.70
208.37.31.171 -> 216.224.120.71
208.37.31.172 -> 216.224.120.72

208.37.31.180 -> 216.224.120.80
208.37.31.181 -> 216.224.120.81
208.37.31.182 -> 216.224.120.82
208.37.31.183 -> 216.224.120.83
208.37.31.184 -> 216.224.120.84
208.37.31.185 -> 216.224.120.85
208.37.31.186 -> 216.224.120.86
208.37.31.187 -> 216.224.120.87
208.37.31.188 -> 216.224.120.88
208.37.31.189 -> 216.224.120.89

Public servers will happen in groups of about 2 per day over the next two weeks. Rentals (the few that remain) will transition at the end of the month. This should give clients time to notify their players.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
 
Steam broke my stats :( ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, August 13, 2005 at 1:19   Comments
The TFC servers aren't really down - they're just a little sad. HAHAH. Anyway... they aren't reporting in the live stats on the left due to the latest Steam update that changed the query protocol somehow. The method used to fix the CS servers a few revs back didn't work and I'm out of time for the evening. I'll try to fix it soon, but you can use HLSW to see the real-time stats. The servers are up.
 
Gibs #4 down temporarily ... Posted by Potsie Monday, June 27, 2005 at 20:23   Comments
We lost the power supply in the box running Gib #4. I have replaced the PS and upgraded it a bit and will try to get it back into production tomorrow morning.
Update: It's back up now. I managed to swing by on the way home from the office.
 
Engagement at a Lan? ... Posted by Draco Friday, May 27, 2005 at 16:14   Comments
Some happy news.... I'm proud to announce that Lynni and I are now Engaged to be Married! I popped the question at the last Gibfest Lan Party in front of about 35 GibGames faithful. You may ask yourself why do such a thing at a lan party of all places? Well, it was at one of these events we first met. We first laid eyes on one another at GibFest 4.0 October 18th 2003. And the rest as they say.. Is History!

 
Last GibFest EVER!! ... Posted by Draco Wednesday, May 11, 2005 at 19:01   Comments
Just wanted to make sure you all know that the last GibFest Lan Party EVER will be held on May 21st at GibGames headquarters in Fremont California. You can expect great BBQ, Beer (21 and over ;) & Gaming at this event. This is sure to be a great finale to 5 wonderful years of lans hosted by Potsie & GibGames. Make sure you don't miss it!! We have room for 40 gamers and their rigs. You can signup and learn more info by clicking here.

Hope to see you there!
 
Trimming the herd ... Posted by Potsie Monday, May 2, 2005 at 0:02   Comments
Over the next few days you may notice a reduction in the public ports that we run here at GibGames. This will be happening in the Fremont/San Jose servers. We have been providing free servers for over five years now and intend to continue doing so - we just need to bring our expenses under control again. We usually have a ratio of about one public server to every two rentals. This is a nice "gesture" for the community, but it's costing me too much of my own money. With the kids getting older I need to think of responsible ways to invest my money and care for my family. Part of this includes reducing my personal funding of so many public ports.
My apologies if this results in one of your favorites being taken off-line, but it has to be done. Thanks in advance for you understanding.
 
HL2 DM and HL2 CTF Ports Available ... Posted by Volcano God Friday, March 4, 2005 at 0:15
Hey guys, just spreading the word that we have a few HL2 DM/CTF ports up for your 'Gibbing' pleasure. Come get your slam/crowbar on!

216.180.242.162:27015 GibGames.com HL2CTF Atlanta
69.93.247.4:27015 GibGames.com HL2CTF Dallas
66.225.236.50:27015 GibGames.com HL2DM Chicago
208.185.247.194:27015 GibGames.com HL2DM San Jose

You will need to install a mod to play HL2 CTF, which you can find here: http://files.clanservers.net/files/halflife2/hl2ctf/hl2ctf_beta11_full.exe

You can find their website here: http://www.hl2ctf.com

Cheers,

Volcano God
 
New Seattle Boxes ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, March 3, 2005 at 0:14   Comments
We have a couple of new boxes in Seattle. These replace the current public and rental ports on the 66.228.210 network. As part of this upgrade we will be changing IPs as follows:
66.228.210.6:27025 -> 64.246.178.130:27015 GibGames.com CS 1.6 Seattle
66.228.210.6:27960 -> 64.246.178.132:27960 GibGames.com ET
66.228.210.18:28960 -> 64.246.178.132:28960 GibGames.com CoD 1.5 Seattle
Rental clients will be on a new box also and new IP info is being mailed tonight. These should all be live within the next 2 hours or so.
Enjoy!
 
All I can say is WOW ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, February 20, 2005 at 5:05   Comments
To those of you who were participants in tonights LAN party and who helped Draco and Lynni pull off the amazing demonstration of friendship, thank you so much. I am honored and humbled by your kindness and the way you all came together. The personal letters, the cake, the gift basket, the donation and the friendship are all VERY much appreciated. I was, and am, in amazement of this gesture. I've asked Lynni to donate the cash to a worthy organization for it was she who helped organize one of our first charity events and I am forever grateful for that opportiunity.
While the circumstances that brought this about may be a bit sad, we still have one or two more events here before we close for good. I hope to have the chance to thank each of you individually for your help. GibGames will continue to thrive and without the commitment we've all put forth none of this would be a reality today.
I'll post some short videos from the LAN later to give you an idea of how fun it was :)

 
LAN on 2/19/05 ... Posted by SpazzTic Monday, February 14, 2005 at 5:15   Comments
Lately there has been some talk of Gibs regulars putting the smack down on GibGames admins. Well, here it is. Here is *your* chance to make history... put it down, lay it out, whatever you want to call it... just make it happen here:

After this, you may not have your chance. You must act quickly, for the future of smacktalk may rest on your shoulders. That is all.
 
Another CS:Source server ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, February 9, 2005 at 22:25   Comments
I noticed that the 24 player CS:S server in San Jose is full all the time, so I added another: 208.37.31.175
Enjoy!
 
CoD servers no longer running 1.4 ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, January 27, 2005 at 22:37   Comments
Some kids with way too much time on their hands were busy the last few days crashing the CoD version 1.4 servers as fast as I could restart them. As a result, I had to update them to 1.5 and patch them to block the exploit. Sometimes it doesn't pay to have the number 1-5 ranked servers since it puts a big target on your back :/ For some reason the 1.4 ports were full 24/7. Now that I patched them they've been empty for two days. Hopefully the regulars there will get a hint and update.
 
Please welcome Lean Mean Eating Machine as the new NS Admin Manager!! ... Posted by Volcano God Monday, January 10, 2005 at 23:32   Comments
Let me be the first to welcome Lean Mean Eating Machine as the new Admin Manager for our 4 Natural Selection servers!!!

Lean has done a great job of being the master of bans on both NS and the many other Gibgames Half-Life mods. For any future NS request or concerns, please direct them toward Lean.

I've been the manager for around a year now for NS. We have had some really good times over the past year and built some well respected NS servers for the community. I will be focusing my current/future efforts on TFC and HL2DM as Half-Life 2 grows, as I'm spread a bit too thin between work (Intel) and my second job... Gibgames. :-)

I rarely played under my name, but often played just as NSPlayer to keep a low profile. Keep an eye out from time to time, as I will still be playing and getting my chomp on. It has been a pleasure being the admin manager for NS. I look forward to NS source or whatever direction Flayra and NS crew finally decide to drive the mod.

Cheers,

Volcano God

 
LAN Party Recap ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, December 15, 2004 at 13:12   Comments
First a foremost a HUGE thank you to all those who helped us raise food and money for some great charities this year!
As you may know, we had our second annual LAN Food Drive last weekend. There were about 30 people who broke away from studying, shopping and working to endure the cold temperatures and join us for some holiday giving and drinking. You guys donated over 160 cans of food (not to mention the numerous dry goods) for the Jack Emery Food Drive, $170 in cash for S.A.V.E. and $20 in donations to Operation Uplink. A couple people were thanked with prizes such as a GeForce 5900 (Xi) and a P4 Motherboard/CPU/RAM combo (Draco) in the prize drawing. SpazzTic was kind enough to bring a keg of some incredible red ale for those of us over 21 and, although we didn't quite finish it off, it was most enjoyable. Draco and Lynni pitched in with some hot dogs and tri-tip which was chowed down very quickly.
Thanks to everyone who joined in to make this a big success for the charities. I got a hug from the lady at S.A.V.E. when I delivered a wad of cash - it was good for me ;)
Happy Holidays everyone!
 
Help a fellow gamer out? ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, December 5, 2004 at 11:43   Comments
Just thought I'd see if anyone could help out one of our admins who writes in the forums:

As you all know I am deploying to Iraq with 3rd ID 3-7 CAV in January around the 14th or so. I just bought me a Dell XPS to take over there to pass the time by quicker, or at least make it a little more comforting. I only have 2 games to load though, Half-Life (the Original) and Command and Conquer Generals. What I am asking is if anyone has any other games or knows of anyone that has games they can donate to me. Ones that they don't play anymore or are willing to donate to me. In fact C&C Generals was a donation by one fo my Sergeants. I am hoping to get CS: Condition Zero since it has single player CS in it and that most people migrated to CS:Source. I am also hoping to get Battlefield 1942 since someone stole mine. I would appreciate any help I can get guys. I will even pay for the shipping!!!

Maybe someone has some extra games they'd like to contribute? You can find Paper_Clip in our forums under the name UR_DEAD. I'll cover all shipping expenses.
Thanks!
 
Happy Holidays! ... Posted by Potsie Friday, December 3, 2004 at 16:27   Comments
The holidays are upon us again. Another year has flown by faster than the prior and I still have a ton of projects to finish from 2003.
Here at GibGames we're getting into the holiday spirit by planning a couple of charity drives. The first is our second annual LAN Food Drive where attendees donate non-perishable foods as part of the entrance fee. The collected items are then donated to one or more local charities such as the Jack Emery Food Drive in Milpitas. The cash portion of the entrance fee is going to be donated to the Shelter Against Violent Environments.
In addition to the LAN Food Drive, this year I've decided to try and raise even more awareness of one of my favorite charities, Operation Uplink, the VFW program that that keeps military personnel and hospitalized veterans in touch with their families and loved ones by providing them with a free phone card.
One of the ways I will be doing this is by matching the donations generated by GibGames members (certain restrictions apply, subject to early termination fees, legal mumbo-jumbo, hi mom, etc). What I will do is match your donations, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $250. With your help, we can distribute $500 worth of calls to the people who help keep this country free. I know many members of the GibGames community are in the service and this is a very small token of my appreciation for what they've done for me, my family and our country.
If neither of these ideas float your boat, please find some way to share your good fortune with others. You may not think of yourself as being fortunate, but take the time to put away the self-pity and consider those who are living in a box or who can't put food on the table for their kids. Heck.. even dropping your change in the Salvation Army bucket helps. I encourage you all to try. You'll feel better about yourself - trust me on this one.
And finally, Happy Holidays from all of us at GibGames! It's been an even better year than 2003 thanks to the support of every one of you.
 
Thanksgiving ... Posted by SpazzTic Thursday, November 25, 2004 at 13:21   Comments
Happy Turkey-day from us here at GibGames! Hope some of you can tear yourself away from HL2 to eat some home cooked meals =)
 
LAN Party Prizes ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, November 25, 2004 at 0:46
So far NVidia has stepped up with some stuff (t-shirt, stickers, posters, etc) as have BAWLS (case of BAWLS) and GibGames (GeForce FX 5900). We're hoping that people will sign up if they intend to come since it helps the sponsors justify the expense in providing us with freebies for you to enjoy. Worst case I'll throw in a few more goodies on behalf of GibGames since the whole theme is charity for this event. My thoughts are a copy of Half-Life 2 and some other small items. Do us a favor and sign up if you intend to come - even if it's just to drop off some donations. Everyone can win :)
 
Half-Life2 impressions? ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 18:38
Now that most of you have probably had a chance to get or download Half-Life 2, what are your thoughts? I found that Steam actually held up fairly well under the pressure - at least for the initial download. I've heard reports that players couldn't connect to CS servers for a period and our useage stats seem to indicate that may have been the case.
Anyway, share your impressions with the other GibGame players in our forums and see if others agree.
 
Half-Life 2 broke the Internet ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 2:29   Comments
Coincidence? About five minutes past midnight, as I had to read Volcano God's "play by play" of his HL2 downloading my connection started gettign slower and slower. I figured it was just me until I started tracing to some of my sites and servers. Holy COW! The first hop was showing 40% packet loss and it only got worse from there.
As much as I'd love to get my download started, it looks like this release has broken the Internet. Thanks Valve.
 
Network update ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, October 24, 2004 at 19:39   Comments
Just a quick note to let y'all know that we now have a nice blend of carriers in our Fremont CA facility comprised of both XO and AboveNet bandwidth. This should prove to be very attractive to clans who have a wide distribution of members across the states. This does not impact our prices at all and is available immediately.
 
Counter-Strike Source servers ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, October 7, 2004 at 14:49   Comments
Many of you knew we were running the beta already, but now that the release is official I thought it would help to post the info here. We have two 32 player CS:Course servers running:
San Jose: 208.185.249.142:27015
Dallas: 69.41.238.78:27015
We're still learning all the nuances of the engine and the new cvars and such, so feel free to share some opinions in our forums.
Enjoy!

And hot on the heels of the CS:Source came the Battlefield Vietnam 1.2 update. We've updated our public server to version 1.2 already at 208.37.26.150.
 
Call of Duty: United Offensive hosting ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, September 22, 2004 at 14:00   Comments
For those of you playing CoD, or interested in renting a server, we now have the United Offensive expansion available. There is a public port running at 64.62.175.65 for you to try. We can also provide you with your own server.
I grabbed a copy of this the other day and it kicks ass. It does a great job of extending the excitement and tension of the original CoD and adds a few new twists. If you liked CoD I think you'll enjoy this too.
 
Video Game Revolution ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, September 9, 2004 at 1:13   Comments
Just saw a cool program on PBS. See if it's showing in your area any time soon. It's well worth it if you're interested in the gaming industry:
Here is a link to the show.
While you're at it, be sure to check out the short film, GG, by our very own Pulitzer Prize winning David "[D2]Dead_Ugly" Leeson. This is a great documentary covering the gaming culture and a couple large LAN events such as CPL and Quakecon. I've known David for years now and have the upmost respect for his work. You should also check out his site www.davidleeson.com for some amazing photos. You'll see him in a much different light after seeing his work - I guarantee it.
 
Doom3 patch BETA ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, September 7, 2004 at 22:56   Comments
Hot off the presses:

GENERAL
- Updated some cvar docs

INTERFACE
- Added toggle functionality to movement commands (i.e. toggle crouch as opposed to holding the button down) - Added in_togglecrouch, in_togglerun, & in_togglezoom
- Fixed g_voteFlags so that spectator and nextmap could be individually toggled
- Made print screen bindable.
- Added mouse wheel scrolling to server list (gui list boxes).

NETWORKING/MULTIPLAYER
- Bumped damage up on rocket jumping in multiplayer
- Decreased damage from chaingun to 25 in multiplayer
- Exploding barrels to full damage to attacker in multiplayer
- Increased height for falling damage in multiplayer
- Made r_skipNewAmbient, r_skipSpecular, r_skipBump, and r_shadows cheat protected
- Made g_fov modifiable in mutiplayer from 90 to 110
- Changed server protocol version from 1.33 to 1.34
- Fixed rocket launcher dealing no splash damage to player at certain angle in Edge 2
- Added join messages when players join an MP game.
- Fixed players stuck spectating when no spectators vote is passed.

RENDERING
- r_aspectRatio now uses 0, 1, or 2 (4:3, 16:9, 16:10)
- Fixed in-game videos disappearing if you go to the menu and return

That r_aspectRatio is a WELCOME addition for those of us with the widescreen displays. I may have to spend the day playing Doom3 tomorrow! :)
 
Need an upgrade? ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 3, 2004 at 15:44   Comments
I just went through the office and found a lot of stuff just sitting idle that some of you may be able to use. I could easily unload it on Ebay, but would rather give you guys first crack at it. Check my forum post for all the details. No reasonable offer refused!
 
Almost done ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 3, 2004 at 0:43   Comments
Looks like we've managed to get all the servers back up that we intend to keep. As such, the server details on the left are now updated to reflect the new IPs. If you haven't found your favorite server yet, just click on the link of the game you want. A detailed server list pops up and you can view the IPs and even join from the tool.
Stats are next on the list.
We did remove a couple ports and will probably remove a few more this month. The funds just aren't as available as they once were thanks to the increased costs of running this business and the lower prices people pay for server rentals. If it weren't for the hookers we'd be making no money at all ;)
 
Wow... ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, August 31, 2004 at 22:07   Comments
What a bad day this has been. Looks like a couple sites turned to shit while I was slaving away. I'll be doing some research tonight to see if I can narrow these problems down and get them fixed before tomorrow. I have a ton of things to do and my kids start school tomorrow morning, so it may be a little while before I get everything wrapped.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Update:
Okay... so here is how the IPs have mapped out:
216.218.242.171 -> 208.37.31.171
216.218.242.172 -> 208.37.26.132
216.218.242.173 -> 208.37.26.133
216.218.242.174 -> 208.37.26.134
216.218.242.176 -> 208.37.26.136
216.218.242.178 -> 208.37.26.138
216.218.242.180 -> 208.37.26.140
216.218.242.182 -> 208.37.31.182
216.218.242.184 -> 208.37.26.144
216.218.242.186 -> 208.37.26.146
216.218.242.188 -> 208.37.31.188
216.218.242.190 -> 208.37.26.150
216.218.242.191 -> 208.37.26.151
216.218.242.204 -> 208.37.26.154

65.19.163.2 -> 208.37.26.156
65.19.163.3 -> 208.37.26.157
65.19.163.20 -> 208.37.26.153
65.19.163.30 -> 208.37.26.158
65.19.163.31 -> 208.37.26.155

I know it's not as elegant as it could have been, but we took the opportunity to also upgrade a couple boxes while we were at it. All in all a very hectic day.
The .188 box is being fixed in the morning.
I know there are a couple other pubs still down. We're trying to determine if we'll bring them back or not. It's quite costly to run them and we probably need to trim a couple if we're going to stay in business, so please keep that in mind before sending me nasty e-mails about how your favorite server is gone. The free ones aren't free to me.
Now I sleep.
 
Reminder ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, August 31, 2004 at 12:11   Comments
Today is the day we are moving about a dozen boxes which will impact many public ports and some of the rentals. All clients have been sent an e-mail detailing the IP changes. I'll also post an update here with all the new IPs for the public ports. For the most part they move from:
216.218.242.1xx
to
208.37.31.1xx
 
Same old story... ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, August 28, 2004 at 11:59   Comments
As a follow-up to the post last night, the guys at HalfLife2.net set out to obtain confirmation of the claim that HL2 was going gold on Monday. In typical Valve "someone stole our stuff" mode, they dug this up:
This morning it was confirmed that the post made concerning Half-Life 2 going gold, orginally thought to be made by Valve's Gabe Newell, was in fact posted by someone that had found his password and used it to post with his account. A Valve employee confirmed it in this thread on the SteamPowered forums.
This begs the questions:
1) How many times will this happen before HL2 is released?
2) When will Gabe stop using "krispykreme" as his password?
3) How do we know the post on the Steampowered forums wasn't from someone who had "found his password?"

 
Half-Life 2 almost done ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, August 28, 2004 at 2:02   Comments
Just reported at Shacknews is word of this post from the doughnut-eating-one himself at the HL2 Fallout forums:

Gabe Newell
Valve Software

Posts: 30


Posted: Aug 28 2004, 12:10 AM
We're going gold monday...

 
IP mapping ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, August 14, 2004 at 12:24   Comments
As you may recall, we are expanding our servers in the XO and Above Net facilities in order to provide better performance for our public ports. As a result, the last few pubs in Fremont will be moving gradually over the next two weeks. Below is the schedule and IP mapping for the moves:

216.218.242.171 -> 208.37.31.171 - already in place
216.218.242.182 -> 208.37.31.182 - already in place
216.218.242.188 -> 208.37.31.188 - already in place
216.218.242.172 -> 208.37.31.172 - Monday, August 23rd
216.218.242.186 -> 208.37.31.186 - Tuesday, August 24th
216.218.242.187/189 -> 208.37.31.187/189 - Wednesday, August 25th

We will be leaving some servers in Fremont. Rental clients may opt to stay where they are, or move to XO or Above Net as well and an e-mail will be sent describing these options.
Enjoy!
 
Doom3 hosting and e-mail ... Posted by Potsie Friday, August 13, 2004 at 13:17   Comments
We have concluded our testing of Doom3 and can now offer servers. It is NOT cheap. There appears to be a bug in the dedicated server code. As of right now it will consume all the resources of one CPU. This means that on our dual Xeon boxes, an empty Doom3 server instantly uses 25% of the CPU resources. The good news is that it doesn't seem to increase even when the server fills up. Until this is rectified, the pricing is a bit high. We will adjust the pricing when/if the resource utilization is brought under control.
In other news, we can now offer you web-based e-mail as a complement to your game server and website, or provide you with a GibGames.com e-mail address for $12 per year, per account. This includes 500MBs of storage per user and SMTP (outbound) messaging.
 
Tidbits ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, August 5, 2004 at 9:42   Comments
Just a quick post to let y'all know that all of the public GibGames.com TFC servers are now running Steam. Volcano God was kind enough to help me wrap this conversion up last night.
Also, please note that the forums have been "adjusted" so that you no longer need that lengthy sytntax to reach them. The forums are now at http://forums.gibgames.com. No more need for the directory and file names.
 
New TFC Admin Manager ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, August 3, 2004 at 12:05   Comments
After many months of excellence, Integrity/Zion has decided to step down as our TFC Admin Manager due to his lack of available time. I would like to take this opportunity to recognize his invaluable contribution to GibGames. He has successfully built upon the team of TFC admins by adding only the best members; provided for open and friendly discussion among current admins; been a strong leader; and lastly, been a pleasure to work with. As a result, GibGames TFC has undoubtedly continued to be the best place for gaming.

Moreover, Volcano God will assume Integrity's positon as TFC Admin Manager from this point on. There will be no drastic changes in the near future, but DO expect to receive continued quality service. Without a doubt, Volcano God has proven himself to be GibGames material and will carry on the legacy.

Congratulations to both of you!
 
Updates ... Posted by Potsie Friday, July 30, 2004 at 12:52   Comments
A couple tidbits for you today:
- Rentals: Due to some great bulk purchase pricing we are now able to offer discounted rates on private servers. This is somewhat new for us because we wanted to make sure we weren't overselling boxes to provide the discount - a tactic very common in this business. This is limited to certain locations and games. See the rentals page for details.
- WON: We are fully prepared to migrate servers to Steam if/when WON is shut down. We expect to have all the public ports converted within an hour or two of the cutover. If you are a rental client, please let us know your desire as to how to handle this.
- New networks: We're in the midst of our annual network moves/adjustments for improved performance. We're adding more boxes to AboveNet and XO. As a result some of the public ports are moving to new IPs. Some of these are moving the 31st and others will be moved August 15th. We try to run in parallel for at least two weeks when this happens and we advertise the new IP in the server name and MOTD, so pay attention :) You should really enjoy the pings.
That's it for now.. just waiting on Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 so we can put these great new SuperMicro dual Xeon boxes to use :)

 
Reminder ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, July 28, 2004 at 0:24   Comments
If you're a regular on CS #4 (32 player, San Francisco), you should add this IP to your list:

208.37.31.188:27015 GibGames.com CS #4 NEW LOCATION

The current CS #4 will be gone in just a couple of days, so you'd might as well prepare yourself so you can find your friends/regulars that frequent GibGames. If you want to start using it now, feel free. That server has better ping and fills up fast once you get a couple of guys in there. We also have a new CS #5 server (Los Angeles) at:

69.26.170.101:27015 GibGames.com CS #5 (LA)
 
Doom3 and Half-Life2 server hosting ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 22, 2004 at 23:55   Comments
While we can certainly appreciate your enthusiasm and desire to have these servers hosted by GibGames, we can't make any commitments until the games have been released. Rest assured that we will be hosting these servers - we should only need a day of lab testing after they are available to assess the impact. We've already got a couple more dual Xeon powerhouse servers on the way to accomodate these and we've added rack space in two of our premium datacenters. I expect that we will have a couple public ports running as well, but as with the rentals, we need to see how things will run.
As soon as we have a better picture of the performance characteristics we'll post an update here, on the rentals page and in the forums. Then we'll open the floodgates :)
BTW: I'm offering a bounty for the first copy of Doom3 to reach me. I have one pre-ordered, but in my experience these usually arrive a week after Fry's has them in stock :/ If anyone wants to earn free LAN admisssions or a case of Bawls, be the first one to deliver a copy to me.
 
