It is official.

We will be shutting down our servers for the last time on 28th December 2018. It was a good run.

As expected we never really recovered from the IP change with the number of people joining down 80%, which in turn is effecting the Advert revenue which is also paying much less per hit than before. It's not a question of money any more, the player base has now gone. I will however take a full backup of everything so should one day someone want to revive GmodTech they could.

For now though, I'll go over what will happen with each of our various parts.

The servers will close for the last time on Friday 28th December 2018 at 8:30pm UK time. I think the most appropriate thing to do would be to host a farewell party on the Hotel server, where we can end the server will a traditional server crash nuclear strike.

Keep an eye on the events page for when the events will actually be. I should say that the exact time of the shutdown may change as I am likely to have family over during the Christmas period, so I may change the time to make sure I am on the server for the end.

I am going to take a leaf out of another servers book, so to speak. When I first started playing TF2, one of my earliest haunts before I ended up with GmodTech was on "Knights Social Club", which was run by a guy called 'Knight'. Now his group also fizzled out after he joined the police IRL, but he kept the group open so that people who met there could still keep in contact with each other.

I will update the group description to highlight the fact we are / will be a dead group with no more servers running. I will also look again at the permissions of the group to see if some of them may be relaxed or tightened up. Bots are still a thing and I don't want this group to become a spamming ground for bots and for any conversations to get lost in that.

If you have an opinion you want to share about this, then let me know in the comments. Any changes I make won't be until the servers have been shut down.

The Discord server[discord.gg] will continue to exist just like the Steam group. In time however the Discord may get closed down if that too becomes empty. Provisionally I am thinking that should it drop to less than 20 members then I will delete the server.

All that is left of our website now is some old backups I have on disk, and the Sourcebans page. As we won't be running servers any more there won't be any need to run that page any more, which for many players will mean they no longer have old bans showing up when they Google their SteamID.

• The Facebook page will be updated to match the Steam group description, noting we are a dead group.
  
• The Youtube channel will remain as is, though I may post a final video reflecting this announcement. Comments will get locked down completely.
  
• The Teamwork.tf listing will get removed
  
• The GameTracker Clan will be updated to reflect the Steam group description.

How the hell do you finish of an announcement like this? I suppose all I can say it has been quite the journey. It's going to be weird not having GmodTech around, at least not as it used to be.

The two Strange servers and the Hotel server are currently down due to what appears to be a hard drive failure.

The dedicated server machine we use has two hard drives, one of which hosted those 3 servers. That hard drive appears to have died meaning we can't boot those servers up right now.

I have opened a support ticket with our host who are investigating as of the time of writing.

[Update]
A new hard drive has been installed but unfortunately the data on it was lost, meaning I will have to re-install all 3 effected servers.

Thankfully we have backup builds of those servers so bar some minor updating of plugins, we should be able to get them back up fairly quickly.

The remaining servers are back online as well, as the hosts needed to turn them off while installing the new drive.

I've been thinking and there's no easy way to say this, so I'll get to the point - This isn't a said and done plan. Nothing is changing right now and still may not.

The IP change has hit us hard, with the number of people joining down 80%, which in turn is effecting the Advert revenue which is also paying much less per hit than before. Before the Strange #1 server alone could generate enough on it's own to pay for all the other servers. Now it doesn't even cover 10% of the running costs. The rest comes out of my own pocket.

While I mention the servers, let me explain what I know is happening. From one point of view, the servers are stable. The problem is that we keep getting multiple instances of the same server running, which then cancel each other out and they appear offline.
So for example there may be 2 hotels running, both trying to take the same IP address, meaning neither can be seen.

As for why multiple instances of these appear is a bit of a mystery still. If a server has crashed then that instance of the server should disappear as well, but it seems this doesn't always happen. So a server may crash but the 1st instance of that server still exists, and program that manages the servers creates a new instance. Except now with more than once instance of the same server running it appears offline even though it's actually not.

As for me, well my IRL job is hitting me very hard right now. The short version of events is basically that my manager handed her notice in and quit a couple months ago, and the lady most qualified to take over her was due to go on maternity leave. So she took over, but I had been shadowing her to learn the job so that the new person hired to replace the original manager can learn the ropes quicker when they start in a few weeks time (they are working their notice period with their former employer still)

Well the lady due to go on maternity leave had to take that leave earlier than expected. So I ended up doing both my job and the job of my manager (which I'm not qualified to do) until the new hire starts!

As you can imagine this has been somewhat stressful for me, with me working much longer hours than I am contracted to do. When I have gotten time to look in on the servers, I've only really made sure they were up and running. I've been too physically tired and mentally exhausted to look into the actual fixes.

My problem is that I don't see things returning to the way they were before. The new hire might be no good, or take longer than expected to get up to speed. And alongside other real life commitments, I will have less and less time for running this group, the servers, mapping and gaming in general. At the moment I am keeping myself sane by not doing any work on Saturdays, and still doing work during my free time on Sundays.

We had been quietly looking for admins to replace the likes of Jawi, but I personally haven't been able to do that and the the last time I spoke to the other admins, neither had they, presumably because we are seeing less people joining the servers in the first place. Now though the plan is more towards replacing me.

This is the PROVISIONAL plan I discussed in our Discord server a couple weeks ago:

We keep the servers open for the rest of the year. We can try keep an eye out for both new admins and someone to replace me, and if we find someone who can take over, they can be trained up. No need for the servers to shut down at the end of the year if someone is in training at that point.
But if we don't have anyone by say December 1st, then we announce the closure and shut down December 31st.

To be honest, this is not a perfect ship I would be standing down from and handing over to someone else, this is a sinking ship that someone would need to fix. I'll not list all the issues here, but if someone were interested in taking over then they can ask.

But yes, the future of this Group is not certain. And I don't really know what else to say to that.

It's taken a couple days to track down the exact problem, but we believe we have it nailed down!

Basically a Microsoft .NET Framework update broke the program that we use to manage the servers itself, which hasn't happened to us before, hence why it took so long for us to nail down the exact cause.

We will be monitoring the servers for the next few days to make sure the fix is in fact fixed

I've just got back home to find that yet again, the servers are not responding or timing out. I tried joining one of them and it kept lagging out.

I am able to connect to the dedicated server itself and I have tried to restart all 7 servers but the problem is still there. I have even restarted the dedicated server itself and it has not made any difference.

I have opened a support ticket with the hosts, but I am also looking into possibly moving hosts. We've been with this company for a few years and they had been reliable up until now, but since they moved our IP address we've not had the same level of service from them. Honestly, I'm actually quite annoyed by that.

For now though the servers are down until I have a response from the hosts. There's no point having them up if no one can connect anyway.

I have was speaking was a support rep last night to try work out the problem, and they were suggesting everything from firewall rules to making sure the .net framework was up to date, even suggesting that maybe the machine was over heating.

Nothing they suggested worked, and they are claiming they aren't detecting any network faults. I even gave them the login details for the machine so they could look at it themselves, but since then I have had no replies. I am going to pester them again this morning to see if anyone from the host had tried anything.

I have now spent most of the day speaking with the hosts support team to try diagnose the problem, trying everything they have suggested.

We've narrowed down the problem to FireDaemon, the program we use to manage the servers on the dedicated server, and the Microsoft .NET framework. We we're using an older version of FireDaemon which I have now updated.

However, it seems the latest .NET update broke all versions of FireDaemon so I either have to wait for them to patch it, or roll back the update.