First off, you may or may not have heard of Heartbleed, a hack that exposed critical security information, such as login information and credit cards, on about 2/3 of the web. Here's part of Mojang's post about it:
Two days ago a serious vulnerability (that’s been named “Heartbleed”) in the popular cryptographic software OpenSSL was made public. This weakness could potentially be exploited to steal information, such as login information, that normally would be protected by encryption. This software is used by roughly two thirds of the internet so a lot of services were or are at risk of being affected.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think Minecraft made an update or two to prevent Heartbleed from taking the security information from them, in addition to the name-changing updates. So now, with 1.7.9 out and all our servers on 1.7.2 (and one private one on 1.7.5), our servers are currently "down".
Yes, I know, Bukkit HAS released a jar for 1.7.8 (which also includes support for 1.7.9). However, it is still a development build, which means it's UNSTABLE AND UNSUPPORTED, as it says when you look at it:
I don't know about Daniel and his server jar, but MCFun Central runs a lot of worlds and plugins, and I don't want all of our plugins to break because of a Minecraft update. Some of you may know MCFun Central isn't exactly the most stable server out there, even with a more stable Bukkit jar. Therefore, MCFun Central and possibly the other MCFun Servers will not be available for users on 1.7.9 until the beta version is released or until 1.8 is released. To play on the servers, you will need to switch your client to 1.7.2-1.7.5.
There are advantages and disadvantages to being gone from our servers. One of the disadvantages for us is that we don't know whether or not someone's managed to grief our servers.
Today, I received an email from our Co-Owner, sharpdomino (some of you know her as Carmen). Here's a screenshot of the email:
You may have to zoom in on the picture a little bit to see it better, but the griefer not only turned all the ground to lava, but also spawned a bunch of NPCs of our admin, captainfreedster, everywhere, and screwed up the letters and the portals (you can clearly see it in the random redstone blocks that used to spell "Redstone Rebel").
Carmen was wrong, however. Using the awesome and highly useful CoreProtect plugin, which I highly recommend to quickly find out the whodunit and to automatically undo the griefs, I first found that it was two of our highly respected admins, ironhaan and pikmin822 (Xander and Jack). I was surprised, but I'll get to that later. I used CoreProtect to FULLY RESTORE the spawn. Come see for yourself. I don't want to turn this into an advertisement for CoreProtect, but I think everyone should have this plugin on their server, whether or not they are having problems with griefing on their servers.
I wasn't that surprised to find that Jack did it. He had griefed MCFun Central as much as 6 times since the server opened (12/10/2013) just out of rage or boredom, and always asked for a second chance.
I was surprised to find out that Xander had helped him, though. Xander was one of most respected admins not only on MCFun Central, but on MCFun Servers as a whole. I haven't talked to Xander about it yet, since the email was sent last night (but I didn't read it until today), but I'll talk to him and hopefully update you on what happened.
Wow, that was a long post. If you read through all of that, then thank you, because that took really long to type =P
Be on the lookout for more MCFun Server posts! Thanks, and have a great day!