Doom3 = GOLD! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 12:16   Comments
Yep, hot off the presses from the .plan file of Todd Hellenshead:

Welcome to id Software's Finger Service V1.5!

Name: Todd Hollenshead
Email:
Description: CEO
Project:
Last Updated: 07/14/2004 12:36:49 (Central Standard Time)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7-14-2004 11:52 AM CDT

IT'S DONE!!!!!!!

Yes, this is the official word that DOOM 3 has been code released and has been approved for manufacturing!
It won't be long now until the anticipation ends and the PH34R begins ;-) We literally just hung up with
Activision and have confirmed that our latest release candidate has been mutually approved and is finally
GOLD. Thanks to everyone for their patience (yeah right! =) and for everyone at id, Activision and our
numerous partners for helping us create what I believe is absolutely the best game we have ever made.

So, the next question is release dates. Retailers in the States will be allowed to pick up games starting
at 12:01 AM on August 3rd. The official street date is actually August 5th in the U.S.A., but some of
your favorite stores will probably have it early for those of you who have to have it first. Check with
your local retailer for that information.

Internationally, the game will take a few more days to make it to the store shelves. The UK will probably get it first, on or about August 6th. Everywhere else will probably be Friday, August 13th (que Twilight Zone Theme) or close to that date, with just a few exceptions (e.g. Russia and Poland). This isn't
because we don't have love for you folks outside the U.S., but the localization and manufacturing process
takes a bit longer outside the U.S. where we will have JVC run 24/7 to get the units built. I guess the
European manufacturers prefer to give their employees nights and weekends off. Go figure!

The champagne is flowing here at id and smiles abound!

I'll update again with some DOOM 3 preparation tips (not what hardware to buy - you'll have to wait for
a programmer for that sort of thing). In the meantime, I want to see those "DOOM 3 GOLD!!!" threads set
new records for swamping message board servers, destroying productivity, and post counts ;-)

Recapping today's headlines....DOOM 3 GOLD!!!

 
Goodbye SoF2 servers ... Posted by Potsie Monday, July 12, 2004 at 21:00
I am shutting these 1.0 servers down. They've become far more trouble than any FREE server should be to operate. The people who play there are disrespectful, ungrateful and a general nuisance to this community. I will be converting them to 1.03 Gold, where we can use Punk Buster and other tools.
It's been a nice ride and I enjoyed seeing them full all the time, but it's gotten out of hand. Click here for an idea of the types of crap I'm referring to. Calling admins names and being assholes about every situation has led to this decision - and the final straw were the posts by 3@GLE EYE and SliceRR. Be sure to thank them if you see them elsewhere.
 
Still room... ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 8, 2004 at 22:27   Comments
I just stocked up today on beer, sodas and hot dogs for the LAN and the cases of Bawls arrive tomorrow. We still have room for a few more, so reserve your seat or be left out in the parking lot with no bawls. I heard someone is bringing a copy of Half-Life 2 with them.

Please make note of the change in the start time - 5:00 PM

And yes, there's still room. Quit e-mailing me and sign up. Everyone pesters me for a LAN and then doesn't register. Slackers - all of ya. :P
 
New server browser ... Posted by Potsie Monday, July 5, 2004 at 13:50   Comments
If you've ever wondered what the IPs were of the public GG servers, or wanted to see who's playing, we've finally replaced the aging Q3plug and X-plug. Seems the past few IE and Windows patches caused these to stop working for people running IE (you should try Firefox instead).
Anyway, we added a new pop-up to the server list. Simply click on the link of the game/mod you're interested in and it will display the details for all the public ports. These are broken down by game and mod, so if you click on a TFC server, for example, it will display only the TFC servers. Hope this is useful for at least one person!
 
More service changes ... Posted by Potsie Friday, July 2, 2004 at 14:40   Comments
Just a quick post to let everyone know that we are now adding more servers to Seattle as well. We'll be pulling a couple of the dual Xeons out of Fremont and shipping them up north. We'll now have a much better distribution of services that include rentals in all of the following locations:
Seattle
San Jose
Los Angeles
Dallas
Chicago
Atlanta
New York
All of these locations are using premium bandwidth. We'll be spreading public ports across them shortly to allow everyone to test the performance. Out Fremont location, while convenient and decent, is not doing a good job of demonstrating the type of performance our rental clients can expect. As such, we will be focusing on spreading out the public servers across the geography a bit more. Keep an eye on the website for news as these changes unfold.
Enjoy!
 
Summer Specials ... Posted by Potsie Friday, July 2, 2004 at 1:00   Comments
Since we usually lose a few clients when summer arrives (no more campus broadband, summer jobs, etc.) it's time to fill some vacant boxes again. Last summer we offered a special that was well received and we will extend the same deal throughout July of this year.
We called it "summer schooling" last year. This year we just call it a great deal. Pay for three months and get the fourth month free! This is a great deal no matter how you look at it - a 25% savings. Supplies are limited and subject to availability. Visit our rentals section for server details and pricing. Be sure to reference this offer in the comments section.
 
LA is alive ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 20:03
Our servers have arrived in LA. You can test the connection via our public Counter-Strike server at 69.26.170.101. Rentals are available immediately. Enjoy!
 
Service updates ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, June 26, 2004 at 0:45   Comments
Just wanted to keep everyone up to date on some of the recent developments around here.
I've finally stopped travelling. I was home from Germany for a week and then split to Vegas for another week. I thought I could win back some money I spent while in Germany, but you know how that works. I did manage to escape with no serious cash flow issues nor jail time, so I rate it as a success. But enough about me - there are some great server related happenings:
First up is the expansion in LA. We are adding servers to a new facility in LA and will be offering rentals out of there within a week. You can ping test the gateway at 69.26.170.98. From here in the SF Bay Area I get a steady 30ms ping. Not bad at all.
We've also expanded our Dallas presence and added more dual Xeons to the mix. We're phasing out some of the older single P4 boxes and have a, pardon the phrase, shitload of servers available right now.
And finally, we are close to wrapping up the install of the multi-megabit wireless solution at the LAN center. In the mean time we have a method of "borrowing" some wireless signals from the neighbors. They're never there on the weekends anyway :)
 
Ban Removal Process ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, June 23, 2004 at 20:55   Comments
Volcano God has been kind enough to put together a quick flowchart to make it easier for many of you:

1. Are you stupid? If yes go to question: 7 If no, goto question: 2
2. Are you the person that got banned? If yes to goto question : 3 If no goto question: 4
3. Were you cheating or just being a disruptive? If cheating, goto question: 1 If disruptive, goto question: 1
4. Was it your brothers, brothers 1/64th sister playing on your computers? If yes, goto question: 1 If no, goto question: 5
5. Was it your dog's pet cat's tick's cousin in the cats litter box? If yes, goto question: 1 If no goto question: 6
6. Was it your uncle's half sister's, sister's boyfriend? If yes, goto question: 1 If no, goto question: 7
7. Lucky number 7 says: YOU'RE FUCKED! Goto another server!

 
Let the games begin! ... Posted by Motu Monday, June 21, 2004 at 1:59   Comments
The inagural match of GibGames CS Scrim League begins Sunday, June 27th. The schedule can be found by clicking here. If you have a concern regarding the scheduling, talk with your captain and then, if needed, you can email HORSE. Good luck to all, and let's keep it fun!

UPDATE: Horse has setup a website at http://www.gamemasterz.net/gib.

If you're interested in developing a website like this one for yourself, click here for a demo from Gamemasterz.
 
Gibgames CS/TFC Scrim League Anyone? ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, June 2, 2004 at 17:39   Comments
We will be hosting a GibGames Counter-Strike and TFC Scrim League, for the clans that frequent the Gibgames servers. If you would like to register your CS clan, send an email do HORSE: davidcarloswhite_at_yahoo.com. To register a TFC clan email reins_at_gibgames.com. Also, go in to the forum (under Half-Life) for further details about the league. It will start in about a month, assuming that things go as planned. There will even be a team of admins participating, and we all know how badly you want to play them!

Join our new Gib League channel on gamesurge.net @ #gibsleague
 
Cheers! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, June 1, 2004 at 12:01   Comments
For those who don't know, I will be away for about two weeks. I get to see my grandmother in Germany and spend some time at the local pubs.
In my absence, please be patient if things go awry. I've left a couple people with the keys and they may decide to blow it all up.
If you're a rental client, PLEASE be sure to use the appropriate means of contacting support! The rentals e-mail is NOT staffed as regularly as the support e-mail. There is also the support section in the forums and the support system where you can open trouble tickets. If the guys are a little slow to respond please accept my apologies in advance, but know that you are left in good hands. I'll try to check in when possible.
 
GibGames.com is Looking for a Few Good Admins... ... Posted by TNT Wednesday, May 26, 2004 at 14:14   Comments
Do you think you have what it takes to be a GibGames.com Day of Defeat admin? Shoot an email to tnt and let him know why! All applicants must be able to connect to the Steam servers and be able to be very active. Thanks.
 
New LA facility coming ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, May 20, 2004 at 18:16   Comments
After many frustrating situations in the Southern California market, we've finally found what we believe to be a great provider in the LA area. We have a couple boxes ready to be delivered as soon as the contracts are signed. I expect them to be live in about a week.
You can ping test the edge router at 216.34.221.98 to see if it's good for you. If our other LA boxes are any indication, there will be tremendous demand for these servers. If you really want an LA-based server, you may want to reserve one now. We've never had any openings on our other SoCal boxes and I expect these will be the same.
 
Our E3 mole is in ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, May 13, 2004 at 11:37
Armed with a $5 disposable camera, some quickly printed business cards and a whole lotta attitude, our man SpazzTic is now inside E3 gathering all kinds of good stuff for us. I'm guessing he'll get sidetracked playing demos and watching booth babes (and subsequently getting slapped by his girl Emily), but if he can keep focused we may get some details from him later. Maybe some crap to give away at the next LAN too (mid-June).
 
Short E3 news clip! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, May 12, 2004 at 22:41   Comments
- Team Fortress 2 was not mentioned at all.

:P
 
I hate stupid people! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, May 11, 2004 at 18:39   Comments
Just had to get that off my chest.
I need to start posting some of the lame e-mail messages I get. Do us all a favor - if you can't write beyond a third grade level then stick to the spoken word. It's even more amazing when I respond with something like "Please write back when you can form a sentence" and they proceed to tell me how they're twenty-something years old with a good job, wife, family, etc. Is it any wonder jobs are being sent overseas? You'd think people with a computer would be more capable of using the written word.
Anyway, my four year old child is calling me. I need to help her with her Algebra homework.
 
CSDM (Deathmatch) Server ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, May 5, 2004 at 19:09   Comments
Thanks to Draco, we got a CSDM server up. It's also known as CS Deathmatch or Instant Respawn to many of you. Whatever you call it, we have it now, and I wouldn't doubt that it will be full most of the time. If you've never tried it, check it out. It's free, and doesn't require any downloads.

216.218.242.186:27030 GibGames.com CSDM #5 (SF)

 
LAN reminders ... Posted by Potsie Friday, April 23, 2004 at 17:07   Comments
If you're renting a PC at the LAN tomorrow, remember to bring your favorite accessories - headphones, mouse, etc - or be stuck using the generic ones we have on-site. Also, be sure to bring CDs and/or CD keys for the games you want to load/play. Not all games are installed on the rentals, so be prepared to spend a little time setting them up. We have a shared CD drive for installing games.
It's gonna be a hot day, so bring some water and dress comfortably.
Also, don't forget those cables unless you want to waste 30 minutes digging through our scrap cable box :)

I was just looking at the attendee list. Where did some of the "regulars" go? There are about 10 people who are die-hards that haven't registered. Is it the 3AM cut-off? I may be willing to let some of the regulars hang out longer since I know you personally. Just a thought since it won't be the same without you.
 
GibFest 7.0 games ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 15, 2004 at 13:14   Comments
For those of you attending the next GF, we have a couple treats:
1) Far Cry dedicated server - if you haven't seen this game, check it out. It kicks ass in single-player, although it takes a beefy system to run it well.
2) Painkiller dedicated server - another gem this spring.
Both of these games can be found at Fry's for $29. They are well worth it and will easily suck away your free time.
We'll also be holding a little CS tournament with a twist. The teams will be put together randomly. No stacking this time and it's all in fun, so be prepared to work with new people and be social for a change.
 
Not JUST a TFC player ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 14, 2004 at 17:51   Comments
In one of the most amazing things I've come across in all our years of running servers, one of our rental clients actually won the Pulitzer Prize! This in not a belated April fools joke either. Many of you know him as [D2]deAD_UgLY and that's actually him in the pic. I knew many of the members of the GibGames community had "hidden talents" but I thought they were the type that resulted in jail time and psych wards rather than Pulitzer Prizes. Congrats David! You've really proven that it's unfair to stereotype gamers.
 
Fake e-mails ... Posted by Potsie Monday, March 29, 2004 at 12:00   Comments
In the event that you get an e-mail claiming to be from GibGamesInfo@gibgames.com, it is NOT originating from us. We do NOT solicit anyone - never have and never will. Most likely it's from someone infected with Bagle or Netsky. I recently had an old e-mail address used by spammers to send out an e-mail about Viagra. It's clogged my in-box with delivery failure messages.
DIE SPAMMERS DIE!
It's out of control when someone takes all the necessary precautions and then, due to someone else with my address in their mailbox, has their address hijacked for spamming anyway. Come on people... PATCH YOUR MACHINES!
 
UT2004 Retail ports ... Posted by Potsie Friday, March 19, 2004 at 18:24
Yes, we do have a couple of them up already:
208.37.31.172:7777 - DM in San Jose
66.7.164.198:7777 - DM in Dallas
65.19.163.31:7747 & 8827 - ONS in Fremont
More to follow.
 
BF Vietnam port ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, March 18, 2004 at 9:35   Comments
We're still trying to hack together some monitoring tools for Battlefield Vietnam. It looks like EA went back to an older protocol with this. As a result, the newer tools we use for BF and associated mods don't work quite right. But that doesn't mean you're out of luck! We have a server already running (and usually full) at:
216.218.242.190
Go get some!
 
One demo down. Who's next? ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, March 17, 2004 at 23:48   Comments
I finally had enough of people complaining about the RtCW demo ports and people constantly nuking it, so the two ports we were running are now gone for good. Fortunately for the SoF2 players, there has been very little noise coming from there so those can stay up. I just can't spend time constantly trying to keep ahead of the kids who have more energy and time than me to nuke/hack/fuck with a demo server. I thought it was good for the community to keep them up since it offers a low cost way to enjoy a game, but like usual the idiot few ruin it for the masses.
Now what can we do about the invis hacks on the UT2K3 demo ports?
 
What a turnout ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, March 14, 2004 at 18:39   Comments
Had a great turnout at the LAN this weekend. I think the final count was 43 people. Not bad at all. We had some great BBQ action, lot's of jawing, and I hear some people even got in some gaming.
Thanks to everyone who helped make it a success!
If anyone wants to pickup one of those cool mousepads that xceTra made, I can mail them to you for $13.00 each. Here's a picture of one of them. They are made of a pretty slick neoprene surface and measure 8"x10". What better way to show your support?









 
I laughed until I cried... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, March 10, 2004 at 17:51   Comments
Like a moth to a flame, we went and updated all the Steam servers last night based on the news post at 6:28 PM and the reports from some clients that they needed to be updated. The unfortnate part is that at 7:31PM Valve posted the following:
Update Recalled
March 9, 2004, 7:31 pm · Erik Johnson
There was a crash bug in the release that was planned for this evening.
This update has been rolled back until we address it.

Let me put it this way... FUCKERS! This is THE last time we do an update that quickly.
 
Steam updates ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, March 9, 2004 at 20:21   Comments
Time for your weekly Steam update - starting to be like Microsoft security patches, eh? Here's the changelog:
This update is for all of the games currently on Steam. The specific changes are:
- Changed HTTP download behavior to retry connections using old trickle download method if it can't download all files.
- Fixed a crash bug when connecting to a dedicated server with an empty mapcycle.
- Fixed a bug where MP3 volume wasn't working properly.
- Fixed "STEAM UserID 0:0:1 is already in use on this server" message when connecting to LAN servers in offline mode.
- Fixed memory leak in HLTV.
All I can say is it's about freaking time on that last item. Imagine the horror of watching a full 2GBs of memory get sucked down because I forgot to setup a daily restart script for one of the HLTV servers :/
We'll be updating all Steam servers tonight. If things are the same as usual, the content servers will be hammered, so be patient while we scurry to get all 70 or so ports updated.
Thanks!
 
Dallas move ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 24, 2004 at 19:45   Comments
Although I'd been warning people for two months that the old Dallas server was being decomissioned, it evidently came as a shock when it was finally shut down yesterday. Not to worry - there's been a replacement for two months already and they're usually very active.
69.56.191.226:27015 - GibGames.com CS #2
69.56.191.226:27025 - GibGames.com TFC #2
69.56.191.226:27030 - GibGames.com DoD #2
Go find your old buddies who were dedicated enough to play on the old, underpowered box and see what a good server runs like ;)
 
New UT2004 ports... ... Posted by SpazzTic Friday, February 20, 2004 at 14:47   Comments
Seeing as a few of our ports are packed 24/7, and others are empty -- I thought I would help by posting our newer ports here as the Master Server seems to be having trouble advertising them correctly -- hence they appear at the bottom of your in-game browser with a "?" ping.

65.19.163.31:7777 GibGames.com v3120 ONS-Demo #3
65.19.163.31:7747 GibGames.com v3120 ONS-Demo #4

And as a reminder -- here are some others that *are advertising correctly =)

65.19.163.31:7777 GibGames.com v3120 ASU-Demo
205.155.6.61:8777 GibGames.com v3120 CTF-Demo 120%
205.155.6.61:8747 GibGames.com v3120 ONS-Demo
205.155.6.61:8727 GibGames.com v3120 ONS-Demo #2

`nuff said -- get to work!
 
Unreal Tournament 2004 ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 1:14   Comments
All of you regular GibGames UT fans probably knew this already, but some of you may be just now picking up the 2K4 demo. For the latter of you, GibGames has already setup quite a few UT2K4 ports throughout our servers. Most are on the standard IPs of 205.155.5.61, but we've also got a couple others floating around. Just look for the servers that are full ;) This weekend we hope to have a couple in Dallas and Chicago too. I'll update this post with IPs when done.
Enjoy!
 
How cool is this? ... Posted by Potsie Friday, February 6, 2004 at 10:19   Comments
Far Cry Beta Signup

Congratulations Potsie, you got in on the beta. You'll receive an email with the key from us soon.
 
Promotion time ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 3, 2004 at 13:18   Comments
We have a new datacenter full of awesome dual Xeon boxes that are just sitting idle - mostly because I never got off my ass to advertise this new location.
As a result, I want to load these bad boys up this month. During the month of February, we're offering a 25% off discount for ordering a server for three months, or the fourth month free. Clever, eh?
A test IP for this new location is 208.37.31.165
This offer will last until we sell out the boxes we have there, or the end of February - whichever comes first.

 
Updates up the wazoo ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, January 31, 2004 at 16:45   Comments
That's the technical term we use around here.
In the last few days there have been quite a few patches/updates to come our way. In no particular order:
Natural-Selection: 3.0 and 3.0 beta 2
Call of Duty 1.02
Battlefield 1942 1.6
We've only updated the BF1942 servers thus far. As usual, it broke every tool we use. This is just one of the reasons we've always preferred the Quake-based games.
We've only at 3.0 of Natural-Selection. We'll probably update the servers in the wee hours tomorrow AM since they're all still full.
And finally, CoD will likely be updated tomorrow morning as well. Looks like everything passed our tests.
If you are a rental client and require an update to any of the above, please notify us at the support address. We do NOT arbitrarily update rentals since there are often league ramifications.
Carry on.
 
Far Cry ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 21, 2004 at 15:24   Comments
If you're bored waiting for HL2 or sick of Steam, you may want to check out the new Far Cry demo. While a bit different from your typical "run 'n' gun" game, it is an FPS. It requires a lot more thought and "stealth tactics" and offers some graphics sure to grind your older video hardware to a crawl. I tried it on my 9600XT with 4x FSAA and 8x AF and it sure is visually stunning. I'm not thrilled with the feel of the movement (a lot like UT to me), I was able to adjust pretty quickly and wound up thinking I'd buy the full versoin when released.
 
Wayback machine ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, January 20, 2004 at 11:40   Comments
Just killing time while on a conference call and stumbled across this: what we were doing five years ago. Hard to believe Quake3 is that old already. And somewhere in there is news of the imminent release of Team Fortress 2 and Duke Nukem Forever ;)
 
Happy Holidays! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, December 24, 2003 at 22:52   Comments
Just a quick note during a moment of sobriety to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukka/Chanukah, Cool Kwanza, et al. Thanks for your support throughout the year and for helping keep GibGames as strong a community as it is. Be sure to share something this holiday season - something positive that is. It's not too late to give to someone less fortunate than yourself. And remember, there is only ONE person on this planet who is in a position where there is nobody less fortunate. Keep that in mind as you complain about how you didn't get that new $499 video card you wanted in your stocking you greedy bastards ;)
 
Thanks! ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, December 14, 2003 at 14:05   Comments
A huge thanks to those of you who helped Lynni with your generosity last night. While it was a small crowd, the donations were very much appreciated and certainly go to a good cause. And thanks to Lynni for giving us a good reason to gather together during the holiday season and for being so easy on the eyes ;)
If you were unable to attend, but would still like to contribute feel free to contact me or Lynni. All donations benefit the Jack Emery Food Drive. Even if you don't donate to this cause, make sure to do something positive this holiday season. One of my standards is Operation Uplink, but even something as simple as sharing a smile can make a difference.
Happy Holidays!
 
GibGames.com LAN Food Drive!!! ... Posted by Potsie Monday, December 1, 2003 at 16:48   Comments
Lynni, of CS #4 fame, has asked for your support to help raise food for those less fortunate than ourselves this holiday season.
In order to help motivate you to help, we're holding a LAN event on Saturday, December 13th from noon to midnight. The admission price is canned or non-perishable food items. If you plan to attend, please drop a quick e-mail to us so we can get a rough headcount. Please don't be stingy with your donations! There are people who can benefit from your kindness, so think about that when picking up items for your admission. If you're doing well enough to afford a computer and gas to get here it seems reasonable that you can afford to donate more than a $.29 can of tomato paste :)
GibGames will be providing Bawls for all attendees and a raffle for a new hard drive. Let's see if we can't kick some ass as a community and gather so much food that Lynni has to rent a truck to deliver it ;)

If we get 20 people committed to joining, I will personally contribute a motherboard/CPU combo for raffle. This could make a great holiday gift for you or someone you love/lust. And I hear Lynni is bringing mistletoe!
 
