Stupid funny server error storys

General Discussion
1

my funny stupid funny server error was when my server did a reboot . this was not a problem we had it reboot every 4 hours, for memory reduction etc.

but apparently something went wrong during the night apparently when i logged in after work in the evening next day and found that somehow non of the permissions were loaded and everybody was a OP . XD i could trow away the map all the world editing that had happened pfff

of course they only had 4 hours the time but still. lots of damage

anyhow thats my stupid little funny server error story
you guys got some ?

2

Hmm, Well I remember that the owner of the server was trying to figure out how he can delete the map from the donator server. But he always got the “can not delete java opening” message. When I looked at it, It turned out he was trying to delete the actual survival map where 60 players were playing on on that time.

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One of my admins used worldedit to spawn thousands of mob heads in one of the creative worlds. The server crashed instantly, so he could not undo it.
The world was not corrupted, but because there were so many entities, it was impossible to play in the world. Luckily I had daily backups of the whole server :wink:

4

I have some pretty good WTF stories from my old server.

One time one of my admins decided to spawn in a crapload of creepers into the map and then used a plugin to make them have very little health, make them explode on death and spawn two extra creepers on death. Then he killed one creating a massive chain reactions of creepers spawning and dying and exploding and spawning and dying until half of the map was pretty much a giant crater… by the time I got on the server had already crashed, had to restore from a backup.

Another case happened when one of my administrators somehow managed to get worldedit to spawn in a giant cube of TNT into the center of the map that went on for about 30x30 chunks. Another backup restore…

One time an admin put a command block that teleported the nearest player to the top of the spawn area so any players that died or logged in were immediately trapped in an endless loop in spawn.

One time an admin setup a command block that spawned creepers on top of everyone in the server every 5 ticks.

One time one of my administrators built an admin base, filled it with OP items then made the stupid mistake of allow people to get into it w.o protecting the chests… half of our community ended up with some op item.

I once was coding a custom mobs plugin and I got the mob ids for zombies and zombie pigmen switched up so zombie pigmen came at you no matter what, burned in sunlight and groaned, while zombies spawned with golden swords and only attacked if provoked. Even the /summon Zombie and /summon ZombiePig got switched up.

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5

I’ve got a great one.

So I get into working with this server that’s launching as their primary developer. It’s their initial launch day and some of the standard plugins are not cooperating. The Owner gives me access to the server console and I start troubleshooting what the heck is going on. I notice that the server both has PEX chat configured and EssentialsChat running. I figure that’s the issue so I turn PEX chat on and restart. The moment the server starts, not only has the chat formatting broken, but half the plugins won’t load no matter what happens.

For my own server I once went away on vacation, left onlineMode off and remarkably had no external people join, but had one of the regulars join as me to get back at his friend. While I’m on vacation in south dakota I occasionally get wifi and from the backseat of our van I’m skyping the co-owner. I have Rcon setup and working properly but it’s just not behaving right. I can connect but it just freezes up. What happened was that he used worldedit to set the entire world (or most of it) to TNT and another player accidentally set it off. The server didn’t actually crash, it was taking so long to process all the explosions that it didn’t finish in two weeks and Java had become very low on memory.

1 Like
6

One day we updated spigot to the latest version and everything went without any issues.
The server has a flat plot world. Some time later (a few days I think) an admin of our server noticed that a huge amount of blocks below the plots were missing.

We thought someone may have WorldEdited them out, but then that can’t really happen because we have a WorldEdit block limit and you can only use WE on plots you own.
Maybe it was an admin accidentally deleting a lot of blocks?

We flew a lot under the plots and noticed that it didn’t seem to have an end.
It also wasn’t completely cleared. There were still some piles of blocks here and there.

screenshot

Luckily, we’ve got LogBlock and just checked the logs of those blocks.
Nothing. wat!

Now we were really confused.
Oh well, we need to get a backup.
Rolled back a few hours, restarted the server, same problem.
Rolled back a few days, restarted the server, same problem.

It must be something different.
Maybe the world is corrupted?
We ran MCEdit’s region repair (took a few hours because the world is HUGE).

Restarted the server, same problem.
Hmm, this is really weird.
Maybe MultiVerse got some issues?
Disabled Multiverse, restarted server, same problem.
Duh. Disabled some other plugins, restarted server, same problem.

Oh wait, Spigot got this built in Anti-Xray feature, let’s disable that!
Ahhh, nope. Same problem.

Finally downloaded the world (only 1 region) to my PC and tested again. Same problem.
Then I put the world into vanilla server. Finally the problem was gone!

