Maybe it's for the best that the server isn't updated ... call it an "accidental intervention". 

RAWR I WANT TO PLAY

Beta 1.4 is out. Update includes wolves, which are tameable.

I started a new world for ensuring I had the right environment for finding wolves. I wandered ALL OVER the place and still haven't found any. It seems wolves are ULTRA rare.

Hansrote already left for work for the night, so he won't have the server updated until tomorrow.

Oh man, tamebale wolves... Just when I thought I've broken free from Minecraft's spell, Notch lays this awesomeness on me.

So I'm probably going to start playing again just for the wolves, but one question.. Do they stay with you even after you've logged out and come back in? Or do they respawn so to speak?

I'm new to minecraft, the map I started a few days ago (my first) already has 3 wolves that hang around my house.  There used to be loads of sheep and pigs wandering outside my house 24/7 and I didn't want to kill them all.  One morning I went outside to find all the sheep were gone, and only a few pigs, those three wolves and scattered wool remained xD

So I guess just spread some sheep around an area to see if it lures some wolves.

Yeah, I found two of 'em this morning wandering around inside my city.

Which means, for those that play on the VGC server, we are now back up and running!

updated for 1.4, sorry about the delay was running late before work yesterday and did not have time to check for an update.   also this kinda ruins my april first plan... oh there is always next year

The wiki says they spawn in forest and taiga.  Guess which your city is in

i spent some time tonight testing our vgc server. i did this because jamminr has reported latency intermittently at night. but never during the day

first i used three computers and 4 OS's to test.

second out upload speed is very stable on flutter,  and 98% of tests put it at 5.5mbits up. this is more then enough upload speed. in doing research it seems a 2 mbits speed is recommended for 10 players. though they can play with as little as ambits can keep everyone playing without issue.  (the bandwidth data may not be relevant anymore since the move from 1.3 to 1.4 but its the best i could find)

of note this is down form my high in the winter of 10mbit up consistently comcast is obviously still tuning their docis3 uploads in this area. comcast also does not advertise the tier i am on on their website,  and i don't remember what im supposed to be getting, but ambit is probably it.


our download speed is a bit different 85% of the time its between 49.7mbits and 56.5mbits  3% of the time at 23.8mbits and the remaining 12% jumping wildly from 60mbits to 98mbits.

all of these are more then enough bandwidth. there is however a lot of flutter in the connection so its not outside the realm of possibility that it drops lower just none of my testing caught it but it would have to drop to below ambits to really see any issue

 once again im not certain but i believe my comcast tier is for 30 mbits, and this is also down form winter when i would see a steady 98mbits to 110mbits. again comcast must be working on the docsis3 in my area, this is also most likely the reason i have had intermittent outages for 1 to 3 days at a time the last three months, though comcast says they have no idea whats going on.  this might also account for the flutter comcast working on docsis3 at night. my day tests showed much less flutter but the same normal average speed

ping - to various servers and networks 23-30  so really nothing to worry about, and i could not find any dropped packets or data collisions.


onto the server, even with 7 players on (the most vie seen in the logs recently) the tower used only 120% cpu usage out of 200% and was only using 600meg of ram out of a possible 2gb.
the disc it runs off of is a second gen WD raptor 67gb. its fast but quite a few modern 72k drives are faster, so i might pick up a new one and swap out, though i do not feel that is the issue.  (i also looked at a solid sate 40 gb drive for 99 bucks im going to check its stats)

through put seems fine and does not seem to max out the drive, though that could be a sat controller issue, as the controller in my tower does have known issues, but vie never seen them manifest.

I would like to see if you guys have any issues on your end with lost packets unstable connection, to see if a players connection can slow the server data for others. i feel if they are working in the same general region on chunks loaded this could be the issue.



other observations. just some tests i thought id do while doing the vgc tests.

i used 4 web browsers on this firefox 4, opera 11.1, safari 5.0.4, and chrome 11.0.6XX

i found chrome to be the most unstable for downloads and speed in general. i ended up excluding most of its results for the test as the conflicted with the others so wildly.

firefox also had a large number of issues mainly with more instability in download, speeds bouncing around, for the first bit of a download it frequently had the highest connection speed but would drop more in line with others the longer the  download rarely did it go lower. uploads were fine  right in line with where it should be

safari had less bounce then firefox, but more frequently was slower, would occasionally have faster downloads, but mostly in rage of expected. uploads were right in line with where they should be

opera .. well the king for now, download speeds were at the top end consistently of the normal range, with the best download times during the duration of a file transfer. it also showed spikes of better uploads but most uploads were at the expected speed.

this confirms its fine for me to continue to ignore chrome, and before the most recent update to opera, safari was king, splitting time with firefox for me, though now i think ill drop safari and just use firefox and opera.

edit just a note was not using any of the browsers boosts or download optimization, nor was i using comcasts