New servers supported ... Posted by Potsie Monday, November 24, 2003 at 22:50   Comments
It took a while, but we've finally found the necessary tools to allow us to manage some new servers that people have been asking for. Effective December 1, we will begin offer Battledield 1942 and it's mods like Desert Combat, Eve of Destruction and Road to Rome. We are also now offering the awesome new Call of Duty.
Use the form in our rentals section to get a quote for your specific configuration. We're excited about this new offering and look forward to hosting your server!
 
CS Admin Openings CLOSED ... Posted by Motu Thursday, November 20, 2003 at 19:24   Comments
GibGames is no longer accepting adminship requests for our CS servers. If you have applied, you will be receiving a notification soon. Please do not send any more requests; we will not reply.
 
Steam updates ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, November 13, 2003 at 13:32   Comments
With the update to Steam servers last night, we have been busily trying to update all Steam-based servers. The auto-update doesn't work and the Steam content servers have been plagued with problems for the last 36 hours making it a painfully slow process. We WILL have all servers updated before Friday night - one way or another.
Thanks for your patience!
 
CS Admin Openings ... Posted by Motu Saturday, November 8, 2003 at 15:03   Comments
GibGames.com is accepting requests for adminship on its Counter-Strike servers. We will only take serious requests seriously, so if you can't write a complete sentence or spell, don't even bother. You won't imagine how many of these we get:

"yo...motu...i see alot of chetrs on the servers. there are never any admins on, eVER!@ i play evry nite and are at the top of ur stat list. pleeeeese. i wont abuse the power. i promis."

If you plan to write anything even remotely similar to the message above, i'll let you know right now that we'll delete it instantly. The point here is that we want mature, honest candidates. If you feel that you can meet the requirements, shoot an email to our CS Admin Manager, Gorilla. Also, because of the number of requests that we will receive, don't expect a response, and don't inquire about your status. If we like what you've had to say, WE will contact YOU. Anyone pestering us about their status will promptly be dropped out of the running.

 
Dallas upgrade ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, November 6, 2003 at 21:41   Comments
I've heard about the public Dallas box being a little underpowered lately, so I took the liberty of copying the whole setup to a new, more powerful one. The old one will hobble into retirement at the end of the month. In the mean time you can get a jump start on using the new one:
69.56.191.226:27015 = Counter-Strike
69.56.191.226:27025 = Team Fortress Classic
69.56.191.226:27030 = Day of Defeat

Thanks to those of you who brough this to my attention!
 
Network upgrades ... Posted by Potsie Monday, November 3, 2003 at 19:23   Comments
You've probably seen the Fremont connection going up and down this afternoon/evening. We're installing all new Cisco switches and routers to eliminate those spikes we've seen in the past. There are 6 in all and it takes a little tunning and tweaking, so don't panic - all will be smooth shortly and better than ever.
Update: That took a lot longer than expected. We had all the gear in last night, but there was one device spewing errors all over the network. It took some time to isolate the problemm, but as you can see things were fixed this evening at about 5PM PST. Sorry for the inconvenience. This was necessary to allow for our continued survival. One can't run a network with 800-1000 gamers on it without a top notch network :)
 
Server specials ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, November 1, 2003 at 9:36   Comments
We currently have a glut of available hardware in our Fremont datacenter. In an effort to use more of these great boxes and bandwidth (which seems to be improving a lot recently), we are offering a special to new and existing clients between now and November 30th:
- Pay for three months in advance and receive the fourth month free -
That's a 25% savings just for paying up front. No hidden gimmics, we haven't raised our rates and these are the same quality servers we've always used.
If you're an existing client and want to take advantage of this offer, you can by simply paying for three months on your next invoice. We'll then adjust your next billing date to four months from the current due date.
If you have any questions, contact rentals@gibgames.com (that's sure to bring on the spam!).

 
GibFest leftovers ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, October 26, 2003 at 23:25   Comments
Someone left behind a Nike hooded jacket. If you lost a jacket after the last GibFest, shoot me an e-mail describing it and claim it as yours. I have no use for it since it's not the right color for my hood. Here where me and my homies roll, it's all about fuchsia.
I also just found a backpack under one of the tables (yes, I'm just now claning up two and a half weeks later). If you lost a backpack, e-mail me with a description and claim it. I won't tell anyone about the erection cream and genital wart medication in the front pocket.
 
Updates ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, October 21, 2003 at 14:07   Comments
Three things I hate:
1) Hangovers
2) Steam
3) Football

On the topic of Steam, I've just reverted a couple of TFC servers and one NS server back to the old HLDS. The public hasn't adopted Steam as quickly as we had expected, so it seems this would be a great way to fill them up again. The TFC #1 and #4 are reverted, as is NS #2.
GibFest 4.0 was a blast. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed lite beer so much ;) Congrats to Arena 1337 for their victory over wKt for the fat cash prize. We're tossing around some ideas for improving the competition at some point in the future - like a winner take all tourney with a $50 entry fee or something. That would pay out $400 to the winning team if we had only 8 teams. Could be pretty fun.
There is also a UT even coming in November and another Flickshot has been scheduled for late January. Be sure to sign up at the respective locations if you want in on the beer drinking LAN festivities. We'll also be closely watching the release dates of the new games and will plan something around them.
Now.. back to the Steam forums where I spend my days venting.
 
Full house ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, October 14, 2003 at 10:19   Comments
Got a lot of registrations for the big LAN event this weekend. For those who haven't pre-paid, it's first come, first served. We open at 10AM. Not earlier, so don't come knocking on the door because I won't be there.
We have room for up to 50 and have 60 signed up. If you want a seat held for you, be sure to get that payment to us.
 
That wasn't fun ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, October 4, 2003 at 23:12   Comments
As you may know by now, we had an unusual situation with one of our Dallas facilities over the last 32 hours. The bandwidth provider to the facility we use cut them off without warning for alleged AUP violations. This impacted about a dozen hosted servers as well as our own web site. The good news is that a new provider is in place with better bandwidth than before. Below is the IP mapping in case you didn't receive the e-mail notification:
Old IP           New IP
66.28.225.x      216.66.20.x
66.28.81.x       216.66.21.x
38.114.3.x       216.66.18.x

All is back up and running. If you have any server/service that is non-functional, please let us know. An IP change is not trivial and we may have overlooked one or two things in our haste to get the servers up.
 
HL2 = delayed ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, September 23, 2003 at 23:48
Just check the latest post at Shacknews.
 
More new connections ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, September 23, 2003 at 9:20   Comments
In addition to the new Atlanta servers (listed below) and the additional Chicago boxes, we should have a new San Jose location turned up before the week is over. We have a pair of dual Xeon boxes ready to go which will be delivered today. Shouldn't take more than a day or two for them to be on-line. The IPs, when active, will be 208.185.247.195 & 208.185.247.196. These will be on pure MFN bandwidth which is known for it's performance and low pings - similar to what we used to have in San Francisco.
 
GibFest 4.0 is on ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, September 20, 2003 at 10:21   Comments
Although there weren't a lot of poll responses, I got a lot of feedback from people wanting another LAN. So it looks like October 18th is the day. We're startinng at 10 AM on Saturday and going until 4 PM the following day. This should give the hardcore gamers enough time to get their fix. I'll get to work lining up some sponsors this week. The best way to draw the good stuff is to have you sign up early. They get a lot loser with the goodies if they see a good attendee list, so if you want to come, sign up now! Here's the page.
In other news, we have a new Atlanta box up:
216.180.242.162:27015 = CS
216.180.242.162:27015 = TFC
And finally, I changed the site a little bit so it loads much faster. We used to grab the player counts in real time whenever the page loaded. This added about a 5 second delay as it has to query all of them. I now do the query off-line and store it in a text file that is, at most, one minute old. Close enough, eh?
Now go sign up for the LAN!

 
Rentals updated ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 19, 2003 at 13:17   Comments
I updated the rentals page to show current availability. I didn't realize how many open ports we had. What an enlightening experience THAT was. We're also adding another box in Atlanta and Chicago which should both be up this weekend. There's been a lot of demand for those two locations, so it made sense to expand them.
I also have a small budget for some development work if anyone wants to write a program for automating the order process for me. The site is running PHP. I have some sample sites you can look at for ideas. If someone out there wants to make $100 slapping something together, let me know.
 
CS #4, TFC#4 Upgraded to Steam ... Posted by Motu Thursday, September 18, 2003 at 18:54   Comments
Our 32 player ports have now been upgraded to Steam. If you're having trouble connecting, you need to download Steam here. If you're having trouble downloading it, we have also mirrored the file here.

CS #4 (Steam) = 216.218.242.188:27015
TFC #4 (Steam) = 216.218.242.188:27025
 
LAN time? ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, September 17, 2003 at 15:13   Comments
I'm thinking the weekend of October 18th for the next gig. How does this work for people? Post your input in the LAN party section of the forums. I'm pretty sure I can line up some vid cards, memory and other goodies if we get a fast start on the signups. Need 30 people to make it worthwhile, so post a Yes or No in the forum poll.
Thanks!
 
Steaming mad ... Posted by Potsie Monday, September 15, 2003 at 23:22   Comments
Any of you tried Steam yet? Thought so. For the few dozen of you who got it to work, the CS #1 and TFC #1 servers have been updated. For CS this is a whole new version - 1.6. We're probably going to let the dust settle before migrating more servers, but if you're a rental client we can migrate you when you're ready. We still need a couple days of benchmarking to make sure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot, but so far it looks to be about the same as the prior HLDS. If we discover anything different, we'll be sure to let you know.
 
San Francisco server moves ... Posted by Potsie Monday, September 1, 2003 at 22:25   Comments
Final report: Looks like everything is up and humming along nicely. Basically, replace 69.1.79.5x with 216.218.242.17x and 69.1.79.6x with 216.218.242.18x. There are only a couple exceptions to this. I think the UT demo ports are on 216.218.242.198.
It's going to be tomorrow before I can update all the DNS entries, so they probably won't propogate out until tomorrow night and Thursday. Be patient. My kids need me for a few minutes (now that it's bedtime - 9:00 PM).
I know for some of you the pings won't be as good, but many are finding them to be better. Looks like about a 70/30 split with the 70 being the same or better. To the 30, I am sorry. We're in the hunt for another facility to complement this one, so hang tight. I'm sure we'll have something worked out soon.
Thanks for your patience! This wasn't easy to squeeze in with my other projects, so I know it didn't go as smoothly as it could/should have. At least it's over.

Update: So much for planning. Just received word from our old host that the bandwidth is being cut off tonight. As a result, I have to move every box today. This will be "interesting" to say the least. I'll keep everyone posted as much as possible.

Update #2: All servers have been removed from the SF facility and are on their way to Fremont with the new IPs. You may have received an e-mail stating that IPs would be sent tonight. They are also listed below. The only thing different from what's below is that ALL servers will be on their new IPs tonight. In fact, they should be coming on-line within the next hour (it's currently 3:00 PM).

-------------
Looks like I'll finally have some time this week to move the servers out of San Francisco and into their new home in Fremont. We will do this over two days - most of the public ports on day 1 and the remainder plus rentals on day 2. Below are how the old and new IP addresses map. The first group will be moving on Wednesday and the second group on Thursday:
Old IP   		        New IP	

69.1.79.51		216.218.242.171	
69.1.79.58		216.218.242.178	
69.1.79.59		216.218.242.179	
69.1.79.60		216.218.242.180	
69.1.79.62		216.218.242.182	
69.1.79.63		216.218.242.183	
69.1.79.66		216.218.242.186	

69.1.79.52		216.218.242.172	
69.1.79.53		216.218.242.173	
69.1.79.54		216.218.242.174	
69.1.79.55		216.218.242.175	
69.1.79.56		216.218.242.176	
69.1.79.57		216.218.242.177	
69.1.79.61		216.218.242.181	
69.1.79.64		216.218.242.184	
69.1.79.65		216.218.242.185	
69.1.79.67		216.218.242.187	
69.1.79.68		216.218.242.188
69.1.79.69		216.218.242.189	
69.1.79.70		216.218.242.190
We'll be contacting rental clients with the specific details of their IPs and ports.
Thanks!
 
Updated Rules ... Posted by Motu Monday, September 1, 2003 at 19:22   Comments
Most of you know that we have a very specific set of rules for our players and admins to follow while playing on our public game servers. These rules have been updated and posted here. Please take a minute to look them over if you have not already. It would be a shame to get banned for something you didn't know was illegal.
 
RIP Elvis ... Posted by Potsie Monday, September 1, 2003 at 14:41   Comments
Many of you GibGamers started your FPS "career" long ago. If that's the case, chances are you knew or were fortunate enough to have played with [T2K]Elvis. He and the whole Time 2 Kill clan have been active in the Quake community for what seems like decades. I know that's not possible, but they are one of the few clans who knew how to stick it out through the many ups and downs of clan gaming. One of the main fixtures in the whole Quake gaming scene was Elvis. Sadly, Elvis passed away on August 22nd. I just learned of this today and it came as quite a shock.
In our little on-line world, we tend to forget that these are real people with careers, families and vulnerabilities that go beyond what we see on screen. Elvis was one who truly cared about the community he helped develop and was always a positive influence. I have no doubt that these qualities were evident in his "real world" life as well. I can only hope that a little piece of his positive attitude lives on in each of us.
Rest in peace my brother.
 
NS Under Control ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, August 26, 2003 at 23:33   Comments
Since the release of Natural Selection 2.0 a few weeks ago, the amount of cheater complaints that I've received has gone from about 2-3 per day, to virtually none. We owe this positive outcome to our NS Admins (Guildwriter, PikachuOfLove, XtremeFlatuation, Impy The Lerk), and our new NS Admin Manager Volcano God who has done an excellent job at keeping things in order. Good work you guys!
 
Just a bad week :/ ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, August 24, 2003 at 21:29   Comments
I got home late last night to see that an entire box in San Francisco had died. Not sure if it's a complete failure, or something else. Either way, I can't get there to fix it until next weekend (I'm in Green Bay until then). We've moved some of the client ports to Fremont already. If your server is one of those impacted, we can move you whenever your're ready. The only caveat being that I can't copy your current setup until next weekend. Just contact me if you want your server moved. This will all settle down soon when I finally get all the boxes moved.
 
Server moves ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, August 21, 2003 at 11:13   Comments
We've started phasing servers over to the new datacenter. First up, CS and TFC #4:
Old IP: 69.1.79.68
New IP: 216.218.242.188

NS #2
Old IP: 69.1.79.62:27035
New IP: 216.218.242.182:27035

We're contacting rental clients this week with new IP's. There is no rush in the migration, so some may choose to stay where they are for a while.
 
San Francisco update ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, August 16, 2003 at 11:13   Comments
It appears that some of our clients haven't received my e-mail communications about the developments in SF, so I'll recap here:
We are currently running on a backup circuit. The provider we used has been bought by a larger company who promises to have things fixed up in a day or two. In the mean time, I have signed a contract for new datacenter space in Fremont. The IPs listed two posts below are located in the same facility as my new space. If things are resolved to my satisfaction in SF, we will be able to offer the choice between locations. If not, then I will be moving all the servers out of SF and into Fremont. There are no firm dates yet, so I will continue to update everyone here.
Thanks.
 
San Francisco outage ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, August 14, 2003 at 19:16   Comments
I know many of you are wondering where the San Francisco servers went. They are all still there and powered up. Only problem is that the BGP advertisements (the way the servers are broadcast out) aren't making it out. We can ping from the boxes to the gateway, but that's about it. I have a strong suspicion our provider hasn't paid his bills and has been cut off of MFN. To put it bluntly, this is fucked.
I am burried right now with PMs in IRC, so I'm going to shut it down so that I can focus on a back-up plan since these have now been down for over six hours.
It sickens me that this happened, but there was no indication from our provider that there were any issues at all. I'm torn between grabbing the shotgun and breaking down in tears. I spent a lot of time and money to get GibGames to where it is and I refuse to let some fucker who can't run a business ruin in for me.
So with that, I'm off to find a solution.
 
New NorCal facility ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, August 12, 2003 at 21:58   Comments
We're testing out a new datacenter in Northern California and could use your help beating up on the servers. There is a 32 player CS port and a 20 player NS 2.0 port here:
CS = 216.218.242.205:27015
NS = 216.218.242.205:27035
Let's see what kind of pings the place can dish out.
 
Gib Fest 3.0ver ... Posted by Potsie Monday, August 11, 2003 at 1:25   Comments
Just a quick note now that I've finished most of the cleanup to congradulate -wKt- in their victory over GG to take home the $100 cash and five Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP Deluxe TV Tuner cards. In addition to the prizes, the top two teams will be attending the GameXPo Counter-Strike tournament at the Great Mall in two weeks.
I'll post more details later and will get some pics up. If you were there and have pics, please send them to me so I can post them for everyone to see. Thanks!
 
Hi ... Posted by Potsie Friday, August 8, 2003 at 23:16   Comments
It's getting late, I'm tired and I still need to get so much done for tomorrow. You have no idea how much work it is to .... to ... umm ... keep the beer cold. And configure the servers! That's it! And print flyers.
Rest well tonight. There won't be much of that this weekend.
 
Updates, patches and bugs, OH MY! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, August 6, 2003 at 21:04   Comments
Just a quick note while I'm still burried here. IN the past week there have been numerous exploits discovered for both the OS and some of the games we run. We've been busily patching away. Some of these patches require a brief period of downtime, so that is why you've seen some ports off-line for short periods in the past few days. I know it sucks, but it has to be done. We're also performing complete system scans and installing virus detection as we do this, so it is time consuming.
Couldn't have come at a worse time with all the preperations for the LAN event in full swing too. Nonetheless, all is well and we're set to have an awesoem time.
 
Gib Fest 3.0 ... Posted by Potsie Friday, August 1, 2003 at 18:13   Comments
As you may have seen, we are booked solid for the next LAN event in just over a week. We plan to take 60 reservations, but have space for only 50 people. So... if you REALLY want to be here, I suggest you pre-pay to guarantee a spot. In addition to the spot, you save a whole $2.50! If you don't have Paypal, partner up with someone who does and get those payments in. I'm sure we'll have a few no-shows, but I'd hate to see people loitering outside waiting for a seat ;)
In other LAN news, we have some sponsorships lined up: Bawls, Corsair and Antec have committed to participating. Not sure what we'll see from them, but it's sure to be better than a poke in the eye!
This just in! Leadtek is in for sponsorship. The unconfirmed rumor is that they will provide video cards to each member of the winning team. Wish I knew how to place CS! Stay tuned for details and BE SURE TO PRE-PAY!
 
NS Admins in Full Force ... Posted by Motu Friday, August 1, 2003 at 17:32   Comments
GibGames has added three new Natural Selection admins in response to the rampant cheating on our three public ports. With the release of NS 2.0 and it's popularity, their service will be greatly appreciated. Everyone welcome Guildwriter, Silent-Death, and Staff94!
 
Natural Selection 2.0 ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 31, 2003 at 22:03   Comments
Now that the activity has died down a bit, I thought I'd share two things with y'all. First of all, the Natural Selection client files are mirrored in our downloads. Secondly, the update caused both of our public ports to fill immediately, so we've added a third. This one is in our new Chicago facility. I'm very pleased with the performance of this facility - 50ms pings from here in the SF Bay Area. You can find it at 66.225.197.114:27015. Go help us stress test this network and server :)
 
HLDS Patch ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 30, 2003 at 21:54   Comments
Valve has released a patch that fixes the vulnerability. Since it's a rather important one, we will be updating ALL servers tonight starting at midnight PDT. This includes rental clients. The downtime should be minimal - less than five minutes each - so don't panic if your server is down for a few minutes. We're on the case!

I just had a thought as I downloaded the Natural-Selection v 2.0 server files - I wonder if it's been tested with the patched HLDS? This could be one cluster fuck of a night ;)
 
Half-Life engine issues ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 30, 2003 at 10:38   Comments
I guess Valve has been too busy working on HL2 to worry about patching the current HLDS. There are reports popping up all over about an exploit that they were made aware of back in April. It's a buffer overflow exploit that causes a server to go into an infinite loop, thus freezing the server and chewing up all the CPU cycles. We've already seen this a few dozen times on both our public and rented ports. To add to the fun, there is nothing captured in the log files to allow us to see who the culprit is/was in the attack.
Some providers also claim that this vulnerability has been expanded upon to include a means of gaining OS-level access and essentially hacking into the server. Many public and rental companies have begun shutting down servers until this is patched. We may need to follow in their footsteps, as a compromised server can rack up thousands of dollars worth of bandwidth utilization that we cannot afford to cover.
I urge all of you to put pressure on Valve to get this fixed. There are a couple of "third-party" patches, but none of them have worked to our satisfaction yet. We need a real fix and not a band-aide.
More to follow.
 
Pub UT Demo server down... ... Posted by SpazzTic Monday, July 28, 2003 at 21:04
"For regularly scheduled maint." -- or something. I`ll have a new power supply in there in 24 hours. Check the forums for details. Till then, try to keep your mind off of RL`s, `deemers, and the mighty flak. (Is that possible?) Good luck.

Edit: OK, the replacement ps just died. What are the chances? Hang tight, I hope to have _another_ in by tomorrow evening.
 
No more Hope ... Posted by Potsie Monday, July 28, 2003 at 9:30   Comments
I don't usually post "entertainment news," but every one of us knows who Bob Hope was. An American and international icon for sure. His support of our troops for decades and his timeless humor will surely be missed.
 
I broke down and cried... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 23, 2003 at 0:42   Comments
when I saw this. In light of this situation, there will be no regularly scheduled weekly meeting tomorrow morning. I'm going to be hungover.
 
DoD players? ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, July 22, 2003 at 15:12   Comments
Did you know there's a third GibGames DoD server in Seattle? The IP is 66.228.210.6:27030. We'll add stats for it once it picks up some activity. Those of you up north might find it to ping pretty well compared to the ones in SF and Dallas.
 
Gib Fest 3.0 Events ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, July 20, 2003 at 12:03   Comments
There is a CS tourney planned for this LAN event, but we also have a huge contingent of Day of Defeat players signed up already. If DoD is your game, I suggest you register. This is sure to be a great event to get your low ping fix. We're also working on hawking some donated prizes in order to round up some funds for a DoD tournament. Worst case we'll break a video card into 4 or 5 pieces and split it among the winners.
(BTW: I actually played DoD at the last LAN and it was really pretty cool. That says a lot coming from a Q3 player!)
There are already 25 registered people, so be sure to sign up now. We've got room for 50 at this one, but seats are filling fast. This is a 24 hour event starting at noon on Saturday the 9th. Bring a team, or bring a friend, but leave any attitude problems at home ;)
 
CS #3 ... Posted by Potsie Friday, July 18, 2003 at 19:42   Comments
After a little back and forth with this port to help out a client, it's now back to it's original home - 69.1.79.66:27015
Sorry for any inconvenience, but we do whatever it takes to make our clients happy. They really liked that location, but unfortunately the server (since it's a lowly public box) isn't capable of expanding to the 32 players they want.

 
Warcraft 3 patch ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, July 15, 2003 at 22:49   Comments
You can stop e-mailing me. The new WC3 patch is NOT for the Counter-Strike mod (hmm... a mod of a mod?). Believe it or not, there is a game called Warcraft that has nothing to do with Counter-Strike. The WC3 patch you are reading about is for the Blizzard game.
Damn CS players always think the world revolves around them ;)
 
LAN day ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, July 12, 2003 at 10:56   Comments
We're opening at 3PM today for the little event. Please make note of the time since it's not our usual noon start time.
There are a couple people looking for rides. If you're coming from the valley, Draco is in need of a lift. Hop into IRC and offer some help! Won't be the same without him there.
Anyone else needing or offering rides, please do the same. Just pop in and see what can be arranged. I can also grab a few people at the Fremont BART station if it helps any.
 
