Honored Hearthlings,
As part of currently ongoing efforts on my part to modernize parts of Haven's underlying facilities, I will be migrating the account and character information to the newer file format that Salem uses. To prevent simultaneous modification, I'll have the account server shut down during the migration, which means that all account-related services will be non-functioning during that time, which includes website/forum login, account creation and, of course, the game itself.
I'll shut the stuffs down around 2013-06-10 17:00 UTC, and they will remain down for however long the migration happens to take. I would approximate it to between 5-10 hours, but don't blame me if I'm off by an order of magnitude in either direction.
You won't notice the shadow a pixel of difference from me doing so, of course, so enjoy! Indirectly, it makes many of my chores a lot easier, but might also imply further lagfixes.
EDIT: Incidentally, it seems that (yet another :P) hard drive failure decided to occur now, as well, which calls for a replacement. From what I can tell, the failure of one disk seems to have confused the controller somehow, causing the current megalag. It should thus be resolved after the harddrive is replaced and the server thus rebooted, but I'm shutting down the game server now to be on the safe side (and since it's pointless to continue running it like this anyway).
EDIT 2: I've made an appointment with Hetzner to replace the drive at 15:30 UTC, so the server with website and all will be shutdown for a while around that.
EDIT 3: I'm not entirely sure what's happening, but Hetzner told me both drives indicated failure when they were going to replace the one that failed. What I know is that after the first drive failed, the second one started experiencing S-ATA link problems, but I assumed this was only due to the S-ATA host controller becoming a bit confus by one drive failing, and that it would be OK again after a reboot; however, the drive is continuing having the same problems now that I've rebooted, so I'm not so sure anymore. It does still only seem like S-ATA link problems, however, so a RAID rebuild and everything should work fine, if perhaps being a bit slower than usual because of the intermittent link resets. In the worst case, however, the drive will foobar in the middle of the process and all will be lost, so I'm currently backing everything up off-site, so that it can be restored should the worst transpire. Everything will likely take a bit longer, however. I'll keep you posted as the situation develops, but current status is, again, that I'm backing all data up off-site (and the disk is still reading everything perfectly okay).
EDIT 4: The disk was replaced and the RAID successfully rebuilt, so the server is now safe, at least. It does, however, turn out that the other disk is indeed only semi-functioning, in that it seems to be reading correctly, but has some weird host-interface problems, so it, too will need to be replaced, meaning the RAID will need to be rebuilt a second time. I'll complete the account format migration before that, however. The downtime is turning out to be far longer than I expected, for sure, and I'll also need to sleep somewhere in between, so expect the whole process to take another 12 hours or so. :P
EDIT 5: The account data has been migrated and seems to be working fine thus far, so you should be able to log in on the website again and create accounts now, again. However, the hour is over 9 AM over here now, so with that, I'm off to bed before continuing with the disk replacement.
EDIT 6: The replacement of the second drive has been appointed with Hetzner, now, at 22:15 UTC (two hours from the time of this writing), so the server will again be comletely down around that time. After that, the RAID will have to rebuild again, and then I'll start the game back up.
EDIT 7: Up and running again. Situation normal, all fucked up. ^^