Warhammer FRP

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Although we haven’t played in quite a while, we are resuming our alternate gaming group this coming Sunday, and starting/continuing a campaign based on the Warhammer FRP game (second edition version).  This is not the Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords group, but actually my original group of far more experienced players.

Its been a few years since we have played Warhammer, and I know that the version we are using is rather outdated these days – to the extent that there was a 3rd edition that has already come and gone.  Rumor is that a 4th edition is in the works for later this year, by a company called Cubicle 7, but I can’t find any information other than a general press release from early 2017.

Hopefully that version will be an improvement over versions 1 and 2, while still keeping the same spirit.  My understanding of version 3 is that it attempted to get all complicated with custom dice and such, which is trendy, but not conducive to playing lots of different games.

Another rebuild

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In my continuing quest to fine tune my home computer network, I am tackling another reorganization.  Currently, this website and some other functionality is residing on an Oracle VM Virtual Box configuration, running several virtual machines which each in turn run Ubuntu.  It dawned on me, that the same computer which runs the virtual box app, could be reloaded directly with Ubuntu instead, and simply run the same applications natively – ie, there is no real need for isolated and independent OS installs, and the core Windows OS on the system doesn’t really gain anything except for patch reboots and related outages.

As such, I am mid-stream with re-homing the sites to the rebuild computer.  Fortunately, I was easily able to relocate the virtual machines onto other hardware temporarily (allowing the site to remain alive), while I work on the installs.  But (fingers crossed), it should be a short period before I am ready to transition to the updated system.

Hopefully, without the extra overhead of the Virtual Box app, the services will run that much smoother in the future.

UPDATE – appears my efforts have been successful, and the revised site is operational and running correctly.  At this point, I am not aware of anything that is broken, but I will be continuing to review the site for the next couple of days just to make sure.

FreeNAS 11 upgrade

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As previously posted, I run much of my home network (and this website) on a FreeNAS server, currently running version 9 after a recent downgrade from the failed version 10 release.  Recently, FreeNAS 11 was released as a stable version, so I have been eager to upgrade to the new functionality – but hesitant due to the prior problems with 10.

With my work travel plans disrupted this week, and the kids off at Cub Scout day camp, I found I had a lot of spare time, so I gambled and took the plunge.  Fortunately there is a direct upgrade path from 9.10.2 of FreeNAS to the latest version 11, so the upgrade itself was fairly painless.  Just had to update the train setting to point to the 11.x stable train, delect download and install, and click “go”.  A short time later, the files were downloaded and the system was rebooting.

Of course, with my hardware, I have an issue with the OS-based reboots from FreeNAS not cooperating with the motherboard 100%, so I had to manually power off and back on once or twice (not an unusual step).  Otherwise, the upgrade actually ran very smoothly, and I would say that after about 30 minutes, the system was fully updated and running again.  More importantly, all of the jails transferred cleanly, so there was no rebuild or reconfiguration needed on my part.

I might not yet be taking full advantage of any new features, but at least for me, I can say that the upgrade process from 9.10.2 to 11 of FreeNAS is very simple and smooth, as promised.

Back from vacation

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So there has been a noticeable drop in posting activity over the last couple of weeks, primarily because I spent the last couple of weeks with the family on vacation in Florida.  We spent the first part visiting Disney World, and the second half with the kids on a cruise with the grandparents, and my wife and I hanging out on the beach.

Not really being much of a beach fan myself, it didn’t do much for me, but it was nice to forget about work for a couple of weeks.  The rest of the family of course really enjoyed the trip, and everyone was eager to plan the next one.

However, my intended plans of keeping up with the postings and updates ended up failing miserably, between a combination of distractions, poor internet connections, and general lack of topics.  I don’t like to post vacation updates while I am on vacation, and of course there wasn’t much else to talk about at the time.

All that is complete now, so I should be able to get back to my usual routines.  We ran another session of Pathfinder yesterday, so I will be working on the video for that, and hopefully might get a chance to play some more Star Wars Armada again in the near future.

Updates

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As mentioned previously, I am on vacation this week with my family, enjoying a bit of down time from work.  I specifically informed the office that my vacation plans involved a “region in which cell phones cease to function” – thus don’t call and expect any response.  As a result, the week has been very quiet from work.

As we prepare to leave and head out, of course the weather has turned from solid rain to a very pleasant evening, as it tends to do on the final days of a vacation.  But as a result, the pictures of the sky and grounds are rather majestic.

Rise of the Runelords, Chapter 3, Part 4

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Its taken quite a bit, but I finally managed to edit and finish the game video from our last session.  During this game, the group continues to explore Fort Rannick, searching for the leader of the ogres, in an attempt to defeat the brutes.  All the while, they are trying to avoid major conflict and discovery by the ogres, who so successfully had defeated the Black Arrow rangers.

Continue reading

Time for some vacation

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Posts for the next couple of weeks may be a bit more sporadic, as I am finally taking some time off from work and my schedule for a vacation.  I will still be trying to post, or at least pre-post, but I honestly am going to try to think about computers as little as possible.

I have finished the latest round of Pathfinder gameplay, the video is currently rendering before I can upload to YouTube.  But I expect that will be published either tonight or tomorrow.

Which is good, since our next game may be delayed again as well, meaning it will be over a month since we will have worked on the storyline, meaning many of the players may have forgotten a lot of the detail and events.

Testing the twitter link

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Apparently my recent rebuild also lost my twitter link, so recent posts had not been auto-posting to Twitter.  Seeing if that is working correctly now (fingers crossed).

Pathfinder video content

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Its taken a while with recent distractions, but I finally managed to finishing editing for content length the latest gaming video of our Rise of the Runelords game.  Still need to do another pass for graphic additions and perhaps sound, but almost there.  As a result though, today’s post was running a bit late – I wanted to get the computer rendering before I got distracted, so that I could work on the final steps tomorrow and actually publish.

Signs are looking better

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So yesterday I posted that my recent FreeNAS rebuild had affected the site, and discouraged or stopped the traffic to the site.  From my testing, I was receiving 404 (not found) errors on all links, and the pictures and attachments were broken.  This was resulting in web crawlers being unable to find and catalog content, which in turn meant no traffic.

After digging into it, I found out that fundamentally I just didn’t finish the migration of the site.  There were two pieces I was unaware of, that were causing the impact.

The first was a default module within Apache (mod_rewrite) which is disabled with a default Ubuntu LAMP installation.  I needed to activate this module, and restart Apache, before the various links could resume.  As basic of a function as mod_rewrite would be, I honestly would have expected it to be turned on by default, but I am sure the Apache coders have a better knowledge of why this is than I do.

The second fix was a problem with the UpdraftPlus backup plugin I was using for the actual migration itself.  The backup files were intact, but my process to run the restore got a bit impatient and I closed it before it ended up completing.  As a result, the images and attachments simply didnt get re-uploaded to the site.  Instead, I grabbed the backup files, and manually uploaded the files into the WordPress site, which immediately then began working again.  A simple lesson learned for future efforts.