Forums down for upgrade ... Posted by Potsie Friday, July 11, 2003 at 11:31   Comments
Just FYI: I'm attempting to upgrade the forums to a new rev, so they may be down for a while. These things rarely go as smoothly as one would hope :)
 
Bawls to the walls at Gib Fest 3.0 ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 10, 2003 at 13:59   Comments
In addition to the tourney and prizes, I just received this e-mail moments ago:

    Hi!
    We will sponsor the GibGames.com Gib Fest 3.0 with 1 12-pack(s) of BAWLS Guarana, a BAWLS banner, and 1 12-pack prize case of BAWLS for the winner.
    It is our policy to provide free product for the initial event. We do this so your LAN has the opportunity to try BAWLS. After the initial event, or in addition to the sponsorship case, we will sell BAWLS to your LAN at a discounted rate. Please fee
    free to contact us for more information on purchasing additional cases.
    **We will provide one free prize case for every event (limited to 1 per month.) Please update your information to receive the prize case at least three weeks prior to the event. We only provide prize cases for events that we have advance notice of.
    Please post the attached banner to your site indicating that we are a sponsor.
    It is our policy that BAWLS Guarana be the exclusive beverage sponsor for all events that we are associated with.
    Please let us know if there are any changes in your plans and feel free to contact us with any questions. I look forward to hearing from you soon
    Please feel free as well to use the message board on our site (www.bawlsgaming.com) to post and discuss your events with your LAN party members!

    Never Sleep!

How cool are these guys? Now if only Sierra Nevada would do something similar :)
 
Ahh... What the hell ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 10, 2003 at 11:02   Comments
Still pretty much split on the responses and I couldn't reach some people for input on Saturday, so we'll proceed as planned. The difference being it's wide open. Meaning, I'll be letting people in for free (of course I'll accept PG&E donations :)) just to try and make it more fun for those that do come. Thought maybe this would draw some more of you out of your bed/couch.
We're going to get started at about 3PM since I have to take the kids to their gymnastics class. For those travelling from far away, we'll make it an all-nighter. This should give people ample gaming time as well as an opportunity to rest up before driving home. Plan on cleaning out at about noon on Sunday.
There is BBQ and some large coolers, so feel free to bring fixin's and drinks. Make sure to bring plenty of water too.
Feel free to e-mail me or hit me up on IRC with any questions.
 
Need a few more... ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, July 6, 2003 at 15:18   Comments
Not quite enough people have signed up for next Saturday's LAN. I'm going to wait until tomorrow night to see if we can get 20 people since many are probably still away for the weekend. If you plan to attend, tell a friend. Let's see if we can't get 20+ people for this one. We have some nice stuff to give away and thanks to <LoD>Legend (AKA Mike) we also have a huge BBQ available for cooking up some grub. If you haven't been to a LAN party before, you needn't worry about that. These are always very fun and everyone is very down to Earth and friendly. Give it a try... you won't be sorry.

UPDATE: We haven't hit 20 players, so it looks like we have two choices:
1) Open up for anyone who wants to come by, or
2) Postpone one week to see if we can drum up enough people
I'll be hanging out the Saturday afernoon and evening regardless, so it's no skin off my back to let a few people come by to ride the 20ms pings to GibGames, throw back a few beers, etc.
If you signed up, let me know your preference. I'll send e-mails to registered attendees tonight.
Updated Update: We're pretty evenly split so far between those who want to come and those who want to wait. If it's any help, I have a couple systems and 19" monitors available. The monitors are nice flat screen Mitsubishi's. So what's it gonna be? Small LAN with a few cool people, or wait a week and try to grab a few more?
 
Crackdown ... Posted by Motu Friday, July 4, 2003 at 19:23   Comments
Due to the fact that some cheaters who get banned simply move on to the next GibGames server, we have now synchronized our ban lists. For example, if a player was banned from CS #1, he/she is now banned from ALL GibGames servers.

You cheat : you lose the priveledge to play on GibGames.

There are a total of 4361 bans as of now.
 
How to report a cheater in IRC ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, July 2, 2003 at 18:34   Comments
There have been a few instances throughout each day where a player has come into IRC to report a cheater in one of our servers, but gets absolutely nothing accomplished. The apparent problem being that there isn’t always an admin monitoring the IRC channel at that moment. Ironically, admins do regularly scan the chat-lines at random times during the day, and often times see messages like this:

<WebGuest>any admins here?
<WebGuest>i need help! we have a cheater!!!
<WebGuest>hello?
*** Signoff: WebGuest (Quit)
<Admin> what server?
<Admin> hello?

See, the problem here is no longer the lack of admin presence; it’s the fact that many players aren’t giving any information. We might be admins with some subtle super-powers, but we cannot read your minds. Instead, post one line that includes the MOD, SERVER, PLAYER NAME, WONID and SUSPECTED HACK. That way, as soon as an admin sees it, he can respond to it, assuming that the cheater is still playing.

I hope this reaches at least a few of you…
 
Flickshot rocked! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 2, 2003 at 0:22   Comments
Thanks to an all-star lineup of RA3 players, a half-dozen cases of beer, a gallon of Bacardi, 5 cases of Crystal Geyser, 5 packs of hot dogs, 2 packs of burgers, 6 packages of buns, 11 trips to Carls Jr, 12,000 Kilowatt hours of electricity and one cool group of people, the Flickshot LAN was a total blast. Warped and Legend managed to gather some of, if not THE, best RA3/Quake3 players in the western states and brought them all together under one roof for 36 hours of non-stop fragging fun.
You can read the post-event wrap that Warped put together where he details all the tourney stuff that I was too drunk tired to pay much attention to.
It was awesome to see that many Quake3 players together. I was beginning to worry that there weren't enough left to make it a decent event, but they proved me wrong. Some of the coolest people I've met at a LAN in a long time - LoD boys excluded of course (they are, afterall, family for me). I welcome any of them to return to one of our many open events to show the Counter-Strike kids what a real party is like ;)
Thanks to all who came for making it fun and stress-free for me - no whining, no network problems, no fist-fights and only one passed out drunk. Speaking of fist-fights, if anyone see's Nikko, let him know I found some Subaru parts in the parking lot.
 
Gib Fest 2.0 ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, June 25, 2003 at 15:56   Comments
We're just over three weeks away from the next event and haven't received enough registrations. If there aren't at least 20 people signed up, we'll have to postpone it. I know some of you are just lagging, but plan to be there to see who the new sponsors are, so get to registering. Don't forget that if you were at the first party, this one is half-price.
I need to have 20 people by July 5th, or it will have to be pushed out a few weeks. What else have you got to do?
 
LAN can cook? ... Posted by Potsie Monday, June 23, 2003 at 13:45   Comments
Dunno what the hell that means. Too much coffee I suppose.
Hey... I have some exciting sponsorships in the works. This could mean some really cool prizes for those attending the LAN parties. Be sure to sign up. Flickshot is about full, but we've had a slow response to the next Gib Fest. If you were at the first one, it's half off for this event. We have another video card to give away and will have other goodies thanks to our sponsors.
What are you waiting for? It's summer and you have nother better to do!
 
LAN summer ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, June 19, 2003 at 1:18   Comments
I finally added sign-up pages for the upcoming LAN events:

Be sure to get in on the action. I'll have monitors and a couple systems for rent if anyone needs them.

Update: Be one of the first 10 to pre-pay for the July 12th event and receive two entries for the video card raffle!
Updated update: Uhhh... hello? Any Q3 players out there? I only see two or three GG players on the list for the Flickshot LAN party. Get with the program you slakkers!
 
SF Upgrades done and new DoD ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, June 17, 2003 at 16:36   Comments
Yesterday afternoon and again today, we were upgrading servers in SF. The work is now complete and you should be seeing the results. We phased out the 1.8 Ghz Xeons and moved in some more 2.8 Ghz units. All of the Xeon boxes are now at a minimum of 2 GBs of DDR also. THe primary beneficiaries of this are the boxes used for rentals, so if you're on a public (aka FREE) server, the improvements will be subtle since they get the "hand me downs."
We also decided to swap one of our Seattle ports from CS to DoD. The new server is at 66.228.210.6:27030. Give it a try. We may need to tune it a little yet, but it's up and running for those of you up north.
 
LAN action ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, June 15, 2003 at 1:30   Comments
Just a reminder that we've posted a schedule of upcoming LAN events that you may be interested in attending. I'll spend some time tomorrow slapping together a nice little sign up sheet so we can keep track of the attendees. There are 40 seats so I doubt we'll have problems with running out of space. While on the subject, I have continued to "refine" the place by pre-wiring the center tables so that we don't have to worry about patch cords reaching the switch anymore. It's all nicely managed and routed to that nobody will trip over the cables. I also have some insulation on the way that should help keep the temps a little more steady in there. It gets a little cold at night right now. And finally, the DSL has been upgraded to a nice 512k up / 4-6 Mbps down service. Should make for some nice download speeds and even some decent Internet action with the 20 ms pings to the SF servers. Come on down!
 
Another move ... Posted by Potsie Monday, June 9, 2003 at 11:04   Comments
In our constant quest to keep up with the demands of the evolving Half-Life engine (I remember when you could run a full server on a P3-500!), we've switched a couple of TFC ports around. The NeoTF and TFC #4 IPs have been reversed. They are now:
69.1.79.66:27025 = NeoTF
69.1.79.68:27025 = TFC #4 (32 player)
In addition, I ordered another batch of CPUs. We have more 2.8 and 3.0 Ghz Xeons coming that will be replacing the 1.8 and 2.0's that there are still a couple of and the 3.0 Ghz will be going into a new rentals box.
I may be selling these older CPUs, so let me know if you're interested in a pair.
 
Another LAN in the plans ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, June 7, 2003 at 17:23   Comments
While most of you play CS, TFC or SoF2 around here, there is still a die-hard Q3 community looking for some fraggin action. To that end, Warped and Legend (who were both at the first Gib Fest) have planned another LAN at the GibGames facility for the RA3/Q3 players. There will be NO Counter-Strike or TFC. Probably nothing other than some RA3 and other Q3 mods. That said, if you're like me and dig Quake and LAN parties, this may be the gig for you.
Here is the site where you'll find the details, but it looks like it's still under construction. This is slated for the weekend of June 28th. If you're interested in attending, hit the site or let me know. Just make sure someone knows you're coming. If you're from out of town and want a comy place to snooze, there is an Econo-Lodge right next to us. Otherwise you're on concrete and beer stains.
 
SF NS moved ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, June 5, 2003 at 12:01   Comments
Just trying to free up some resources on some of the boxes, so I've moved the SF Natural Selection port to a stronger and under-utilized box at 69.1.79.69:27035. Same great taste and less filling.
 
Whew! ... Posted by Potsie Monday, June 2, 2003 at 13:11
That was a blast! I actually got to play a few games and drink "a couple" beers. We had a great turnout with as many as 32 people there. Some were hardcore enough to go all night.
I feel like some folks didn't get their money's worth, so the next event will be half-price for those who were at this one.
Congrats to [MGB]Hellbender who picked up a new nVidia FX 5200 in the drawing. The drawing was based on seat numbers and this bastard was lucky enough to have switched seats earlier in the day for some reason. When the randomo drawing happened, the seat he had moved to was the number drawn. How lucky is that?

It was cool to see us go from this:

to this:

in only two weeks.

And here's an idea of what 20 straight hours of CS will do to a person:


 
What's that smell? ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 30, 2003 at 21:11   Comments
If it's LAN time, it must be fried circuit breakers. Just kidding... got all the electrical finished just in time. 20 amps for every 4 PCs. Niiiiice.

And there's still room!
A few last minute cancels opened up four spots. The servers are sweet and the drinks are cold. Don't miss out! Feel free to stop by and say hi even if you can't stay.
Webcam link will be posted here tomorrow so you can see the scary sights and faces.

Also ... if you are a regular LANnabis participant, please note the new location:
45973 Warm Springs Blvd
Unit #4
Fremont, CA 94539

Phone: 510-979-9301

If you show up at the house, my wife will probably sick the pitbull on you.

Here's the web cam for those who are brave enough to witness the ugliniess.


 
Almost full ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, May 25, 2003 at 20:12   Comments
A little less than a week away from the first LAN party at the new office and only a few spots left. We'll take a couple extra reservations because it's almost certain a couple won't make it. If they do, we have plenty of space and connections, so not to worry.
I got all the servers mounted in the rack today. I'll post some pics tomorrow. If you thought we weren't serious about making this the coolest place to LAN, wait until you see our server setup. We currently have a dual Xeon 2U rackmount, dual P3-933 1U rackmount, P4 1.7 1U rackmount and P4 2.4 tower along with pre-wired network drops for 96 ports and a bunch of 10/100 switches. We should probably test the circuit breakers before next weekend ;)
Here is a pic of our little server rack:


Perched atop that rack is a little spy cam. We're gonna fire it up for the LAN so you can sneak a peak at the people who, five years from now when we have 3,000 person LAN parties, can say they were there back when there were "only" forty people.
BTW: There are still a few seats left. Don't miss out!
 
Power Outage... ... Posted by SpazzTic Wednesday, May 21, 2003 at 17:05   Comments
If you were wondering why you felt like you were missing something last night, here`s the reason:

Yesterday at 6am our UT center in Santa Cruz lost power for several hours. When the network finally came back up, we had to deal with some nasty routing and DNS issues that arose. After about 15 hours of testing, replacing, troubleshooting, and cursing we have patched things up and are hopefully back to normal. We at GibGames are committed to providing the best possible network uptime and performance even in the shadow of exploding transformers. :)

Thank you for your patience.
 
HL2 Preview ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, May 20, 2003 at 1:45   Comments
All I can say is that this shizzle is off the hook. Whoever was spreading rumors that Half-Life 2 was going to suffer because of its video engine was completely and utterly wrong. If the gameplay is only half as good as the first one, the graphics will surely pick up the slack. Don't believe me? See it for youself. You can download the avi from our files section.
 
Gib Fest v 1.0 ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, May 17, 2003 at 2:33   Comments
30 people signed up.. 10 spots left


For lack of a better name (although I still like LANnabis TM) Gib Fest v 1.0 is what we're calling this first of many LAN events at the new GibGames office. Be sure to sign up and pre-pay to ensure yourself a seat. We have room for 40 and 25 have indicated they will be coming. We just added the payment feature tonight, so nobody has paid yet. Save a few bucks by paying in advance and secure a seat. Yes, even you GibGames admins need to register and pay - although you get the night off from administering servers.
We have all the same great servers you've come to expect from GibGames, only here they will be on a fully switched 10/100/1000 LAN. The servers include some dual P3s, P4s and dual Xeons. Plenty of hardware to keep the place warm ;)
We'll be providing sodas, snacks and chairs as well as a drawing for a high-end video card (exact make/model TBD).
Go sign up now so you don't get stuck watching the action from our web cameras :P
 
Holy shit! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, May 14, 2003 at 23:16   Comments
Have you seen the trailers and videos from E3? The Doom3 and Half-Life2 footage is just stunning. I know how I'll be spending some of my time at the "office" this fall! I almost wish I hadn't seen any of that... now I'm looking at video cards and CPUs just in anticipation that my stuff won't run these.
 
LAN season is upon us ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, May 10, 2003 at 1:35   Comments
I took posession of my new office space today. While this isn't the full-fledged plan that I had for a real PC gaming center, it does include about 1000 square feet of warehouse space. In the next few weeks I'll be converting that into a place for lab testing of servers, small networks that I deploy and, most importantly to you all, room for 40 people to LAN it up once a month or more. We won't have the PCs there for rent like a real game center, but it's a start.
The "ground breaking" event is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, May 31st to June 1st, 2PM Saturday until 2PM on Sunday. 24 hours of non-stop LAN action.
I'll provide more details in the next few days - location, cost, etc - but wanted to let some of you mark your calendars. An informal headcount shows about 20 people already, so it will probably be full. Be sure to sign up early. In fact, to reserve a spot you'd better send an e-mail to this address. Inlcude your name, alias and city of residence in the body so we can post the info.
 
Thanks AT&T ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 9, 2003 at 9:48   Comments
Awoke today to see half of the San Francisco servers apparently down. As it turns out, it's an AT&T routing issue. Although all 12 servers are on the same subnet, in the same cabinet at the same datacenter on the same 100Mbps connection to the same OC-48, I can only see half of them. Ohhh... the others are up. I can remote into one and then to all the others from there, and can get to them all from other ISPs - just not from my cable at home. WTF?
So anyway, if you can't see some of the servers and think it's us it's really AT&T, but try to convince them of that.
UPDATE: AT&T sucks! Just about two hours after thibgs were fixed (a failed card on an AT&T router to MFN) all hell broke loose and now I can't get to ANY of the servers on AT&T circuits. Guess I'll go drink beer and blame it on the tornadoes in Oklahoma. Afterall, that's what AT&T will do.
 
Are you ready? ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 9, 2003 at 0:15   Comments
Here come the (p)reviews of Half-Life2. Rather than get too caught up in the hype (unless it's Doom 3), I usually wait until I can see the demo myself to draw any conclusions. That said, there is a nice little write up of sCary's impressions over at the Shack. And those screen shots sure look purdy.
 
Taps ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, May 4, 2003 at 22:05   Comments
That's the song playing for SF#1 right now. Made the mistake of having a friend at the datacenter pull out a box while he was there. Somehow, in the process, SF#1 died. He says one of the CPU fans was dead and in the process of trying to swap it with another, the entire server died. I'll probably be there in the morning to replace it.
Sorry about that!
[UPDATE:] We're back at full capacity again. The dead CPU was due to a screw through the top of it (wrong screw for the fan he applied), so it's been replaced with a dual Xeon that was standing by. That server was close to being put to pasture, but I was hoping to use the old parts :(
 
New HLDS ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 2, 2003 at 18:26   Comments
As luck would have it, I haven't yet found the time to upgrade the DoD servers and there's now an updated HLDS (dedicated server executable for Half-Life).
Seeing as there are about 65 HL-based servers at GibGames, this will take awhile to accomplish. There are no compatibility issues between revs, and this is mostly for server admins. As such, until we've had a chance to test it out with our distribution tools and standard configs, it will be on hold. If you have a compelling reason for us to update your server, feel free to e-mail us and we'll see what we can do.
Thanks for your patience!
 
Day of Defeat 1.0 ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 2, 2003 at 14:58   Comments
Just so you know, we've mirrored the Day of Defeat version 1.0 in our files section. This 173 MB file is not available as an update, so you need the entire thing.
We expect to have our servers update this evening. ETA for that is 7 PM PDT.
 
More on Half-Life 2 ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 24, 2003 at 10:55   Comments
Spotted this at Shacknews (which will always be sCary's Shugashack to me). CNN Money (of all places) has a story about the forthcoming release and includes a couple of new screen shots. They speculate that HL2 may help "revive" the PC gaming market. I guess our constant increase in players is a fluke since sales are down this year ;)
 
RA3 1.6 coming Friday! ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 24, 2003 at 1:55
We have a couple of Quake 3 Rocket Arena ports running here and the new development team reports a Friday afternoon release for version 1.6 which offers bug fixes and three new maps. I, for one, am looking forward to this. We'll update the servers ASAP and will mirror the files here. I guess I know how I'll be spending my late nights for a few weeks...
 
UT2K3 2225 ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 23, 2003 at 12:35   Comments
Yes, another week and another update to UT2K3. We don't have the files mirrored here yet, but will shortly. All of the public retail servers have been updated.
 
Counter-Strike w/ a twist ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, April 22, 2003 at 16:02   Comments
In case you missed it, we have added a second CS WC3 server because of it's popularity. This server is now conveniently located in SF at the following IP address:

69.1.79.66:27035

Don't forget the port!
 
New server? ... Posted by Potsie Monday, April 21, 2003 at 19:22   Comments
Well... given the "overwhelming community support provided by the Gangwars developers" (sarcasm intended), we're looking to replace that port with something different. Just so you know, we mirrored files for them and let them know about our server not once, but three times without even receiving a response. If anything will kill a mod it's ignoring the people trying to help it succeed as we were.
That said, it's time to figure out what to do with that port. So far some suggestions are another WC3 mod, another DoD, a Q3 mod called Proball, a Raven Shield port and another 32 player CS. Post your thoughts here and in a few days we can have a poll to see what people want to see. Heck... I'll even keep the Gangwars if it gets a little use.
In the mean time, I've already set the port to the Warcraft3 mod. 69.1.79.66:27035. Enjoy.
 
Half-life 2 anyone? ... Posted by Potsie Monday, April 21, 2003 at 11:44   Comments
It's coming. Here's one of the magazine covers showing what appears to be Gordon and an E3 booth babe ;)
Does this mean Team Fortress 2 is coming soon? Naw... didn't think so.
 
While we're at it... ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 17, 2003 at 19:31   Comments
Our Java IRC applet was busted for a while. Fortunately for us, the coding wizard known as Motu found the problem. I'll let him explain the technical details.
 
I hate sharing ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 16, 2003 at 23:17   Comments
I feel like I owe some of you an update as to what happened last night with the switch.
I was informed this morning that a new Cisco 2924 had been ordered and would arrive tomorrow. Since I couldn't allow this to persist without at least seeing if I could do something, I headed to the colo. First thing I did was unplug everyone elses stuff from our switch (we have four people sharing one cabinet - me (12 servers), the owner (6 servers) and two others who have 4 servers between them). As soon as I unplugged the others, the switch cleared. Hmmmm... coincidental? I thought not, so I plugged the owners equipment back in. Still fine. Added my neighbors. Still fine. Added the "other guys" and it started spiking. Hmmmm... narrowed it down to one port, so I left it disconnected. On my way home (after completely rearranging my day to go to the colo) he calls my cell phone to ask if I had left yet because he needed someone to patch the SQL server he had installed last night. "Was this around 5PM?" I asked. "Yes, but I didn't have time to patch it yet."
You know the rest of the story. Didn't take more than a few minutes for his unpatched SQL server to get infected with the worm and wreak havoc on our little cluster. This thing was so brutal that we couldn't even telnet into the switch to disable ports. That's why we thought it was something worse.
The lesson here? If you're going to share, make sure you set forth the rules that allow you to bitch slap someone for breaking your stuff. I'm pretty sure he now knows how I feel about his carelessness.
 
WarCraft 3 Plugin ... Posted by Motu Monday, April 14, 2003 at 20:38   Comments
WarCraft 3 plugin now available at our Seattle CS server - 66.228.210.6:27015

This is a server side mod only, requiring you to only download a couple of sounds. What you DO need to do is bind a key to "ultimate" which lets you use your special ability and "shopmenu" which lets you buy extra items. If you have more questions you can type /wc3help into normal chat or visit http://spacedude.games-fed.com/ for more information.

Update: The map time has been changed to 45 minutes instead of 30. This will allow you guys extra time to build your special abilities.
 
Bans Bans Bans... ... Posted by TNT Monday, April 14, 2003 at 20:18   Comments
Most of you already know about our IRC channel. It is where a lot of people come in reporting cheaters or people just being dumb. The participation is great, it is a big help for us trying to keep the GibGames.com community a clean one. However, when you come in to report a cheater, we need some information, we can not go into a server and ban someone after someone says "There is a hacker in #4" and leaves. We need a name, which MOD the server is (not just number, there are many #4's), the time if no one is around, and a WONID and demo are even better! Thanks for helping us out!
 
New services ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 10, 2003 at 10:37   Comments
In case some of you missed it in our earlier post, GibGames now offers TeamSpeak hosting. This is a great voice comm tool that many people prefer over the others out there. Only $10 per month!
Also, we now offer Freelancer servers. This is a bit of a different game for us, but there seems to be little available to those who want a dedicated Freelancer server. As such, we worked with our first client to get it rolling and it seems to run very smoothly on our dual Xeon boxes (what wouldn't?). Feel free to request a quote and we'll get you hooked up in no time.
 
