SWTOR.com Extended Maintenance Details



As most fans probably noticed, over the past two days the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website remained down for an extended period. As Twitter and other social media sites buzzed with speculation as to what the downtime meant, and players shared their official SWTOR forum withdrawal symptoms, I began wondering what kind of massive change could take over 24 hours for them to implement. And then a thought occurred to me: Domain name servers (DNS) can often take a full 24 hours to realize changes made to website domains.

For those not familiar with the technical intricacies of how a DNS works, basically a website's domain name (such as "SWTOR.COM" or "Darthhater.com") is associated with an IP address. The IP address represents the physical location of the web servers the website is running on. If the website moves, the DNS entries must update so that the domain name points to the new IP address. The process of getting all the DNS servers across the world to recognize the new IP address can take more than 24 hours.

So I did a ping of the SWTOR.com address yesterday when maintenance started. The IP address was 159.153.92.41, a server owned by EA in Redwood City, California. Performing that same ping today, now that maintenance has ended, shows an IP address of 74.203.191.59, a server located in Austin, Texas.

It appears as though one of the things done during yesterday's downtime was a change in the location of the physical website servers. They are now in Austin, Texas with the rest of the BioWare Austin team.

Comments

  • tmrz's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 2
    #11 tmrz Posted 10/19/2011 10:14:15 PM
    ROOT DNS servers refresh within minutes now a days instead of the up to 24-48hr they took a few years back.

    last time the root record was updated:
    Domain Name: SWTOR.COM
    Created on: 25-Jul-07
    Expires on: 25-Jul-12
    Last Updated on: 02-May-11

    www.swtor.com still resolves to the old IP for me which depends on which IP Geo database you query is redwood or new york, which is moot point since the swtor.com website like most any company out their uses akamai for content/application acceleration through caching (twitch/livestream use it as well) if you pull the web sites you'll see that its really being pulled from cdn-www.swtor.com (page info) which resolves to the closest akamai cache server to you based on your GEO location.

    I don't think the downtime had anything to do with DNS, probably just some infrastructure issue on config problem.
  • Jaspor's avatar
    Dark Lord
    • Posts: 292
    #12 Jaspor Posted 10/20/2011 12:28:09 AM
    Thanks for the insight on this. Although I'm still not sure how that explains getting two different IP addresses when pinging from the same exact machine at the same location both before and after the maintenance period? By your explanation, shouldn't I have gotten the same one both times based on location?
  • tmrz's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 2
    #13 tmrz Posted 10/20/2011 1:10:13 AM
    assuming you looked up www.swtor.com at one point then swtor.com, swtor.com still resolves to the 74. IP.

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=swtor.com cute sub domain summary

    and whenever netcraft wants to work http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.swtor.com is also a decent site.

    account.swtor.com 159.153.92.53
    swtor.com 74.203.191.59
    www.swtor.com 159.153.92.41

    What i'm getting at is now a days behind any website you have a multi-tier (load balancers, apache frontend, java app server, database, storage SAN) on the content provider side also fronted by a CDN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network) and under some kind of ITIL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library) change process and changes deployed by automated software or manual steps, so it can get complicated and is not as simply some admin with notepad trying to figure out how to optimize mysql.cf to support 5 million more users on his home made cluster of 2 apache servers =)
  • Jaspor's avatar
    Dark Lord
    • Posts: 292
    #14 Jaspor Posted 10/20/2011 1:24:08 AM
    Very informative, thanks!
  • Kraxis's avatar
    Dark Councilor
    • Posts: 971
    #10 Kraxis Posted 10/19/2011 8:05:38 PM
    /clap

    Good thinking. But as Shlomoshun mentioned, what does this mean for us? And antoher question that is combined with that is, Why? Server overload? Poor infrastructure? Expansion anticipated? Many possibilities, but I'm not much of an internet buff so I can only give some most obvious exlpainations.

    Charming... yes? http://imgur.com/r6WrI

  • Snodge's avatar
    Spice Runner
    • Posts: 225
    #8 Snodge Posted 10/19/2011 7:58:23 PM
    The sensible thing usually is to lower the TTL for the zone or record 24 hours or so beforehand to something like 5 mins. Then the downtime would only have been 5 mins ;)
  • Shlomoshun's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 60
    #6 Shlomoshun Posted 10/19/2011 6:19:41 PM
    I guess that explains it, but does it 'mean' anything to us? (lets get the speculation/conspiracy theories going people...)
  • stoffi's avatar
    Spice Runner
    • Posts: 192
    #7 stoffi Posted 10/19/2011 7:31:00 PM
    Puts on a /tinfoil hat.
  • AlphaAnt's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 25
    #9 AlphaAnt Posted 10/19/2011 8:01:56 PM
    It means they've moved the most vital method for them to communicate with their community to a place that 1) likely has much more bandwidth and much more robust servers, and 2) is completely under their control and not under the control of their overlords at EA. Most likely EA wasn't prepared to handle 3-5 million users on their webservers during an MMO launch, so this can only be a good thing.
  • Baelor's avatar
    Spice Runner
    • Posts: 194
    #5 Baelor Posted 10/19/2011 6:08:10 PM
    Jaspor = internet super sleuth.

    I am the light that brings the dawn.

  • Tavarik's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 3
    #4 Tavarik Posted 10/19/2011 6:03:17 PM
    Well that explains why I haven't been able to play...
  • darthuser725's avatar
    Nerf Herder
    • Posts: 7
    #3 darthuser725 Posted 10/19/2011 5:43:29 PM
    nice catch
  • lupeh's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #2 lupeh Posted 10/19/2011 5:26:57 PM
    Nice one
  • Vastori's avatar
    Jawa Trader
    • Posts: 98
    #1 Vastori Posted 10/19/2011 5:16:02 PM
    Good catch!
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