Sadly, this didn’t really bring us any further in resolving the issue.

Meanwhile, I went to spigot’s IRC and seeked for help, but nobody really had a clue.
I then tried to test the same thing with Bukkit and the problem went away… until I updated Bukkit to the latest version, too.

Great, so we know something in bukkit’s recent change broke it.
At some point md_5 joined the discussion and found the issue.
Apparently @Amaranth replaced a nibble array (which had to do with chunks) with a different type of Array and it had some strange bugs.
Props to md_5 who removed the bug no 10 minutes after he tracked down the cause of the problem.
Edit: more probs to Amaranth who fixed the actual bug shortly after.

Bug thread on spigot forums: http://www.spigotmc.org/threads/empty-ghost-chunks-remove-huge-parts-of-underground-world.23290/

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Pretty sure it was a mod who found it. (me) :trollface:

Aside from that I also took some pictures of that odd bug.

I kinda enjoyed flying around in the giant underground chasm though. xD

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Except md_5 had no idea what the problem was and didn’t fix anything. His solution was to completely revert the change. After discussing it with Thinkofdeath I figured out the problem at pretty much the same time (within minutes), tested it, and pushed an actual fix.

So, thanks for drinking the koolaid and making me look bad but you don’t know what you’re talking about.

3 Likes
10

Nibble array… Lol

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Indeed, md_5 didn’t fix the actual bug, but from my point of view, the issue I was having was fixed by reverting the commit.

Can’t really argue against that, I haven’t been involved into bukkit nor spigot development. I was just telling what md_5 told me in #spigotdev.

Also, I don’t blame you for anything, sorry if it sounded like that :innocent:

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Two stories from the old days.
I have been running a server using Movecraft since the old days when it was maintained by Sychoprime (originally written by Yogoda). Minecraft had many more bugs, and plugin errors just added to the amusement sometimes. The old Movecraft gave us many moments of classic wackiness, doing much damage in the process.
[Caveat: The new Movecraft is a total rewrite and 100x better. These bugs are long gone]

  1. 20.000 Blocks under the Sea
    I made a submarine, using iron blocks, glass, a few ladders and some iron doors. It was working well when I sailed it out onto the ocean, and dived and resurfaced without a problem. Excellent, time to work on the undersea base. I dived again, deep, moved forward a bit, and decided to turn.
    RED ALERT! We’re taking on water! The cabin immediately flooded, the lights went out, and all i could see was a squid that had entered the flooded vessel, right in my face. Abandon Ship! When I surfaced, grateful for the ScubaKit plugin, I noticed I was holding the doors and ladders, which didn’t cope with the rotation :wink:

  2. The Hyperspace Accident
    A moderator was testing his Mothership, a UFO design with a smaller exploration craft inside. I had enabled the Hyperspace option for these craft, which allowed a user to click a number of times in a given direction to denote how many chunks it would teleport. This math was known to be a bit unreliable… as he discovered.
    After launch, he was auto-kicked from the server for exceeding the world border, and then everybody else as it spat a huge string of errors about life in general. When we eventually found it (using cartograph on the map), the ship was 3500 blocks away from where it had started, 1500 beyond the border.

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13

Well I once started our private server server as root, just to test something. After some time, we got a terribly lagging server, no restart could help, we disabled all the plugins, same problem… We practically had no clue what the problem was! Well, the solution: root now had the ownership of latest.log, so everytime bukkit wanted to write something to this file, it was stuck in an endless loop as the permission was missing. After an hour or so after start, the server went completely unplayable…
This was just another lesson of: “Don’t work as root!” :stuck_out_tongue:

15

I’ve spawned TnT in our spawn on July 4th 2 years ago and corrupted the world. Our server backups weren’t working well back then so all the backups were missing region files.

fun stuff!

16

We were testing 1.7.9 Spigot for performance issues. One of my admins made a 10x10 hole all the way down to the void. He then spawned 1000 redstone ore. Keep in mind our server is hosted by an incredible company who provide monster servers capable of massive world edit changes within the map without lag. Suddenly out of nowhere we were showered by redstone. It fell for around ten minutes. We got lag around the seven minute mark and no matter what we did we could not stop the falling redstone. We gave up and came back later to see invisible blocks and no redstone falling.

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[quote=“MarshCaptain, post:16, topic:3594, full:true”]
He then spawned 1000 redstone ore.[/quote]

He should have used //fast

18

He was actually a training admin and had no clue. Watching him cause this problem was hilarious.

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19

What was the actual bug? Can’t see the references without being DCMA blocked from issues