Beware the Vapor ... Posted by Motu Saturday, April 5, 2003 at 19:03   Comments
Here's a funny clip sent in by Daniel Becerra (Adiemus). What's he saying?

Listen

 
Funny CS or TFC screenies ... Posted by Motu Friday, April 4, 2003 at 4:50   Comments
Capture something funny in the GibGames servers? A great kill, or a timid n00b? Maybe even Draco kicking your asses? Well, if you have something worthy of being posted right here in our news column, send it to me, Motu. If we get enough submissions to where we have something new (and funny) each week, I'll start to post them weekly. Send them in!
 
New Admins ... Posted by Motu Friday, April 4, 2003 at 4:45   Comments
Just wanted to introduce our new CS Admins Whiskey Zulu and Riceboy to GibGames community. Their help is greatly apprciated around here, and deserves some recognition. They also deserve a few headshots from their fellow gibbers (you guys), so go pop their heads!
 
Thanks for the memories ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, April 1, 2003 at 11:39   Comments
As many of you know, I've been focusing my energies on opening a LAN center recently. I finished the business plan last week and met with my bank yesterday. They blessed me for an SBA loan to get things rolling. This means two things: 1) I should be able to open this summer (hopefully June), and 2) I need to reduce my debt.
The second item is pretty important becuase right now my biggest debt is hosting related. I spend about $3000 per month on bandwidth and space - not to mention the monthly upgrades to hardware. This money could go a long way towards making the LAN center (code named GamepLANet) a success. My financial advisor has drafted a plan that makes a lot of sense for me financially and puts the center in the black at the end of the first year. The down side is that it means the closure of GibGames for the most part. We would probably still keep two servers running off of the T-1 at the center, but the 70 or so servers we currently have will need to go. We expect this to happen gradually over the next four to eight weeks. Rentals will be allowed to operate through their paid periods, but the public ports will be shut down ASAP. We will sell the hardware with preferential pricing to GibGames players. There are a ton of dual CPU servers (at least 20) - some dual P3-1Ghz, but most dual Xeons. I'll post details in the forums tonight.
I need to get to the bank to sign some papers, but will be back this afternoon. Feel free to e-mail me at this address with any questions.

[UPDATE] Evidently I'm either a good liar or many people forgot the date. I even added the clue in the e-mail link and some people still believed it. Just wait til Easter when I post pics of the Easter Bunny and what we do to him! ;)
 
Suspected cheater demos ... Posted by Fyrmn472 Tuesday, April 1, 2003 at 10:35
We here at GibGames get numerous emails from players suspecting people of cheating. We can not simply ban on word alone. If you suspect a cheater, send name, wonid, and demo to your respective game admins. You can find those on here.

Here is the information you need to make a demo.
 
New maps ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, April 1, 2003 at 1:25   Comments
The player count in CS #3 and #4 has been pretty stable for the past week, so I've gone ahead and added some new maps. CS #4's map selection was limited due to its 32 player nature, but for CS #3 I've more than doubled its current rotation. Also keep in mind that our CS #1 has different maps that neither CS #2,3 or 4 offer. The IPs are as follows:

CS #1 - 69.1.79.51:27015
CS #2 - 12.96.164.208:27015
CS #3 - 69.1.79.66:27015
CS #4 - 69.1.79.68:27015 (32 player)
 
Day of Defeat goes retail! ... Posted by TNT Monday, March 31, 2003 at 18:26   Comments
Well, for all of you Day of Defeat fans such as myself, DoD is now going retail. What does this mean? Those of us who don't want to buy Half-Life and download other mods, for some reason, can now buy a DoD boxed set, with the DoD CD, just as you can with Counter-Strike. There will probably be slight changes, as in CS, but both are compatible with on-line play, so no worries there. Truly proof that Day of Defeat is moving on up the list!

See the final product at EBgames.com.
 
Routing challenges ... Posted by Potsie Monday, March 31, 2003 at 15:01   Comments
I know many of you use AT&T/Comcast cable service here in the Bay Area. Recently they changed some routing which was initially a good thing. We were no longer going to LA to get to SF and pings were reduced. Now, however, there is some funny stuff going on that makes it look like HE.net is congested. After a lot of research and head scratching we discovered that AT&T is forcing inbound traffic for MFN and others through C&W on the return path. This means they are treating us asimetrically (which is bad). This is not an HE.net, MFN or even C&W problem - AT&T is bouncing traffic over congested peers.
The good news is that my provider will soon have a direct peering arrangement with Comcast which will greatly reduce pings and hops.

 
Latenight confessions, the idiocy astounds me ... Posted by Motu Sunday, March 30, 2003 at 0:49   Comments
Just tonight I had a guy, who I won't say the name of (*cough* Llama), who quickly stated that he had a "little aimbot". Thinking that it was a joke, I just let it go. Two seconds later he asks, "Are you an admin?". So I engaged the fellow...

+Motu say "oh yeah, which one" (dead)
+Motu say "I like OGC personally" (dead)
+Motu say "what's yours?" (dead)
Llama say "RageOGL v2.5" (dead)
+Motu say "is it good?" (dead)
Llama say "GREAT" (dead)
ChickenFondler say "lol this is too funny" (dead)
+Motu say "what do you have it set at?" (dead)
+Xi say "hehehe" (dead)
+Motu say "like, accuracy" (dead)
Llama say "wallhack, aimbot,lambert,whitewwalls,all   
   that and more etc........." (dead)
+Motu say "you only use the aimbot?" (dead)
Llama say "yep" (dead)
+Motu say "how come?" (dead)
Llama say "and an eps" (dead)
say "what's an eps?" (dead)
Llama say " it puts a bright blue dot
   over CT and a bright red dot over T" (dead)
[NEXT COLUMN]



+Motu say "and you're using that?" (dead)
Llama say "yes"
[t0KeRz]*g0t*|2ice? say "BANN HIM MOTU"
Llama<987><3453857>" say "NO"
+Motu say "you serious?"
Llama say "i told truth"
Llama say "why ban me???"
+Motu say "you're actually using that?"
+Motu say "i can't ban you"
+Motu say "no admins here"
Llama say "AHAHAHAHHAh"
Llama say "Yep"
+Motu say "you're actually using that though?"
Llama say "I GOT IT ALL"
[t0KeRz]*g0t*|2ice? say "i thought u where admin?"
Llama say "I GOT IT ALL"
+Motu say "got what?"
Llama say "aimbot and eps"
Server say "Llama has been banned"

Even with all of those obvious warnings, he continued to spill his guts. I almost felt bad banning the kid. He seemed so proud of those hacks. I guess he can go be proud on a different server.
 
Neighborserver Watch Program ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, March 26, 2003 at 20:53   Comments
I've been seeing a lot of good emails, PMs and forum posts lately about cheaters that admins where not present to ban. I've probably banned about 10 people in these last couple of weeks because of the great demos and screenshots that you guys have provided. I would especially like to point out your fellow gibber Net Present Value who always has ample proof to justify his claims. He alone is responsible for some of cheat-free play that many of you enjoy. For future reference, making demos and taking screenshots is good practice if you want to get a cheater banned after the fact. Make sure you also get the players WONID and Alias (we can't ban them without this info). Then, you can then either email them to me, or post the information in the forums. Either way, keep up the good work!
 
Tired of voice spam? ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, March 23, 2003 at 22:26   Comments
Just a quick note to let you know that GibGames now provides TeamSpeak servers for rent. If you are a competitive clan, this would make a great complement to your server rental and is a fantastic tool for matches. From what I hear, this is the best available voice communication program. We have received nothing but positive responses to the servers, so try it out for yourself. If you find that you like it, but need the server offloaded from your box with it's slow 128Kbps cable upload, we're here to help :)
 
Are you too cool for IRC? ... Posted by Motu Saturday, March 22, 2003 at 20:08   Comments
     If you haven't already found us on IRC, join us! We're on gamesnet.net on channel #gibgames. You can come report a cheater or just shoot the breeze with fellow gibbers. Who knows, maybe PuppetBill will even let you pet his snake. ;)
 
Help! ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, March 22, 2003 at 2:42   Comments
Can we get the air conditioning turned up? I think it's getting a little hot in the datacenter!

 
New news ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, March 12, 2003 at 12:04   Comments
We have a new server running in Seattle at what could be a new datacenter for us. Pings from down here in SF are great at 30-40ms and we've got some locals pinging 10-15. Perhaps you'd like to help us test it out? The IP is 66.228.210.6 and there is a CS game running on port 27015. Please try it and post your findings in the forums. Please be sure to include where you are connecting from so we can get a good idea of the routing. Thanks.
Also, at the risk of jinxing the situation, looks like SF is now much improved due in part to some new fiber, new equipment and the dedication of the Digital Wire Works owner who has bent over backwards to tune and tweak this for us. I continue to monitor the connection 7x24 and it's been very clean for the last couple of days. Hopefully this is the same thing you all are seeing.

 
Fixin's ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, March 1, 2003 at 15:38   Comments
Looks like we zeroed in on the problem last night. I'll be at the datacenter early this evening - about 4PM - to do some more work. This includes putting in another switch, so there will be brief periods of interruptions on all servers as we make the cut. Shouldn't be more than a minute or two followed by one or two short bursts as we reset some things. This hopefully means we can stay put.
 
Bandaid bandwidth ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, February 27, 2003 at 21:23   Comments
Over the last two days I've seen some connectivity issues in our San Francisco facility. I thought we had them licked last week. Sadly, this is not the case.
We did install a new Cisco switch this afternoon which seems to have helped, so we'll continue to monitor this closely. Rest assured that this has my full attention and will be resolved one way or another. I really don't want to move again if it can be avoided.
In the mean time I will be adding some servers to a new facility closer to home. I need a place to go when the wife gets sick of me (which is daily). If things don't get resolved soon, we'll start migrating the rentals over to the new facility. I have pre-built some dual Xeon 2.0 Ghz servers that will be used for staging if necessary. Hang in there... we're on it.
 
UT2K3 Demo updated ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 18, 2003 at 21:16   Comments
This is kind of cool... Infogrames has updated the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo for Windows and Linux using the latest gamecode. Along with the update is an additional map (CTF-Orbital2). Full version clients can now also join demo servers again. I'll have the files posted shortly.
 
WONder why? ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, February 13, 2003 at 10:40   Comments
It sure would be nice of Valve to let people know BEFORE they start messing with the WON servers. The best part is that about a year ago, one of their engineers posted a fix which was to use fixed IP addresses because they were renaming the servers. This meant editing a file and placing IPs in it instead of east.won.net as an example. This morning I read a post where it said "the only time this would be a problem is if people have hard-coded the IPs - which should never happen." Can you say "morons?"
I'll have to see how many of them have the fixed IP. Anyway, if you can't connect, it's more WON maintenance. Don't blame me!
 
Whatchoo claimin' holmes? ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, February 13, 2003 at 1:16   Comments
Word on the street is that the Gangwars mod for Half-Life is pretty dope. Why don't you go check it out on our new server and keep them dudes from the other neighborhood away from our turf, eh? 69.1.79.66:27035
 
Fiber repaired ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at 13:17   Comments
That outage has been repaired just moments ago - the one that caused us to be routed through Seattle to get to San Francisco. Pings immediately dropped from 40-50 down to 20-30 for me. Hopefully y'all saw the same thing.
 
Server swaperoo ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, February 6, 2003 at 14:51   Comments
In the interest if trying to improve the performance of the 32 player ports, I've moved them to a different box. They are now at 69.1.79.68 and the old box has been reduced to 20 player ports. Should be better all around.
I wonder if it's time to retire the DMC servers too. Not much action there anymore :(
 
New maps added to CS #4 ... Posted by Motu Sunday, February 2, 2003 at 20:14   Comments
If you haven't already noticed, I've gone ahead and added three new maps to our 32 player CS server. The new rotation is as follows: Aztec, Oilrig, Dust, Cobble, Dust2, Inferno. Not including Vertigo, these are the few standard CS maps that support 32 players. Depending on the forum feedback, we're considering adding Vertigo as well. Either way, have at it!
 
Cleaning up ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 29, 2003 at 13:02   Comments
Still a few minor items left from the move that need resolution. The only one that impacts anything with any significance is the occasional ping spikes. They aren't really spikes though. What happens is the router our gateway connects to times out for a few seconds. We're chipping away at the cause. We've replaced cables, run fiber, reconfigured the switch, flattened the network, etc. It could be something as strange as a failing NIC, so it may not be fixed today since we've already tackled the more obvious causes. Rest assured that we are on it and will have it fixed soon.
In the mean time, there are new servers - sort of the resurrection of CS #3 and TFC #3. They are at 69.1.79.68 on ports 27015 and 27025, respectively.
 
San Francsico moved ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, January 26, 2003 at 13:55   Comments
We got the San Francisco servers moved yesterday, so they are now on new IPs as listed a few posts below. All ports have remained the same - it was just the IPs that changed.
While I thought I was prepared for everything, I neglected to bring a console cable to connect to the switch to reconfigure it :( I ended up driving in to downtown SF, parking in a garage, walking two miles to a Comp-USA only to find that they didn't carry them. Not a problem - I can build my own. Do they have cable kits? Nope. I tried Radio Shack. They didn't speak my language (English). Ended up having my friend drive out from my neighborhood with one.
I'm sure there's a lesson in this somewhere, but I'm too tired to see it. We did have one casualty. The box that used to be 66.28.252.15 isn't responding to a remote power reset, so I have to head in tomorrow to check it out. Aside from that all looks to be okay.
Also, we added another NS server to 69.1.79.68:27035. Enjoy!
 
Moving day ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, January 25, 2003 at 1:38   Comments
In about 9 hours from now we will be shutting down all of the San Francisco servers in order to move them to our new facility. We expect to be up and running again by 1PM PST. If not, be patient. We have planned for many potential problems, but haven't the budget to be prepared for everything (since that would mean a backup server for all 10 of them). That means we may have to scramble to fix things. I have done this many times and no matter how well planned, there is always one thing that goes wrong. Just hope that it will be a minor thing :-)
The new IPs are listed below. Wish us luck!
 
... Posted by Potsie Sunday, January 19, 2003 at 22:09   Comments
RAIDERS!!!
 
Among the changes ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 15, 2003 at 17:23   Comments
Just got the new Dallas server up today. Tonight I will be migrating the CS and TFC #2 servers to the new IP of 12.96.164.208. The port numbering will remain the same.
Also, the recently added Dallas DoD at 66.28.225.108 has been moved to this server.
 
The more things change... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 15, 2003 at 11:23   Comments
the more they stay the same.
Our scheduled cut to InterNAP will not be happening today. We got word yesterday that the datacenter we are in is closing. Navisite bought the space from ClearBlue who bought it from Colo.com. Rather than bringing in the circuit for less than one month (it's costly to run that fiber) our bandwidth provider is pushing us to relocate to a facility where they have a POP. This would certainly be better for us - better performance (less hops), better redundancy (dual Gig-E circuits to their switch) and better pricing.
I know this is disappointing to everyone. It is for me too. This switch is inevitable though. We just need to hammer out a contract with one of two facilities and should have that done within a week.
This does mean a slightly different approach for our switch. Rather than a two day overlap of services, there will be a short period (I'd guess two to three hours) of downtime while we remove the servers from the current facility and bring them up at the new one. At that point they will have new IPS (which should remain as described previously since we're using the same provider) and the old IPs will no longer be active.
I'm really sorry this isn't going according to plan, but in the long run I think it will be better for all of us. A better bandwidth provider in a better, stable datacenter with reliable staff who can reboot the correct server if/when needed.
Thanks for your patience!

 
New IPs effective 1-15-03 ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 8, 2003 at 23:25   Comments
Below is a list of the old IPs and the new ones that will be in place at the time we switch to the new provider. We are hoping to run in parallel for a few days, but that's a best case scenario.
Here are those addresses:

Old IP        New IP 
66.28.252.14  69.1.79.51
66.28.252.15  69.1.79.52 
66.28.252.19  69.1.79.54 
66.28.252.20  69.1.79.56 
66.28.252.21  69.1.79.58 
66.28.252.22  69.1.79.60 
66.28.252.23  69.1.79.62 
66.28.252.26  69.1.79.64 
66.28.252.27  69.1.79.66


We are still on target for a cutover on the 15th. I'll keep you updated as things develop. If you try to ping or trace these now, you will see some strange results that are not indicative of how they will be routed once active on our gateway.
And for those of you interested in learning why we selected the provider we did, here are some cool links:
The technology
and
A cool flash description
 
More news... ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, January 7, 2003 at 0:17   Comments
I know there have been challenges recently with some of our mid-west players reaching servers in San Francisco. Hell.. even some local players too. Well, my new years gift to everyone who plays here at GibGames is that we are very close to finishing up the transition to a new provider. The servers are in the same facility, but we're bringing in InterNAP bandwidth. We're still working through the details since it will mean new IPs for every box in SF. Rental clients will be notified as soon as we finish the details and MOTDs will reflect the new IPs. The target date for the cutover is the 15th. Everyone cross your fingers because we're dropping Cogent on the 17th.
 
Growing, growing, gone ... Posted by Potsie Monday, January 6, 2003 at 18:53   Comments
Well... maybe not gone, but certainly growing. Only a month ago we broke 500 simultaneous players. We're now regularly hitting 550.

I just hope we can keep things running smoothly enough to reach 1000 players this year. That's the target. Roger that?
 
Moving again ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, January 5, 2003 at 22:16   Comments
It's official - Verio sucks. One of our Dallas servers is on a connection to Verio. In the past this was great. As of a few days ago it's been bouncing all over the country before getting to the data center. As a result I'm moving the box in a few days. I can't stand paying for something that doesn't deliver. I'll post the new IPs when available. We'll be in a parallel mode for about a week with the new IPs listed in the MOTD as well.
 
2003!?!? ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, January 2, 2003 at 21:01   Comments
And I thought I'd never live to see 1999. Wait.. maybe I didn't and this is all just a bad, bad, really bad dream. Nonetheless, Happy New Year. Hope it's the best one yet for you. Yes, even you (you know who you are).
 
Someone has to say it... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, December 25, 2002 at 0:43   Comments
Merry Christmas!!
 
Remember to say "thanks" ... Posted by Potsie Friday, December 20, 2002 at 14:28
In the spirit of holiday giving, why not send a thank you to the people protecting our freedom. It only takes a minute or two and may help keep morale up for someone who is helping you. There are also many other similar services where you can send cards, letters, pictures, etc., so look around. It's a way to do "your part" as a civilian at no cost to you. I've taken much of the donations we received here and sent it to Operation Uplink.

    Operation Uplink is a unique program of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and its Ladies Auxiliary. It keeps military personnel and hospitalized veterans in touch with their families and loved ones by providing them with free phone cards. Using contributions from supporters like you, Operation Uplink purchases phone cards and distributes them to servicemen and women who are separated from those they care about.

Whatever you do, try and make this holiday a little brighter for someone. Every little bit helps.
 
DMC Admins Needed ... Posted by Motu Tuesday, December 17, 2002 at 20:56   Comments
If you play our Death Match Classic MOD and would like to ban the cheaters that plague the gaming community, please send your rcon request to Motu. We are looking for honest, respectable, players only.
 
Have YOU got what it takes? ... Posted by Motu Monday, December 16, 2002 at 23:10   Comments
GibGames.com is currently accepting admin requests for our Day Of Defeat MOD. If you feel that you'd make a great addition to our team, email your request to Motu. Don't forget to including a little information about yourself, and why you feel that you would make a good addition to our team. Keep in mind that our GibGames admins are expected to follow all of our rules at all times. Good Luck!
 
Stat trackers rejoice... ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, December 10, 2002 at 23:33   Comments
    ... or not. For the CS and DoD servers I've changed it to track by WON ID instead of name. I received a few too many e-mail complaints about people changing names mid-game just to protect their stats. If it's that important to you, practice - don't be such a whore! So anyway, that tactic won't work anymore.
 
What's a DNS? ... Posted by Potsie Monday, December 9, 2002 at 21:22   Comments
    In case you didn't notice, one of the larger DNS hosts on the Net (600,000 domains) took a hit today. Our site was one of those impacted. In addition, all sub-domains (clan.gibgames.com, forums.gibgames.com) and e-mail were impacted. If you get messages bounced back, that is why. Simply re-send and they should get here. Now I need to go see if we have budget for a backup DNS provider.
 
The more, the merrier ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, December 7, 2002 at 23:14   Comments

    In spite of some of our connectivity challenges at times, we continue to have a very loyal player base. So much so that we've hit new hieghts tonight by having over 500 simultaneous players on our servers just moments ago. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has helped keep us afloat and welcome those of you who have recently found our little community. New additions, such as UT2K3 and Natural Selection, have helped us draw new players, and the longevity of Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic have led to some of our friends being here for over two years now. Hard to believe we were about to close the doors less than a year ago.
 
Nearly done, and SF#1 ... Posted by Potsie Friday, November 29, 2002 at 9:36   Comments
    This post is almost the last piece of testing the website move. I see that things aren't much faster. That's due to the time required to query each server and return the results - both in totals at the top and in player counts to the left. I think I'm going to setup a cron job to run it every 30-60 seconds and just pull the data in from a pre-populated text file in order to speed things up. But I really do like it being "real time" data.
    I'm also heading to the SF data center today to see what happened to SF #1. Could be simple, could be really bad. Your guess is as good as mine. I'll be brining spare parts just in case since it's always something simple when I do, and catastrophic when I don't.
    Hope y'all had a good Thanksgiving and didn't wake up with food poisoning or a hangover.
 
Face lift time ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, November 20, 2002 at 15:25   Comments
    I'm just about done converting the website to a faster method of gathering the real-time server stats and player counts. In addition, I'm cleaning up the appearance a bit. Nothing too dramatic, but I like the results. One thing I still need, however, is a good logo. I received a few submissions, but none that really stood out. I can live with what we have, but if anyone wants to get the creative juices flowing during the next week, feel free. We'll give you "mad props" (as they say in my 'hood) and might even drum up some hardware as a small token (not toking) of our appreciation. K. Bye.
 
It's Ba-aaack ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 19, 2002 at 13:37   Comments
    The box with the public SoF2 servers is back up and humming. Not sure if any players check here for updates, but it's been up for a while now and hasn't filled back up yet. Get to it!
 
Soldier of misfortune ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, November 13, 2002 at 11:21
    I've been getting a lot of e-mails asking where the GibGames SoF2 servers went. They are in the same place as always, but the box hosting them has suffered what looks like a hard drive failure. I have some resurrection tasks to perform, but they have to wait until I get a chance to visit the datacenter. Pretty busy week for me, but I'll try to get it back on-line before the weekend.
 
RtCW 1.4 patch released ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 5, 2002 at 23:35   Comments
    As spotted at Shacknews, a new patch for the classic Return to Castle Wolfenstein is now out. This brings the game to version 1.4. We will have the files mirrored here momentarily (certainly done by the time you read this) and will update the servers tomorrow since it always takes a while for these to trickle out to the users.
 
Dallas changes ... Posted by Potsie Monday, November 4, 2002 at 20:09   Comments
    A couple of things are happening in Dallas this week. First, there is a data center move scheduled for later tonight. This will mean new IP addresses. We're probably moving it to an Internap connection which should improve pings to a wider audience. Secondly, we have nice, shiny new P4 2.0 Ghz boxes sitting with another host just looking for someone to rent a port on them. They're loaded up with 1GB of DDR memory and are really crisp and clean - they even have that new server smell to them (no... not the smell of a burning CPU!).
    As soon as the cut is made, I'll update this post with the new IPs and will update the DNS. In the mean time, check out the DoD port on the new box at 66.28.225.108:27030.
[UPDATE:] The new IP for the Dallas servers is 64.83.120.234 and BOY is this a nice connection! Go check it out!
 
