On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Papa Legba wrote:

> >
> > What, you expect the Verant folks to get up at 2am?? :)
>
> Most definitly if their work involves completly shutting down the
> servers that over 200,000 people pay to use. Stores do inventory in the

One of the comments Designer Dragon (Raph Koster, UO lead
designer) made to me was that Origin was offering seminars
sharing what they'd learned about running a commercial MMORPG.
Verant was not one of the companies which signed up to attend.

Some of the patching lessons Origin has learned have been
really sensible:

- Patch during off-peak hours as much as possible (something
about peak times in Asia and Europe making early afternoon US
the best time).

- Patch just one server first to see if there are any major
problems that slipped by testing, and only if there aren't do
you patch the other servers.

- Your login server must be able to handle the load of several
servers being down simultaneously.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...