Loaded up ... Posted by Potsie Friday, November 1, 2002 at 1:23   Comments
    Just a quick note to let y'all know that the downloads are working again. Pretty impressive recovery on behalf of the hosting company that provides the server. I expected it to be at least twice this long, if at all.
 
Downloads down ... Posted by Potsie Friday, October 25, 2002 at 16:19
    Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I was able to retrieve my e-mail remotely (in Tucson for a few days). One of the messages was from one of our hosts in Chicago stating that their bandwidth provider had, without warning, terminated their account and cut the service. This was where we hosted our downloads. They claim a few days is all it will take to restore connectivity, but I'm a bit more realistic. My guess is more like two weeks. In the mean time, try Fileshack for some blazingly fast downloads.
 
The CS "biz" ... Posted by Potsie Monday, October 21, 2002 at 19:52   Comments
    I spotted this last night at HardOCP and thought some of you may find it interesting. Shows off some of the numbers for Counter-Strike as compared to other games and television shows. Give it a look as it may inspire you to do more with yoru time than just play games and surf porn.
 
Doomages ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, October 16, 2002 at 18:08   Comments
    Not sure how closely y'all are following/looking for Doom III stuff, but I was poking around Shacknews this afternoon and burried in some of the comments was this link to some scans of an upcoming article on Doom III. Pretty cools stuff for sure. I can't wait to see this game. With all the rampant cheating on the Net, I've spent most of the little gaming time I get playing single-player versions of RtCW, SoF2 and others. This one will no doubt be a must have in '03.
[UPDATE:] Looks like they got busted. Hopefully you had a chance to see them before they got yanked.
 
Snipers are pussies ... Posted by Potsie Friday, October 11, 2002 at 23:20   Comments
    And I'm not talking about TFC here. I was just watching CNN and there were some "experts" on the air discussing the topic of the "beltway sniper" who's been terrorizing the D.C. area for the past week. One of them has already blamed video games and kids, but the ones that I though were cool actually called this person out as a pussy for taking such easy shots. Most are at gas stations where the victim is standing still for 2-3 minutes, the distances are 150-300 yards and they are body shots rather than head shots. Although it's a terrible situation, I actually had to grin at these guys (former military and FBI guys) pretty much saying that it takes no skill and no balls to play that game.
    I also thought there'd be some TFC players who would find this persepctive refreshing :)
 
More web host fun ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, October 9, 2002 at 13:15   Comments
    Today our wonderful web host seems to be taking about 1000 ms to ping the west coast, so it makes it look like half our servers are down. They aren't. I think I need a better web solution. Was looking into redoing this thing anyway, so maybe now would be a good time. We're limping along on one CPU on this box and the QStat stuff (server status info) is slow as heck. I wonder if I can run PHP on my iPAQ... then I could work on an update while the kids play at the park :)
 
UT 2K3 update ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, October 5, 2002 at 2:09   Comments
    Just to keep you folks up on where we stand, the Linux dedicated server was released, so tonight we got a retail version of the CTF port up and running at 205.155.6.60:7777 and the demo CTF port is alive at 205.155.6.60:7756. The Win32 dedicated server was released, but it's total crap. Massive memory leak and a fistfull of bugs, so nobody is running that yet. Once it's stable, we'll roll out the retail versions of the DM and BR modes as well. Hopefully the full version lives up to the hype. If anyone wants to donate a copy to me, feel free ;)
 
To those who think I'm crazy ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, September 25, 2002 at 0:13   Comments
    I keep telling people that the latest release of HL Guard is bad. It's not just me who found it to cause problems. There's a whole series of threads like this one that leads me to believe we're better off with the old version or none at all.
Just thought I'd clear that up. Also take note if you are a clan renting from us. I've seen some of you update to 1.20 and then message me saying the server is bad.
 
SoF2 1.02 update ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, September 24, 2002 at 0:20   Comments
    As I alluded to the other night, SoF2 has been updated to version 1.02. For some reason many people are still playing the old 1.00, so I'll probably leave that server as is for now. That said, there is another 1.01 server that will be updated tonight and some of the hosted servers have already requested it. Here is a list of the changes/improvements found in the 1.02 patch which is mirrored in the files section. Included is Punkbuster integration to finally fix some of that blatant cheating that happens.
 
Coming and Going ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, September 22, 2002 at 13:45   Comments
    Sadly, I have to announce that we are cancelling our contract with the facility in Atlanta. Many of you who play there know that there have been significant issues with the connection from time to time. The responses I've received were not indicative of someone who cares about the clients, so I have no choice but to find another host. I would have waited until another was lined up, but the outages are just making us look bad. The reason seems to be excessive DDoS attacks against the border router which is the access point to the facility. The complete lack of attention to this is unbelievable to me. To top it off, customers like me get charged for the bandwidth used by these attacks since they flood all ports. Not at all appropriate. I hope to have something else in Atlanta shortly and will keep you posted.
    Now on to the good news. I recently found what looks to be a great facility in downtown San Fancisco and have one server there now. We'll give this a "pressure test" over the next few weeks and assuming it passes the test we'll add to the cluster there. We have one CS and one TFC there now at 66.111.33.90. My pings (via AT&T cable) are 15-20 ms, so I think this one may kick ass. Give it a try and let me know!
 
LOL! ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 20, 2002 at 14:05   Comments
    I laughed so hard I almost cried - the "rice-rocket" case mod does for case modding what coffee cans do for exhaust pipes (huh?). The funny thing is that I was just about to add a K&N filter to my case fan.
 
Typical ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, September 19, 2002 at 2:13   Comments
    Just when I finally get the SOF2 stats added, there are changes coming. If you ever want a developer to update a game, just ask me to start running stats for it, or update my servers to the latest revision. It's almost guaranteed that within days there will be a new release.
 
UT 2003 Demo ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, September 14, 2002 at 1:07   Comments
    You know you want it. I think I can help. Find the file, get a prize - no waiting in line at Fileplanet! We also have demo servers up already: 66.28.252.26 = DM and 205.155.6.60 = CTF
[UPDATE:]A BombingRun server is now up too: 66.28.252.23:7757
 
New rentals available ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 13, 2002 at 12:36   Comments
    Just a reminder that we've got ports available once again for rentals. We added two new boxes to SF (dual P3-1Ghz, 1GB RAM, 18GB SCSI - our standard) and have servers on stand-by in Dallas, Atlanta and Miami for anyone interested. See the rentals page to obtain a quote.
    And don't miss out on the logo contest below! We really need a better graphic for this site and for my new boxers.
 
Logo time again ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, September 12, 2002 at 23:35   Comments
    Some of you may remember a time a little over a year ago when we held a contest for a banner design. While the submissions were limited, the intention was good. And we did get a slightly better one than we had before - even though I could have done a better one myself.
    Anyway... one of our esteemed admins - oh wait, it was Aiwrtcode - came up with an idea to help pay for some additional servers. He found a place that will print your logo on products like hats, T-shirts, mugs and, of course, boxer shorts. The cool thing is that any purchased products result in a small portion of the proceeds going to yours truly so I can buy more beer add servers.
    So here's the thing.. I'd like to try this so that rather than just asking for donations people would actually be able to help us out and get something in return. Wouldn't you be more inclined to spring $15 for a hat than send cash to a complete stranger? I know I would. The problem is that our logo isn't very "catchy" and I think we need something better before we start printing it on boxers.
    So here's the deal... design a logo for GibGames.com and send it me via e-mail. I'll post the entries here and will let people vote on them in ... say ... three weeks. So get them to me by Friday, October 4th. The winning entry will receive their choice of prizes yet to be determined. Some ideas include a P3-1Ghz CPU, a GeForce2 GTS, a server for a month or a couple other things we're toying with.
    Oh.. and keep in mind the theme and sizing of the current one since we'll want to use it on the site as well. Thanks, and good luck!
 
HL Guarded ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, September 11, 2002 at 18:26   Comments
    In a move that can only mean that there's a new release coming out tomorrow, I finally updated HL Guard on all the CS, TFC and DoD servers. Included now is the ability to kick by name - including wildcards. So we can auto-kick anyone using the name MotuSucks by just blocking the string "motu."
[UPDATE:] Okay... back to an older rev. I tried numerous config changes and it just lagged things to hell. We'll just continue to rely on the players to report cheaters and our sharp admin staff to ban them.
    Also another reminder that we again have rentals available in Atlanta, Miami and Dallas. The demand has been amazing, so we've struck a partnership that gives us great coverage and the ability to fire up new servers in just a day or two.
 
Finally ... Posted by Potsie Monday, September 9, 2002 at 2:51   Comments
    If you play on our Atlanta ports, you'll be happy to see that we finally got HL Guard working on both the CS and TFC ports. It's long overdue.
    Also related to Atlanta, we now have ports available for rent. A new partnership has enabled us to provide additional rentals in Atlanta and Dallas and we're looking for hosting in other markets as well. Please contact our rentals department if you need a quote or more details.
 
Like Doom3, but free! ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 6, 2002 at 13:03   Comments
    I know most of you are CS players, but you may have "cut your teeth" on the original Quake. There's been a bit of press lately about the Tenebrae project. Here's the skinny:
    Tenebrae is a modification of the quake source that adds stencil shadows and per pixel lights to quake. Stencil shadows allow for realistic shadow effects on every object in the game world. Per pixel lighting allows you to have fine surface details correctly lit. These are essentially the same algorithms as used by the new Doom game.

Also, the latest version adds these features:
    -Automatic light extraction. (no dark maps anymore)
    -Animation interpolation
    -Better particles
    -Reflective surfaces: water, mirrors, glass
    -Over bright lights

I checked this out in the wee hours this morning and it made Quake feel all warm and fuzzy. It was a bit nostalgic, but the graphics really blew me away. Kinda fun if you're an old Quaker and probably pretty cool if you just want to see what started the legacy, but with an updated visual impact.
 
Dallas Picking Up ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, September 4, 2002 at 19:43   Comments
     In the last few days our Dallas CS server has become more popular. This is a great time to check your ping and possibly find a new home. :) It has StatsME and PhyschoStats installed and running. Check it out at: 66.28.95.226
 
Mmmmmm ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, September 1, 2002 at 12:45   Comments
    Beer
 
Skywalking Grounded ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, August 28, 2002 at 5:34   Comments
    After a recent surge of skywalking, a new rule has been added to our CS Rules to take care of de_Dust's little exploit. The rule consists of a warn/kick/ban for 1440 minutes (24 hours).
    For those of you who aren't familiar with skywalking, it consists of players literally climbing out of the map and walking in the "sky" to shoot players from above. What will they think of next, landswimming? Ok, it's late...give me a break.
 
Servers, files and stats, oh my! ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, August 25, 2002 at 13:54   Comments
    Just wanted to let y'all know of some minor changes around here in the last few days.
- We've shifted some servers to new IPs: DoD #2 and UT DM
- Got the GG#1 box replaced. Even more powerful CPUs on the way and should be in on Tuesday.
- Added Dallas (finally) at 66.28.95.226
- Fixed the DNS for files.gibgames.com so that it now uses our Chicago box and moved a good portion of the files to it - at least the more current ones. We may trim the list a bit since not many people are looking for version 1.1 of Counter-strike anymore ;)
- We're now running Psychostats for public CS ports (Atlanta TBD)

I think that's it for now. At least I can cross those few items off my list of things to do before I die.
 
New DOD Rules... ... Posted by Motu Sunday, August 25, 2002 at 0:21   Comments
In case anyone is interested, a copy of our new DOD rules have been posted on our rules page all thanks to our DOD admin, TNT. You'll see that they stick to our basic GibGames code, so go have some fun! Server IPs can be found here.
 
OMFG! ... Posted by Potsie Friday, August 23, 2002 at 23:12   Comments
    Can it be real?
    In related news, we are really close to finishing a global ban system - get caught cheating on ONE GibGames server, be banned from them all.
 
Finally! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, August 21, 2002 at 11:28   Comments
    In case you missed it, last night marked the return of GG #1. The box is a NICE upgrade from the old one and seems to be performing well. Also newsworthy is the fact that Dallas is now on-line. You can find it at 66.28.95.226. Hope to have a couple more boxes running there soon.
 
Tonight's the night! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, August 20, 2002 at 18:56   Comments
    Don't forget folks.. tonight our admin staff is hosting our first monthly "CS Marathon" - three hours of non-stop action to see who can chalk up the best scores (I think it's ratio based) in that period. We haven't firmed up the prizes, but some ideas include: Burned up CPU from GG #1, burned up CPU from my wifes PC, busted slocket, dead CD-ROM and other such wonderous prizes! The festivities start at 7PM PDT at 66.28.252.27:27015. Be there, or be somewhere else. Here are the details.
    While y'all are doing that, I'll be at the data center replacing GG #1 with an entirely new box - dual P3-1Ghz, 1GB RAM, 36 GB U2W SCSI. Should be nice. Let's hope I don't unplug the wrong box while I'm there and interrupt the marathon.
    Update: IT'S ALLLIIIVE!!! GG #1 is back in action. Go now.
 
The man, the myth, the legend... ... Posted by Potsie Monday, August 19, 2002 at 21:02   Comments
    Kaisersoze appeared in my garage only moments ago. While it's reported that noboby really knows what he looks like, I do. He looks like a guy with ECC memory and an Adaptec 2940UW card in his hands - exactly what we need to get GG #1 back on its feet. My hands are still trembling from the experience. I can't tell you how cool it was of this guy to drive all the way out here just to help me/you/us out like this. When you see him on the servers you'd damn well better kiss his ass after he's gibbed you. Thanks bro! We owe you big time!
 
Bad news, Good news ... Posted by Potsie Friday, August 16, 2002 at 17:04   Comments
    First the bad. The box running GG #1 servers is not coming back. One of the CPU fans died, thus burning up the CPU. Now the good. I have all the parts for another dual P3-1Ghz to replace it - except for the HSFs which should be here tomorrow. If all goes according to plan, this replacement will be up and running Monday. Hang in there!
    Update: Okay.. you know what they say about plans. The first problem is the 1GB of ECC memory I bought is, in fact, NOT ECC. What a bunch of morons. The good news is I've since found some as an interim replacement, but it probably won't be here until Tuesday. The major shipment arrives Thursday. If anyone is in the Bay Area and wants to loan me a few sticks I could replace it with brand new pieces when they get here. Just a thought.
 
Woops! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, August 13, 2002 at 13:54   Comments
    Somehwere between when I left last night and when I woke up this morning, GG #1 died. Since I'm about 300 miles from the data center, it will remain down until Thursday or Friday. Sorry about that, but there are plenty of other ports to entertain you in the mean time. I'm thinking it's time to upgrade that box anyway, so sit tight and the wait will be worth it :)
    Oh yeah.... and the new IP for Miami is 66.232.22.200. The DMC, DoD and RtCW ports are all there now.
    Update: I just got home (12:30 Thursday morning) and it looks like all the parts are here for #1 to be upgraded on Friday. Allegedly the box was rebooted today, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they reset the wrong one. So... one way or another, look for #1 to be back in action before the evening festivities on Friday.
 
Flakey hosts suck ... Posted by Potsie Monday, August 12, 2002 at 11:59   Comments
    So a week has passed with no word from the idiots in Denver. I've sent e-mails to the local authorities to see if they can help. This means many of the files will not be available for download since one of those boxes was the primary file serving box.
    Now I hear that the Miami host hasn't been paying bills and has "gone out of business." This is where I run he web server from, so if one day it's just gone you'll know why. I'm going to try and recover this box as well and will relocate it somewhere - perhaps in the same facility, but through a different company. I'm wondering if it's time to become regional again and give up on a nation-wide coverage scheme. Too many headaches lately :(
    Update: So we've already moved to a new provider in Miami. Better network and great support thus far. I'm looking at them as a potential partner for some expansion - that's how happy I am with them. They literally saved me. I was probably minutes away from my old provider being cut off and they moved my box and had it up and running within two hours. Great stuff.
 
DoD 3.1 ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, August 7, 2002 at 15:06   Comments
    Already mirrored in the files section is the 3.1 update for Day of Defeat. Just came across it this morning, so I won't update the servers for a day or two since I've no idea if they're backward compatible. Evidently the patch includes the incorporation of the Valve Anti-Cheat. Does this even work in the first place? I'm skeptical, but appreciate any efforts to thwart the bastard cheaters.
    Update: I'm going to update the DoD servers to 3.1 late tonight. Probably between when the wife and kids go to bed and when I get 3 of the 40 other things done on my list.
 
Denver ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, August 7, 2002 at 12:09   Comments
    I'm really getting tired of having to post this, but Denver is down again. No reply from the host, so who knows what happened this time. If I were to guess, I'd say they haven't been paying their bills because they tried to charge me three times in one month. /me sends e-mail to lawyer - again.
    A soon as I hear anything I'll update y'all here.

    Update: Well, still no word from those bastards. This is the last straw. I've contacted those of you who are hosted in Denver about alternative arrangements. I'm killing the service there. I cannot be left without a resopnse for 12 hours like this. I'll probably never see those servers again, but maybe it's best to cut my losses now. When the impact trickles down to people who rely on me for their servers, it's imperative that the host be reliable (in addition to stable and having good performance). I can never reach these guys when I need something, yet they seem to be able to bill me frequently. Not anymore!
    Anyway, this opens up a little capital for alternative locations. I'd like to keep a presence in Denver, so if anyone knows a good host that charges $100 per Mbps or less, please let me know.
 
Back to normal ... Posted by Potsie Monday, August 5, 2002 at 21:00   Comments
    Got the web redirected back to its real home, so all should be in ship shape once again. For some reason the APC info I had for this box was wrong, so when the intentional shutdown failed to close all the apps properly I couldn't do a remote hard reset. Oh well... not like this is mission critial stuff ;)
 
And here I thought it was me ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, August 1, 2002 at 15:35   Comments
    Just cruising the web and discovered and updated IP driver for UT. Evidently the ping problems on the UT servers have been well documented and I just never heard about it:
    This fix causes the UT server to correctly process ICMP port unreachable messages, and disconnect any connection it receives one for. This solves the Windows 2000 creeping ping problem and the denial of service attack mentioned in this article.

I applied the patch, so let's see how these servers perform now - shall we?
 
32 players, a move and a fix ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, August 1, 2002 at 15:16   Comments
    I had a number of requests to add 32 player servers to the rotation, so it's now done. We have Dust/Aztec at 66.28.252.27:27015 and Dustbowl/Avanti at 66.28.252.27:27025. Hope it works out well.
    I also relocated the SF UT server to 66.28.252.22 to improve performance. This box has more than enough horsepower and RAM, and it should also improve the games running on the box it was removed from.
    Lastly, if you are like me and wondered why you couldn't see the DoD details with Q3Plug anymore, make sure you download the latest version (1.3b1) and you'll once again be able to see all the goodies.

 
He's a big boy now! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 31, 2002 at 22:42
    Our very own TFC admin, Aiwrtcode, turned 16 today. While I didn't get him a present, I thought I could put his name in print and let you all e-mail him your wishes. While he may only be 16, he has the spelling of a 5 year old. That notwithstanding, he is a tremendous asset to GibGames and has been with us for over a year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRIAN!!!
 
SoF2 servers updated ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, July 27, 2002 at 13:01   Comments
    All of the hosted SoF2 servers and one of the three publics have been updated to the 1.01 patch. Apparently not many people have the patch though, as evidenced by the severe drop in players as soon as we updated them. This is just a reminder that soon they will all be running 1.01, so grab the patch and make the change now.
 
Popular Indeed ... Posted by Motu Sunday, July 21, 2002 at 18:34
GibGames' popularity has grown by about 50% in just the last month or so...

Excellent job Potsie!
 
Have you got what it takes? ... Posted by Motu Thursday, July 18, 2002 at 4:07
    GibGames is currently reviewing requests for admin positions on our DoD Servers. If you play on GibGames DoD often and think you have what it takes, shoot me a request with the reasons why you think you'd make a good candidate.

    Potsie here. If the above hasn't piqued your interest, what if you knew that GibGames has the top CLQ ranked DoD server? Would that make you think about it? Check this out:

 
Of patches, updates and glitches ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, July 13, 2002 at 0:57   Comments
    Not sure how many of you use Qstat in your travels, but it's what I use to produce the player counts for each server in the server section. Just a brief FYI: The 1.01 version of SoF2 doesn't report correctly anymore, so for an accurate view of how many are in the server you'll need to click on one of them to go into the server detail view. I'll see if I can fabricate a fix for this.
 
And it just keeps coming.. ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 11, 2002 at 18:05   Comments
    After a bit of a false start, it looks like Day of Defeat has been updated to 3.0. Just when I thought I could head to the brew pub :( Now I have to wait like everyone else to get the files. Once I get them downloaded, I'll mirror here and update the servers. We haven't seen a Q3 update in awhile... how about it id? Wanna throw yours into the mix too?
 
Another patch/update ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, July 11, 2002 at 15:48   Comments
    Today the 1.04 patch for Jedi Knight II found its way into our hands. I've mirrored the client files in the obvious place (files) and updated the server. I don't thing they're backward compatible, so you'll need to update in order to play.
    And the #1 SoF2 server has been updated to 1.01. The #2 (in Denver) is still at 1.00, as are the hosted servers. Too many people playing this morning to justify shutting the servers down. I'll wait until it looks like the momentum of 1.01 has picked up so we don't alienate people who don't know about the patch. As with JK2, this isn't backward compatible.
 
SoF2 patch ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 10, 2002 at 23:42   Comments
    As mentioned last week, the 1.01 patch is now available. Included are 4 new maps, a new gun, a new mode (Demolition) and a slew of bug fixes including: - Pause when clients join a team has been fixed. This last one is something that we've noticed at GibGames, so I'm glad it was fixed. I kept thinking it was just me ;)
    I'll be updating the servers early in the AM tomorrow. In the mean time you can grab the file here.

 
DoD 3.0 and SoF2 patch coming ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, July 3, 2002 at 19:50   Comments
    Just to keep you all informed, word is that Day of Defeat version 3.0 will be released next week. No word on the exact date, but we'll have the files mirrored (although we're still maxed out from the CS update) and will update the servers shortly after the release.
    There is also news of a patch coming soon for Soldier of Fotrune 2 which is becoming more and more popular here at GibGames. The patch includes new maps, so be on the lookout for it. As with DoD, we'll have the files and update the servers shortly after the patch is released.
    Since our primary download server is still maxed out nearly 24/7, I may add these files to a different location so people can grab the quickly instead of waiting in line at FilePlanet. I should have something worked out in plenty of time.
 
Dallas coming up ... Posted by Potsie Friday, June 28, 2002 at 13:15   Comments
    We have finalized a hosting deal in Dallas and should have a pair of servers up within a week. In order to "jump start" our new location, we're offering a deal on two rentals there similar to that of our Denver facility at $50 for a 16 player server. We have two ports open for a limited time. You can ping test the gateway at 66.28.28.90. Contact us for info.
 
BTW... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, June 26, 2002 at 2:24   Comments
    The RtCW servers are now running 1.33. Go grab the update if you haven't already. Looks like most leagues are using this version now, so it's probably time you do too.
 
Next stop, Dallas ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, June 20, 2002 at 17:05   Comments
    Got quite a few responses to the little poll about branching out to Dallas. Looks like about 70% of the responses indicated that it's a favorable idea. I've got a few good leads on deals for both colocation and dedicated servers at three really good data centers. I'll be negotiating pricing and services over the next week or so. Looks like we could have a new home around the beginning of July. If any of you have knowledge of a good facility with good pricing, feel free to let me know about it. It's always nice to have a wide selection to choose from.
    Also had a nice surprise earlier today. After we lost our AT&T connections in Hayward we've been slowly and steadily climbing again in terms of player counts. Mid-morning today I happened to see this:

Been awhile since we broke 200 players. Good to see it starting to happen again.
 
Almost a "10" ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, June 19, 2002 at 23:04   Comments
    While we don't get a tremendous amount of UT traffic here, one of our recent rental subscribers has scored a knockout with their new mod - Freehold - scoring a 9.8 out of 10 at the Modsquad review site. Sounds like a bunch of really cool changes to the regular game play. Get more details and the files at the Freehold UT website.
    Oh... and if you wanna check out the server, it's at 66.28.242.143:7777.
 
Lost in the shuffle ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, June 13, 2002 at 11:32   Comments
    So things weren't so bad yesterday with the new releases of HL and CS. I suspect a lot of people, still angry over the 1.4 fiasco, are simply waiting a day or two this time. Surprisingly I was still maxing out the download box even after increasing it to 500 connections. That's probably because of this:

    All of the servers, both public and rentals, are now running the new HLDS and the CS are all at 1.5. You can grab them updates in our files section if you haven't already.
    In "what were they thinking" news, Activision released 1.33 of RtCW last night amidst all the HL/CS udating. That's a sure-fire way to get your update ignored. Timing is everything! In any case, we have the files mirrored here. There is also a new map pack (also mirrored). You can learn what has changed in the readme file. No decision yet as to when we will update the servers.
 
The Internet is broken! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, June 12, 2002 at 13:38   Comments
    Thanks to the newest release of HL and CS ;) As I write this, all the necessary files have been mirrored in our files section for your downloading ease. That's right.. no waiting 120 minutes at FilePlanet, no 404 errors and no 1.2 Kbps downloads. Go get 'em! Oh... and I'll be updating the servers slowly throughout the day. If you're a hosted clan we will be contacting you prior to upgrading - which should be taking place this evening - so you can say yay or nay. Enjoy!
 
It's COMING! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, June 11, 2002 at 23:01   Comments
    Yes folks, the day is nearly upon us... the day where server admins and site operators pull their hair out while the Net slows to a crawl as everyone tries frantically to update to the new versions of Half-Life and CS. I've received the server files, so I should have the servers updated shortly after the client release - which I will mirror here also.
    In other news, thanks to a new rental we have the pleasure of hosting a Soldier of Fortune 2 server now. The game is listed under the Q3 section (same engine) and is at 66.28.252.15. Enjoy!
 
HL Guarded ... Posted by Potsie Monday, June 10, 2002 at 1:08   Comments
    Just practicing installing software tonight and went ahead and updated/added the latest HL Guard to all public CS, TFC and DoD servers. This means there will be a new release within hours since that's how it always works ;) In the mean time, this should help stop some of the more obvious hacks and cheats. Enjoy!
 
Stunning turn of events ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, June 4, 2002 at 23:59   Comments
    It's amazing what a good letter from your attorney can do. Without warning, all the Denver servers are back up after as much as three weeks of not a single word from the host. I can understand a problem from time to time, but this is total BS. Gotta get those servers back so I can put them in a place run by professionals. This last outage cost me a hosted clan that has been with me for some time and I HATE to see that happen. In any event, the servers are up until I can find a way to get them home so enjoy the great pings.
 
Wolf servers staying at 1.31 ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 31, 2002 at 13:14   Comments
    If you're a RtCW player wondering why we haven't upgraded to 1.32 yet, check out this article at Shack E.S. describing the findings of most leagues.
 
Help Wanted ... Posted by Potsie Monday, May 27, 2002 at 23:45   Comments
    While it may seem that UT gets the short end of the stick here, we're still committed to running servers for those few who find their way here. Part of the reason our UT servers are under utilized is that I personally know very little about admining and tuning these servers. I spent a whole ten minutes researching some websites to come up with INI files, but I'm sure there are some out there who could do wonders for the servers.
    That said, what we're looking for is someone to spend some time helping tune and tweak the UT servers - determine the best settings, pick the best maps, recommend mods, etc. If you have the knowledge and want to be part of the team here, please shoot me an e-mail with some reasons why you've got the stuff. This isn't a paying gig, but you can brag to your friends that you helped bring the GibGames UT servers from obscurity to the tops of the CLQ rankings ;)
 
Fat, dumb and happy? ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, May 22, 2002 at 12:56   Comments
    This image shows how I feel sometimes after sitting on my ass all day and drinking beer (like right now!).

    Of course this is really one of the screen shots of the upcoming Doom III, as reported at Shacknews. As more of these hit the net, be sure to remember that your CS hardware may not run a game like this so start saving your money for that GeForce 4 and 3Ghz P4 processor!
 
Denver outage ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 17, 2002 at 18:16   Comments
    I just received word from our host in Denver that those servers will be down until Monday due to a major power issue in the building. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused!

    Okay... it's now four days since the reported outage and only one of the servers is back on line. I have tried to reach the host only to get a full voice mail box at the other end. This doesn't look good. I am going to try and recover my servers from them and find a new, responsive home for them. As before, I'm getting rejected e-mail from some of the hosted clans hotmail accounts. Please be sure to contact me about relocation or refund options. Thanks!
 
Threewave updated ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, May 16, 2002 at 23:13   Comments
    The all-time best Quake mod, Threewave, has a new release - 1.5 - and the server has been updated to this version. The update file is available for download in the files section. If the prior versions are any indication, this update will kick ass.
 
Still growing... ... Posted by Potsie Friday, May 10, 2002 at 1:43   Comments
    Just got another box in for rentals in SF. This isn't quite our standard in that it's a single P3, but it's running at 1.4 Ghz, so the performance should be similar. We made this move to single CPUs in order to move into a new 1U standard. Less space = more boxes. More boxes = more games. More games = ummm.... more punk-ass cheaters and whining kids, but that's not the point ;)
    Also, the few of you who play DOD maye be interested to note that version 2.1 is being released on Friday the 10th. Check the website for details. I'll try and get it mirrored here early and will certainly update our server.
 
Updated cheat protection ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, May 7, 2002 at 13:18   Comments
    Rather than continue to wait for Valve, we decided it was time to once again install a third-party solution. All of the CS and TFC servers have been updated with the latest United Admins version of CS Guard. We also added Ping Booster (wow!) and StatsME. I'm sure this will help us cut down on the number of instances of blatant hacks and cheaters, but we'll still be keeping our admin presence. Enjoy!
 
New Jedi Knight II server and more rentals available ... Posted by Potsie Monday, April 29, 2002 at 14:42   Comments
    I'm pleased to tell you all that we got another box up and running that has a Jedi Knight II server running. From what I hear, this game kicks ass. It's listed on the left under the Quake3 games since it uses the same engine. Let me know if he settings need to be improved any.
    We also now have ports available for rental at our SF facility. The IP for ping testing is 66.28.252.15. Should be the same as the public SF servers, but this box kicks even more ass thanks to some cool hardware donations from friends of GibGames.
 
Diehards! ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, April 27, 2002 at 17:14   Comments
    I knew the TFC server was nearly full all the time, but I had no idea it was THIS active. With only 20 players it's managed to sneak into the number 4 spot on The CLQ. See for yourself:

Nice job folks and thanks! This is kind of impressive if you ask me :)
 
Thanks Valve ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 24, 2002 at 18:59   Comments
     For making the latest HL and CS updates as smooth and sensible as ever. Great error messages too. My favorite one: "You are running the    language version. This update is for the english version only."
     Then as server admins we get to try and figure out which plugins work and which don't, which have been updated, where to find them, etc. Nothing but a major PAIN IN THE ASS.
     Now that I got that off my chest, some of the servers are updated. Thanks to Baker for helping get the Linux boxes updated in Atlanta and Chicago. Those seemed to be the smoothest. The Win32 servers? Pfft. Only time will tell. A couple of them are updated, but crashing. The TFC seem to be fine except Neo. It's on my list.
[UPDATE:]Looks like all the Win32 servers needed was a complete purging of the old CS files and a full CS mod install. How easy was that? The hardest part was getting the damn files. So anyway, all should be set now. Enjoy!
 
CS 1.4 Is Here! ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, April 24, 2002 at 16:45   Comments
     The long awaited release of CS 1.4 is out and running on GibGames. So far our Atlanta server (66.28.158.15) is offering the new release. The rest of the servers will be updated as soon as possible. Go check it out and then come back to the forums and complain as usual.
 
Ever have one of those days? ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, April 20, 2002 at 15:06   Comments
    See all the servers missing from the display on the left? First I lost connectivity to Chicago. This server was supposed to be transitioned to a direct account with the host instead of through a managed provider. I never heard from the host, and suddenly it looks like they pulled the plug. Trying to work that out as I write this.
    Then I get an e-mail after losing the Denver servers that says they lost their connectivity. Par.
    But here it is the next day and my Denver guy has come through with flying colors! I just got the new IP addys from him and he was able to port map some stuff for me so that I could change them remotely. What a swell thing to do :) So note the new Denver addresses above. They seem to be a bit faster for me by about 30ms. Not bad! I'll update the server details later too.
 
Speaking of stats ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, April 18, 2002 at 12:18   Comments
     ... I _think_ I've fixed 99.9% of the problems with the stats pages. Looks like I now have the right weapons and maps for TFC, have all the images showing correctly, have them updating daily and EVEN added stats for the DMC server. (and check out that swanky logo I made!)
     In the next few days we'll finish rolling out StatsME on the remaining CS servers too. It looks cool and adds a fun element to the game. If you haven't seen it in action, check the Atlanta or Denver CS servers. I think you'll like it.
 
Live Stats ... Posted by Motu Wednesday, April 17, 2002 at 16:27   Comments
     For those of you who haven't tryed it out yet, GibGames CS Atlanta (66.28.158.15) has a live stats program called StatsME. This program displays up to the second who-killed-who info in the center of the screen and calculates the best killer of each round, much like you would find at a lazer tag arena. At the end of the map, every players personal hit and kill percentage is displayed in detail.
     The program adds a whole new level of excitement to CS, so go check it out!

[UPDATE:] Potsie here. We just got this working on the Denver CS server too, so have at it! I personally enjoyed seeing my name at the end of each round ... of course it was as the victim.
 
GibGames Growing ... Posted by Motu Monday, April 15, 2002 at 18:04   Comments
     GibGames is currently accepting requests for CS and TFC admins for our Denver, Chicago and Atlanta servers. If you live near these areas and frequent the servers, maybe you have what it takes to become a GibGames admin. Please send your requests to our CS Admin Manager or TFC Admin manager, with a short description of your motives and personality. GibGames is looking for honest, respectful and mature players only. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me (Motu) here. GibGames.com Admin Center Turnoff

 
Chicago server alive w/new IP ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, April 13, 2002 at 13:55   Comments
Finally got that bad boy back on-line for your NeoTF needs. Turned out to be (allegedly) a routing issue that forced the change in IP address. As you can see above, the new IP is 66.28.242.143 - formerly .159.
Enjoy.
 
The Skin Hack Is Back? ... Posted by Motu Thursday, April 11, 2002 at 22:09   Comments
     There are many things that we could point to as proof that the human being is not smart, the Counter-Strike ‘cheat’ is my personal favorite. The fact that we had to invent the ‘cheat’... Now why did we invent the cheat? Because we were participating in a game that we were bad at, we looked at the situation, we chose not to get better or quit, but instead to artificially inflate our skill, so that we could continue to play a game that we were naturally bad at. The only thing dumber than cheating itself, is the skin hack, who’s only purpose is to beguile the opposite team, while in turn, making it painfully obvious to the admin who the cheater is.
     Last night on the GibGames Bay Area server I witnessed my first skin hacker in over 6 months. The stupidity and ignorance of this individual astounds me. Needless to say, this player was banned indefinitely. I received great enjoyment by removing this player from the GibGames player pool, and thus making GibGames cheat-free once again.
 
Chicago blues ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, April 10, 2002 at 23:41   Comments
Having some stability challenges with one of the Chicago boxes. It's been down for two days and they tell me it's not a hardware issue. I think that since they quoted me the wrong IP address, it could be a comprehension issue. Some poor slob with that other IP is having his server reset throughout the last two days for no apparent reason ;)
Anyway, if they can't resolve it tonight, we're moving to a new box. Can't have this kind of outage. In the mean time, I'm going to try and bring up CS #2 on the other Chicago box. Sorry about the downtime for those of you who were playing there regularly!
 
Happy Easter ... Posted by Potsie Sunday, March 31, 2002 at 15:37   Comments
Hopefully even those who don't celebrate are enjoying this beautiful Spring day. I have family coming over for beer and BBQ. Not quite the traditional gathering, but you probably don't expect me nor my family to be too normal.
The new Bay Area server seems to have stabilized and has had the CS and TFC ports full most of the time. This is great to see. We'll be adding two more boxes within a week. A couple more public ports, but mostly for rentals. Enjoy!

 
Bay Area servers relocating tonight ... Posted by Potsie Friday, March 29, 2002 at 19:13   Comments
With the final closure of the data center, the last of the 209.155.226.N servers are gone. They're being redeployed tonight on a 10 Mbps connection. Once they're in and accessible I'll post IP info.
Thanks for your patience!
[UPDATE:] The move is under way and the first of many is up. You can find your old RA3, CS and TFC servers at 66.28.252.14. Pings look to be about the same as before from all reports.
 
Updates ... Posted by Potsie Monday, March 25, 2002 at 12:10   Comments
With the last of the new servers going in this week (Bay Area), we'll finally get around to finishing some of the clean up around here.
For starters, we'll now have servers in the following locations:
SF Bay Area
Denver
Chicago
Atlanta
Florida
We may add one to NY once a good host is located.
The UT CTF server has been moved to 66.28.179.93.
The DMC server has been moved to 66.232.6.34
The TFC #2 server has been moved to 66.28.19.95
and...
There's a Lithium (yes, Quake 2!) server at 66.28.179.93
In the mean time the stats will be re-started for all games/mods (UT excluded). This will be a pretty large undertaking as we hadn't provided stats for all of them in the past. Nonetheless, it looks like we have programs in place that can parse logs from each. One change is that we'll be archiving them monthly in order to reduce server load. These log files can get rather large with all you crazy people playing 7x24.
We also have many ports available for rent and can offer some pretty aggressive pricing. Contact our rentals specialist and tell him Potsie sent you. We've been beating our hosting companies pretty hard to improve the connectivity and it seems to be working. Pings have improved in the past week in two of our facilities.
Thanks for you patience while this continues to be sorted out!
 
Chicago maintenance ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, March 23, 2002 at 14:55   Comments
As I just found out - after being down for 6 hours - the data center that holds the Chicago boxes is undergoing a power upgrade today. This will allegedly prevent any future power outages, but in the mean time they've knocked us off-line to install some equipment. Should be back up soon.
 
National tour contunues... ... Posted by Potsie Friday, March 22, 2002 at 20:24   Comments
Next stop - Atlanta. Server was setup today, so before the night is over we should have a couple game ports live.
[UPDATE:] The Altanta addition now completed. We have two servers alive - CS and TFC at ports 27015 and 27025, respectively, on 66.28.158.15
 
GibGames Denver goes live! ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, March 14, 2002 at 14:24   Comments
As a follow up to last nights post, the Denver servers are now up. I'll be moving games to them through the day. The IPs for these boxes are 66.28.179.93 - 66.28.179.96. I'll update the server list tonight with the new ports for each game.
 
Servers moving, changing, leaving ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, March 13, 2002 at 11:49
Most of you know that things are changing around here. Part of that includes moving games to different hosts around the country. For some, it means worse connections. For others, it means a new GibGames server closer to them. With the expense of keeping servers alive and the limited amount of contributions, we also have to trim back on the number of servers run. For example, we cannot afford to keep so many CS and TFC ports alive and at capacity as they've been. Additionally, even though the RA3 server gets great action, not a single RA3 player has contributed to help keep things afloat.
The upshot of this is that by the end of the coming weekend, there will be some pretty significant changes here. The standard 209.155.226.N servers will be no more. I cannot carry the $400 per Mb fees myself any longer. We'll try to have the new IP:port info posted in the MOTDs as they become finalized, but don't be surprised if the old ones just disappear. You can always find the details by clicking on any of the servers listed to the left.
Lastly, the only way we can afford to remain afloat is to offset portions of the expense through renting servers. If you and some friends want/need a place for matches, scrims, etc. we can hook you up with a great deal. The folks behind GibGames have been running servers for years and know this stuff very well by now. We support most games and mods and also have great anti-cheat knowledge for those games where this is an issue.
Keep checking back for the server updates as they develop.
 
**New Server** DoD v2.0 ... Posted by Myron Tuesday, March 12, 2002 at 14:35
Gibgames is proud to announce its newest available server, the Half-Life MOD, Day of Defeat featuring World War II era combat. Here are some screenshots from two maps Caen2 and Overlord.

Check it out at 66.232.6.34:27030 (Florida).

More information can be found at the developer website http://www.dayofdefeatmod.com. A list of available mirrors for download is avaiable here.

Feedback, comments, and questions can of course be directed to me, Myron.
 
CS 1.4? ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, March 7, 2002 at 1:27   Comments
Did I read this correctly? Is the 1.4 CS with the much anticipated "Steam" out now? We'll keep on top of this as it may be time for us to scramble through a few upgrades in the morning.

[Update:] Okay.. so we setup a server for you guys to play with until this becomes a real product. Check it out at 66.28.242.105:27015
 
Like giving a blind man a hammer... ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, March 6, 2002 at 18:32   Comments
Somehow in the server moves the last few days I managed to hose the mail services for about a 36 hour period. The cries of "it worked before!" did nothing to rectify the situation. In a desperate move I read the instructions. For those of you with a GibGames e-mail address you should be once again receiving messages. At least until I screw it up again.
 
NeoTF 1.4.1 Final ... Posted by Myron Wednesday, March 6, 2002 at 0:19   Comments
Here is an excerpt of the changelog...

Release 1.4.1 - 4 Feb 2002

Modifications from release 1.3:

- Soldiers get Apache Helicopter or V-22 Osprey depending on team
Apaches and Ospreys can drop bombs which explode after 3 seconds
Bombs will bounce and roll

- Inert multiguns can be captured by enemies

- Crowbar MG ROF decreased to make it more balanced

- Grenade Launcher MG projectile gravity modified

- buildspecial2 will execute scout's radar

- All classes can use SG cameras

- Updates to ntf_help system


Have fun. Any questions, comments, or feedback can be directed to me, Myron.
 
NeoTF Release Canidate ... Posted by Myron Monday, March 4, 2002 at 14:40   Comments
The increasingly popular NeoTF server located in Chicago has been recently upgrade to 1.4 (release canidate) in accordance with our exlcusive beta test deal with the developers over at Neo-TF.com.

New features include new models for the soldier remotes. Each team now has a seperate model (osprey or apache). Also the soldier remote bomb has 3 second timer now (it will bounce/roll if you are low to the ground) so no more soldier remotes killing scouts running at full speed unless your timing is incredible.

In some popular maps, when using the "say" or "say_team" commands, you can relay your current position by including %l (that is an "L") in the chat text. Use %p to give the position you're looking at, eg. "say_team Incoming enemy from %p!;"

Unfortunately the hook is still disabled, but the hope is it will come with the 1.5 BETA which we will of course setup immediately as soon as it is available.

The only current unresolved issue is the occasional sinking of mgs into floors/objects. The developers already know and are working on it.

Feel free to email me (Myron) directly with your comments, feedback or any possible bugs.
 
What are you lookin at?!?! ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, March 2, 2002 at 20:58   Comments
I know half of the web site hits tonight are coming from the LAN. Quit being a pussy and go play some Quake3! Now!
 
New UT server and colo space ... Posted by Potsie Monday, February 25, 2002 at 10:40   Comments
Thought it was time to add Tactical Ops back to the rotation. Not sure if it's reporting to the master or not, but it's on the Chicago box at 66.28.242.105:7777.
And I found a new colo provider. This is one that I KNOW will be a good fit for GG. With a name like Ghetto-Colo how can you go wrong? It's the first colo I've seen guarded by an attack snake!
 
NeoTF Beta and the return of Rentals ... Posted by Potsie Friday, February 22, 2002 at 14:18   Comments
Thanks to Myron, we have the honor of hosting a server for the latest beta of NeoTF - a Team Fortress Classic mod.
    NeoTF is a server-side modification of the popular Half-Life mod Team Fortress Classic. It adds several new features to TFC, including chat-spying, tesla coils, airstrikes and more. The fact that it is server side means that any TFC player can connect to a server running NeoTF without any hassle -- if it is their first time connecting to a server running NeoTF, they'll auto-download a few small sprite and model files, but this only takes about ten seconds.

News of the developments and more details of the mod can be found at the NeoTF website.
The other bit of good news is that this weekend we launch the return of hosted servers at GibGames. We're finalizing the terms of service today and there are a couple tweaks left for the config builders, but you can get a taste of what we have to offer on the rental page.
To sweeten the deal, the first person to sign up and pay for a three month commitment gets a free brand new VisionTek GeForce2 GTS. While it may not be the very latest, greatest video card, it's still a blazingly fast card and better than a poke in the eye ;)
 
BAH! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 9:58   Comments
This sucks.
 
Still alive and new servers ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 1:41   Comments
Thanks to the donations from friends and strangers, we are able to stay alive yet another month. In addition I've managed to secure a couple servers in Chicago that seem to offer decent performance at a great price. This enables GibGames to move some less heavily used servers to a lower cost facility and return to hosting servers for clans or individuals. There are a few minor details being worked out on the hosting - max servers per box, memory and disk configs, on-line tools, etc. - but we should be back in business this week.
As for the new servers, we have the return of JailBreak:POW (in time for the new map pack release this Friday), another Quake3 Deathmatch server, a third CS (which will likely be switched for a UT Tactical Ops server) and a NeoTF (TFC mod) server all on the Chicago boxes. These have already been added to the list at the left, so you can get real-time updates.
Thanks again to those who've donated! You're the ones who have helped keep us alive and we truly appreciate it!
 
Happy VD! ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, February 14, 2002 at 13:40   Comments
Hope you were bright enough to get something nice for that "special someone." Perhaps a patch kit for that blow-up doll?
For those of you who are without a loved one to share the day with, click here for a card from GibGames.
 
Test server - please help! ... Posted by Potsie Monday, February 11, 2002 at 15:07   Comments
I've got a test server up and running in Chicago. I want to see if this is a decent host or not, so could use your help in testing it before I commit. It's running CS at 66.28.242.105:27015. I get decent pings (100) from the Bay Area. Maybe you could hop on and report in the forums how it performs? If it's any good I'll move forward with setting it up on a permanent basis.
Thanks!
 
A couple IP changes and new Anti-Cheat ... Posted by Potsie Friday, February 8, 2002 at 11:31   Comments
I'm shifting two games to different boxes today.
RtCW will be back on 209.155.226.7:27960
DMC will move to 209.155.226.5:27015
Just trying to utilize those extra CPU cycles a little better.

And we have some new cheat detection running on the TFC servers and will finish up the CS servers this morning. You've been warned.
 
LANnabis anyone? ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, February 5, 2002 at 20:30   Comments
The boss (my wife) says we can do another LAN on Saturday, March 2nd. Just a one day event this time, from noon to midnight, and limited to 18 people. Please RSVP if you intend to participate. Priority seating goes to the regulars and feel free to tip your host.
No news on the new servers yet. I need to go light a fire under their asses tonight. Should be soon.
 
GibGames central? ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 30, 2002 at 23:07   Comments
Well folks, I found what appears to be a good host for some more servers. This will help me balance things out as I'm still way over the 2 Mbps mark I need to be at here. I'm firing up a couple servers this weekend in a facility located near Denver. Pings look good from the Bay Area too - 70 mid-day and 100 during peak hours. If it works out well I'll be shifting things a bit in order to reduce my BW use here. I also have a lead on another colo that may pan out very well for us. I have these options thanks in large part to those who donated. While the total isn't enough to keep us alive forever, every little bit helps. Thanks guys! More updates as things develop. In the mean time, gib it up!
 
Ever wonder about Counter-Strike cheaters? ... Posted by Rylar Thursday, January 24, 2002 at 14:14   Comments
Heres what happened when someone tried to cheat at the October 27th LANtrocity Monster LAN 2 CPL Counter-Strike qualifier:

check LANtrocity home page for download locations.
 
Tap, tap... is this thing on? ... Posted by Potsie Friday, January 18, 2002 at 21:27   Comments
Finally got the dead NIC replaced on the web server. Yes, we're still alive. In fact, we have our first contributor to the GibGames survivor fund! TT120 sent us a donation on Wednesday just before the web server died. If you see him playing, thank him profusely for his help.
 
Interesting results! ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, January 16, 2002 at 14:34   Comments
I was totally susprised by the results of our impromptu poll. For starters, I didn't expect anyone to bother responding. Then to see that of the 100 or so votes so far, 60% of them were positive is amazing to me. I realize that not everyone who says they'd be willing to help support us actually will, but it's a promising bit.
So here's where things stand. I've gone to a month-to-month contract now. This means I can pull the plug as soon as it looks like I'll have to start shopping at Wal-Mart.
For now I'm going to have to trim back a little more. Perhaps only one of each server. But for those who contribute, the concept is to have a private server for the GibGames "preferred" players. It's easy enough to manage an access list, so that's what's in store. The fact that you contribute, however, does not mean that you're allowed to cheat. We'll still strongly enforce the no cheating rules and will use every available means to stop them.
The details are still being finalized, but in the mean time you can begin helping us out by dropping a donation in our box. For those of you who have PayPal, you can use the button above. If you don't have PayPal, sign up using this link, and assuming you follow the directions, a $5 referral is paid to us. What an easy way to support GibGames, eh? And, of course, you can always e-mail me for alternatives.
One other thing we'll be doing is posting a list of contributors. If you want to be listed, please include the name or handle you want displayed. I'll only post names if indicated.
As always, thanks for your support!
 
Just when we hit the big time ... Posted by Potsie Friday, January 11, 2002 at 12:53   Comments
Still working on options to keep things afloat, but nothing concrete yet. It's a shame too because we've finally made it to the big leagues - at least in Mexico. Occasionally I like to see where people come from when they visit the site and I see we're getting some referrals from CS-Mexico lately. Hola compadres! And there it is - the extent of my Spanish-speaking skills. Besides "mas cervesa."
I always get a kick out of the search engine queries that bring people here too. My favorite is when people enter the search string www.gibgames.com - are they really that lame? A lot of searches for cheats lately too. Maybe I need to add a link "Looking for cheats? Click here!" and have it be a link to a virus or something >:)
 
Blah ... Posted by Rylar Monday, January 7, 2002 at 17:54   Comments
All good things must come to an end... By now hopefully you read the post right below this one...

A big thanks goes out to Potsie who engineered this whole sordid affair. I think I can speak (er post) for most people that played on the servers, the run was SWEET while it lasted. And if you dont like GibGames servers then go away, no one wants to hear from you.

There is a slight chance gibgames will continue to run a smaller-scale operation so if you would like to see gibgames continue then check out Potsie's for sale thread here and tell a friend. Hopefully he can be convinced to forgo the twin's college fund and have one last bash with hookers and blow a short list of public servers.



THANKS FOR THE RUN POTSIE!


 
GibGames.gone ... Posted by Potsie Monday, January 7, 2002 at 14:16   Comments
Due to the increased rates at the colocation facility I'm in, I cannot continue to operate GibGames any longer. I had a sweet (unbelievable actually) deal on the space and bandwidth. I had hoped that, since I'm an employee, the deal could continue beyond the one year term. Unfortunately the company was losing money on me and had to raise the rates to wholesale which is still way out of reach for me as an individual.
So it's a bittersweet situation. I've been running servers for five years now and can use a break. I'll have time to play in matches with my clan, spend more time with my family and put more money into college funds. I won't have to listen to people bitch about ridiculous things, complain about settings, ask unreasonable things and be general nuisances. The down side is that I lose some of the sense of community we've built here, may lose touch with some of you, and will no longer run some of the best performing servers on the Net.
The 18th of this month is when things will grind to a hault. I'll plan some kind of cool way to go out (64 player maps or something), but it will end without much fanfare. I may be able to keep the site and forums alive, but it would probably be almost useless.
I am also posting large list of equipment for sale. All the servers and networking gear will be sold.
Sorry to have to do this. If anyone has some options or knows of a place where I can get bandwidth for less than $400 per Mbps, let me know.
 
New year = changes ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, January 3, 2002 at 13:10   Comments
As you may have noticed, I've been gradually trimming back some servers. This has become necessary due to some MAJOR price increases on my colocation service. I knew the one year contract was coming to an end, but was optimistic that I could renegotiate at similar terms. Unfortunately I can't. As such, I need to be VERY careful about how much bandwidth I consume. I will be reducing things a little more in the next two weeks. The performance will remain the same or actually improve, but my ability to support 25 servers will be a thing of the past. May be a good time to put the money back in my pocket and spend time with the family....
If anyone has a fat SDSL connection, or the ability to get one, I can provide a server if you can share the connection (I can even share the cost). E-mail me for details. I've done this in the past and it worked out well.
 
Happy New Year ... Posted by Potsie Monday, December 31, 2001 at 20:03   Comments
Just a quick note to wish you all a safe New Year celebration. Designate a driver, or rent a limo like we did. It's pretty cool to go bar/party hopping with your own driver and stretch limo waiting outside for you. Pretty inexpensive too when split among four couples.
I killed the #2 CS server the other night. Even though the lag appears to have been resolved, it never picked up. I'll save the bandwidth for the RA3 server since it IS being used. Use it or lose it as my wife always tells me.
Looking forward to the end of 2001. Pretty rough year for many of my close friends - people lost jobs, loved ones and things just weren't too rosey for many. Hoping 2002 holds great things for everyone I know and some that I don't know ;-)
 
Never better than late ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, December 25, 2001 at 23:06   Comments
Busy as hell the last few days, so I almost missed a few important things. First of all, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. I had a great holiday spent with family, friends and snow - the kind you ski on.
Next up is word of a Quake3 point release putting it at 1.31. I haven't updated the servers yet, but will do so tomorrow (the 26th) AM. I'll also mirror the file here for those who, like me, missed the news late last week.
That's all for now. Ciao.
 
Damn n00bs are in UT now... ... Posted by Rylar Wednesday, December 19, 2001 at 15:55   Comments
It looks like the CS hack-fest has spilled over into Unreal Tournament... There have been a rash of reported cheaters on the Gibgames UT CTF server. Much thanks to everyone that dropped me a note on the subject (you know who you are, and there are many). I did a little research on CSHP updates that have worked so well but no update is available yet. The UT CTF server is currently running CSHP 4+ which is the most recent version and has done a great job until the last few days. At this point all I can do is attempt to plug the holes, making UT better one ban at a time.

If you are cheating on any Gibgames server, especially a UT server expect to be banned WITHOUT NOTIFICATION. If you dont like the consequnces then dont cheat, its that simple. Cheaters have only themselves to blame. Excuses like "I didnt know I was cheating, Ill turn my cheat off now, I wasnt warned, my dog ate my johnson, my parents didnt give me enough attention in my formative years, Im schitzophrenic and so am I, etc." wont work. Cry me a river. However, beer and refer might help your plight.

Memo to cheaters: <rant>Just because you are challenged and cant play a game well doesnt mean you should get off by denying other people the pleasure of playing a competitive and fair game. I have nothing but respect for the majority of gamers out there that win graciously or accept defeat as a man (or women for that matter) and get right back in to improve their skills. That is a sign of integrity and true sportsmanship. Cheaters on the other hand are one step down the evolutionary ladder from car salesmen, tele-marketers, tobacco companies and suicide bombers.</rant>

If you can offer any suggestions on how to screw the cheaters then send me an email.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone that sent in the fix for this cheat, which turns out to be relatively easy. Server is fixed, frag on.
 
Quote of the year! ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, December 15, 2001 at 1:00   Comments
I was reading HostingTech magazine (trade rag) today and came across what must be the best quote I'd heard/read all year. You may remember Gary Numan from the early 80's with that one song "Cars" that made him known in the states. He was, and still is, pretty well known in the UK and was interviewed in the last page section they call "enduser."

    HT: Do you ever assume other personae on message boards or in chat rooms?
    GN: I never go to chat rooms. I had a sneaky look at a Numan chat room once, and was stunningly disappointed. It was filled with trouble-makers finding fault with everything I do and fans too intense for their own good arguing in my defense. It was destructive, depressing, and quite sad. I already have all the friends I need and would rather discuss serious matters face to face. However, I'm quite prepared to admit that I could be missing the point entirely.

Sounds like nearly every on-line experience I've had in the last five years. My hat is off to this guy for nailing it on the head. I caught myself laughing out loud on the BART train while reading this.
We now return you to your on-line experience. Make it a positive one.
 
CS Cheat Detection ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, December 6, 2001 at 16:51   Comments
As part of our plans to rid the world of idiot punk cheaters, we've enlisted the help of a good friend of GibGames to provide a highly modified version of TSC. This should dramatically help us in our efforts. There are some aspects people may not like such as model enforcement, but that's too bad. We feel that in order to make these CS servers as clean as possible, this piece is necessary.
If you get kicked for a detected cheat, you CAN return and play after removing the offending code - be it a model, wallhack, or whatever.
I'm sure we'll hear all about your experiences in the forums. I just hope someone will post their positive findings to offset all the negatives we're sure to receive.
In "not that you give a damn" news, my cable service was restored Monday night and with it came peace in the Potsie household. I personally think AT&T did a great job with this whole mess considering how f*cked up it could have been and comparing it to my DSL experiences with bankrupt providers.
 
Almost back up and a new site coming :) ... Posted by Potsie Monday, December 3, 2001 at 23:41   Comments
I noticed tonight that my cable modem has a link status again and I even got a new IP addy from the DHCP server. Can't be too long before I'm back on-line. I can't blame AT&T for this fiasco, but read a lot of posts where people are making it sound like it's their fault. I'm always amazed at how far peoples heads can fit up their asses.
In light of the @Homeless situation and the day I had at work, I conjured up some ideas for a new site. This one will be solely for fun. I call it DickedAgain.com (this may not be resolving just yet). The concept is a place where we can all gripe about shit that just seems to happen in our daily lives. Here's the example that solidified it for me today:


I left the office at 4:00 PM to catch BART. I'm at the station at 4:05 and in the front of the line. The announcement for a Fremont train states that a 10 car train is arriving in 12 minutes. Not too bad, so I decide to wait it out. 12 minutes later, the Fremont train pulls in to the station, whizzes right past me (to those who don't know BART, 10 cars is the maximum length, so it fill the entire platform including the line I'm standing in), stops about 10o feet past me and as I and the other 30 people in the same line think it's overshot the station, the doors open. We all start scurrying to the last car to hop on when two old ladies get in our way on a narrow portion of the station. Unable to toss them aside, we impatiently walk until we're clear of them. As we're about 20 feet from the train, the doors close and the train takes off.

Loudspeaker: "10 car Fremont train arriving in 14 minutes."

Pffft... dicked again!


That's a small example of the day I had. Everyone can relate, no? So we'll provide places where everyone can share their "dicked again" stories. Every so often we'll vote on the "biggest dicking" and find some way to commemorate the person/place/thing.
So now I'm off to try and hack into AT&T's network. Wish me luck and hope I don't get dicked again.


 
BAH! Thanks Excite :( ... Posted by Potsie Saturday, December 1, 2001 at 12:29   Comments
Can you believe it? I'm stuck with dial-up thanks to Excite ruining the @Home service. I'm guessing that since I'm on AT&T that something will be up real soon, but I'm impatient and I made the mistake of getting my wife addicted to the Internet.
If anyone has any info they'd like to share with the rest of us, feel free to post something in the forums. I'm sure I'm not alone in this situation.
 
Wolfenstein server up ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, November 29, 2001 at 14:38   Comments
Just a quick note to let y'all know that I fired up a full version (non-demo) of the Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The IP:Port is:
209.155.226.6:27960
GO bang away at it and let me know how it looks. Just threw it together in abotu five minutes, so it may need some tweaks.
Thanks!
 
In case you didnt notice... ... Posted by Rylar Monday, November 26, 2001 at 15:00   Comments
Potsie finally posted the much anticipated and probably Nobel Prize winning (I have my speach ready) review of the LASERBAY. You can find it in the review section.

Also, the Unreal Tournament Tactical-Ops should be back in the next couple of days.
 
Wolfenstein in stores ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 20, 2001 at 14:48   Comments
Yup, today is the day we should be able to pick up a copy. Since I have a real job and a family, does anyone want to grab a copy for me? If not, I'll have to wait until this weekend to get a full version server up and running for y'all.
I'll be leaving for a few days to visit family up north, so keep it clean kids. Report the cheaters, fight fair and come out with your gloves on.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
 
More to come ... Posted by Potsie Friday, November 16, 2001 at 11:52   Comments
Working on a couple of things right now to help reduce the abundance of cheaters on the CS servers. Not even in the last months of Q2 was the cheating this predominant. I really don't understand the mentality. What fun can it be to let the computer do the playing for you? Seems kinda like those cars at the amusement park where you appear to be driving, but they're actually on a track. Some fun, eh?
In other news, my buddy Kirk over at Flipchip.net sends word of a new motherboard they ran through the wringer: DFI NT70-SA Pentium 4 motherboard. If you're in the market for a new x-mas gift for yourself, go check it out.
 
To the Unreal Tournament Tactical Ops fans out there ... Posted by Rylar Thursday, November 15, 2001 at 14:34   Comments
As you can see in the post below, Potsie upgraded a couple of the servers the other day. What he didnt tell you is while he was there he spilled a mixture of beer and "pipe" water on the power strip which immediately fried the thing. Of course this took place the day after I decided to lock down the box and change the password to a 156 digit prime hexidecimal alternating caps 13373|) password. In fact the password is so good I cant even get in. Now I have to drive my new (to me) gas guzzling SUV (shameless plug) all the way down to the colo, rip the box out, take it home, reinstall the OS and take it back. That will teach me to set a good password. I hope you didnt spill good beer or "payload" from the "water pipe" Potsie, sheesh.
 
Maintenance tonight ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 13, 2001 at 17:30   Comments
Around 7PM tonight I'll be taking a couple servers off-line for maintenance and upgrades. New VP6 going in and swapping out a dying CPU in one of the boxes. Shouldn't be out of commission for more than 30 minutes, so expect it to take all night ;)
----------------------------
Okay.. that wasn't so bad. The box that had the dying CPU is now upgraded. More power! Also got the new VP6 with dual 933's in for the web server. Should be screaming along now. All that in two hours and only one accidental trip of the power switch.
 
Wake me when it's over ... Posted by Potsie Monday, November 12, 2001 at 1:18   Comments
Ohhh is it over already? That LAN weekend sure flew by.
Thanks to all the crazy fuckers who joined in the fracas. The house was left in fine shape and the wife seems happy to have returned to no broken or missing items. I myself need sleep. I did manage, however, to get a small collection of pics posted for those of you who wished you were beer... err.. here.
 
Q3Plug fix ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, November 7, 2001 at 11:52   Comments
For those of you running IE 6.0 or 5.5 sp2, I spotted a post at PlanetQuake that there is a registry fix available on the Q3plug site. What is Q3plug? It's a browser plugin that allows you to view a realtime status of all the servers we run here at GibGames when you click on the servers in the left section. I had uninstalled IE 6 for this very reason. If you need the plugin, it's right here.
One other thing. I saw a freakin hillarious movie last night called Whiteboys. I think it was on Cinemax. Maybe it was the beer, or maybe it was truly funny, but I was in stitches. I'm sure it's on video, so if you can't think of what to rent it may be worth your 3 bucks.
 
The PHAT LAN and Beta testing for Valve ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, November 6, 2001 at 14:49   Comments
You probably saw these already, but thought I'd share with those of you who hadn't stumbled across them yet. Shacknews spotted an article at Salon about drugs and LAN parties. "Now it's time for stoner mayhem." Wow! And I thought LAN parties were for strippers and beer. Better change my plans for this weekends event.
Also at the Shack is a post stating that Valve is seeking beta testers. Evidently there's no indication what it is you'll be testing, but speculation is that it's some new anti-cheat stuff. Dare I get my hopes up?
 
Unreal Tournament Tactical-Ops server updated to 2.1 ... Posted by Rylar Thursday, November 1, 2001 at 13:34

The Unreal Tournament Tactical-Ops server has been upgraded to Beta 2.11 RC3. I played it last night and it seems pretty cool. Among the bug fixes are:


Weapons:
- Weapons specs rebalanced.
- Shotguns now have a static accuracy (not affected by movement).
- New sounds for Ak47, SteyrAug, HK SR9, Shotguns, Famas G2, HK 33, M4m203, HK MP5 Navy, HK MP5k PDW, Flashbang.
- Improved firing effects. Rebalanced hit sounds and shellcase impact volume.
- Hiding weapons is back ( handness ).
- Improved Smoke Grenade code.
Bot AI:
- Fixed a bug where bots couldn't find where the C4 was located.
Maps:
- Updated maps: Monastery, Ransom2, GetAway, IcyBreeze, Titanic, Resurrection, Spynet2, Verdon, Province.
- 5 hostages per map limit removed.
- new s_Trigger parameter: ActivatedBy. A specific team can use triggers, while the other won't be able to.
- new Map Actor: TO_TriggeredSoundEffect. (with variable radius).
- More...


Check it out if you havent, Its like Counter-Strike but better IMO. In the latest patch the most noticable fixes were weapon balancing and accuracy improvement (Cone shot). To get Tactical-Ops installed you just install UT and the 4.36 patch, then grab Tac-Ops 2.0 then 2.1 update and finally 2.11 RC3 patch from http://www.tactical-ops.to.
 
You too can run servers! ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, October 30, 2001 at 3:05   Comments
Saw this before and stumbled across it again tonight. One of the best articles on how to run your own servers. This in-depth article covers all the essentials and even offers help on tweaking your connection. A must read!
 
Speaking of cheating ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, October 25, 2001 at 15:02   Comments
Spotted at Shacknews (that name still seems odd to me after so long as the ShugaShack) a post about Valve being focused on fixing the cheating. Based on the spectacular results of the latest upgrade, I'm sure I'm not the only skeptic on the planet.
Along those lines, we've added a new sub-set of the GibGames website (bans.gibgames.com) where most, of not all, of the bans will be posted. Seems we get a large nunber of people questioning why they are/were banned and pretty much calling us assholes for it. This may make it a little easier to see why it happened. Just remember, admins are human too and CAN make mistakes. The objective here is clean servers. If our desire to keep things clean results in a few mistaken cases, I still feel it's better than anarchy.
 
Help on the horizon? ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, October 24, 2001 at 4:12   Comments
I'm sure you've all experienced the instability of HL-based games since the latest release. I'm speaking specifically of the dedicated servers dying. Tonight I saw this posted in the Counter-server forums by Leon Hartwig, Valve programmer:
"Yeah, I've got the fix completed. We'll have another beta server update out to address this soon, I'm hoping Monday or Tuesday."
Of course it's now Wednesday and we haven't seen the patch yet, but I'm optimistic.
 
LAN party? Why yes, we have those. ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, October 23, 2001 at 1:31   Comments
Many of you are regulars and know the scoop. If you haven't been to one of the old "LANnabis" parties, you probably won't have a space since I can only hold 16-18 people in the garage. If you've been here before, chances are I already have a space for you. Drop me a line if you're able/interested in joining the festivities on November 10th. We may extend this to a two day event if the out-of-towners come through.
I'll post details and an atendee list shortly.

 
Want to win $150,000 playing Counter-Strike? ... Posted by Rylar Friday, October 12, 2001 at 16:01   Comments
LANTROCITY ANNOUNCES THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CPL QUALIFYING EVENT OCTOBER 27th AND 28th AT CAL EXPO IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA. LANtrocity is sending 2 teams to the CPL Counter-Strike finals in Dallas outfitted with PNY Technologies Verto GeForce3 video cards, airfare and more. Also at the event will be UT and Q3 tournaments, free stuff, Bawls, 6 big screens playing the latest Infogrames console games and a charity auction with 100% of all proceeds going to the American Red Cross. Did we mention tons of free stuff? Go to www.lantrocity.com for web based signup and find out more about the years best LAN party.
 
ThreeWave and more ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, October 11, 2001 at 20:03   Comments
Got the ThreeWave server up and running a short while ago. Nice stuff from an admin perspective. Haven't had a chance to check it out as a gamer yet though. That comes after the kids are in bed.
Also took advantage of a server upgrade and added a plain old Q3A deathmatch server at 209.155.226.5:27965. People have been asking for this and it's already full, so I guess it was a good choice.
Enjoy!
 
CTF Anyone? It's coming! ... Posted by Potsie Thursday, October 11, 2001 at 1:49   Comments
Was just killing time while waiting for the OS to load on an upgraded server (yes, I am obsessive) and spotted some really cool pics posted at Planetquake. The Threewave release looks like it's going to rock. Can't wait to check it out.
 
Just a quickie ... Posted by Potsie Tuesday, October 9, 2001 at 18:25
Although there are hundreds of similar pages around these days, I actually found myself playing with this one while on a conference call for an hour today. Hopefully it will help hone my RA3 skills :)
 
Finally Freakin' Friday! ... Posted by Potsie Friday, October 5, 2001 at 14:02   Comments
Although it was a short work week for me, it seems that one always pays for a little R&R with an extra brutal work week. Such was the case this week upon my return from 4 days on the coast.
Speaking of work (what a segue, eh?), according to Captured.com the unification project of CCTF will be released October 11th. This is great news for CTF fans. Threewave has, in my opinon, always delivered the best CTF maps available. I expect this to be no different. Of course we'll update the CTF server to include the new maps and will mirror the files here too. Although I haven't been playing much myself, I think this may draw me back in. Fall and Winter months are great for huddling in front of the warm PC :)
From time to time I like to see how people stumble across this site. One of my favorites was a search for the subject "bulemia." This favorite was almost knocked down a notch when I saw that someone came here from the best Canadian band EVER. It must have been a mistake.
I seem to have forgotten to share with y'all the Half-Life spray tags that were submitted some time ago. There were some cool ones submitted and some that were just okay. I've zipped them up for you to play with. Feel free to plaster GibGames tags all over the place ;)
Off again on a short trip north to get my babies back from Grandma. Although they've only been gone a week, it feels so much longer. You'll never know how this feels until you have your own children. Trust me.. it's great.
I'll be back Sunday night. If anything breaks while I'm away, it's Draco's fault.
 
Just catching up ... Posted by Potsie Wednesday, October 3, 2001 at 16:59   Comments
Now that I'm back home and back to work (stop laughing), I had a few things to catch up on. One of them was to find out what Baker's been doing while I was away. Apparently he lost a little weight. I know I'm going to be much more careful about what I drink!
In other news, the Q3A servers were all updated to 1.30 on Sunday. Looks to be stable and well behaved (unlike the HLDS patch).
 
It never fails... ... Posted by Potsie Friday, September 28, 2001 at 2:29   Comments
Just a quick flurry of activity before I head out with the wife for a little R and R. Not only was the 1.30 point release of Q3A made available today, but word on Counter-Strike.net just a short while ago is that the HLDS 4.1.0.8a patch is available. I updated all the public servers and a couple hosted servers to see if this stabilizes