Over the last few months there haven’t been many updates. Just recently Stephanie has joined our admin team, she’s better known as Nemo. She is a bright person and brings up a spur of new activity to the community. Last night she started working on the boards by doing a clean installation and importing the old users and data. After a few hiccups on a misconfiguration at one of the webservers, we are glad to announce that the new and improved boards are back in bussiness. Let’s give the boards another chance and let us enjoy Nemo’s first pet project.

If you have any questions or problems with the boards, or anything else, don’t hesitate to fill out the support form by clicking on the support button at the top of this page.

Over the last few days Oceanius has moved from Charybdis to Inspircd. Inspircd is an IRC daemon written from scratch to facilitate more modern features like modularity in every part of the service and better anti-spam features.

Part of the decision to move over to new software have been said anti-spam features, but the unsurpassed speed of the irc daemon plays a big role in this as well. Resource usage on our servers have gone down by a little as well, which only benefits the speed of the servers even more. If you’re interested, check out the list of features over on their wiki.

Next to moving ircd’s, we have also acquired a valid signed SSL certificate for ssl.oceanius.com so you don’t have to accept invalid certificates anymore. Simply connect to /server -ssl ssl.oceanius.com 6667 and you’ll be chatting via SSL in no time.

We now offer two methods to connect to Oceanius using a Web Chat.

Utilizing QWebIRC, an up and coming open source project by QuakeNet, we are able to host our own Web Chat which doesn’t require the use of Java. This service is available without ads, like the comparable Mibbit service, at http://chat.oceanius.com. If you would like to pre-set the channel name of your choice, you can use http://chat.oceanius.com/?channels=name .. replacing name with your channel name. For example, if you wanted to connect to #lobby, access http://chat.oceanius.com/?channels=lobby . Feel free to link to this application via your website to attract new users to your channels!

We have also extended our support for the commercial Mibbit application, by enabling WEBIRC support. This enables Mibbit to pass the IP address you are connecting from to our IRC servers, so that users don’t show up with *@webchat.mibbit.com hostnames. This helps our channel and network operators fight abuse across the network, and we appreciate Mibbit’s assistance in getting this setup for Oceanius.

Enjoy!

The founder of Chatech and TeenIRC in the past has joined the Oceanius Admin Team. The channels/users of Chatech will be moved over to Oceanius at some point within the next few days. We believe these changes will benefit their users with more network stability and long-term availability. Please welcome Joey and the rest of the Chatech folks!

After being moved from Chicago to California, wraith.oceanius.com has been permlinked to the network. The server is maintained by the Admin Team, hosted at Hurricane Electric, and sponsored by Sliqua Enterprise Hosting. Enjoy!

The recently testlinked kane.oceanius.com, hosted at ServerCentral, has been approved by the Admin Team after it’s 30 day test link. Please congratulate Tank71 on the servers’ permlink status on Oceanius.

Also, HAPPY NEW YEAR! =]

My first attempt to write a plugin that facilitates drawing a world map with server locations. The map can be used for anything you can imagine, for instance draw all the phones or persons in your office on top of a floorplan.

Inside the wordpress administration you will create a new xml file, this file can contain 1 or multiple map definitions. These definitions then get coordinates, and optionally you define a line between them.

Configuration example:

<locationmap>
    <map id="networkmap">
        <baseimage src="%pluginpath%/worldmap.png" />
        <plotimage src="%pluginpath%/location.png" />
        <font src="%pluginpath%/SEMPRG__.TTF" />
        <location id="hana" title="hana.oceanius.com" x="148" y="61" />
        <location id="wraith" title="wraith.oceanius.com" x="82" y="72" />
        <location id="kane" title="kane.oceanius.com" x="128" y="47" />
        <location id="adaro" title="adaro.oceanius.com" x="250" y="46" />
        <link from="adaro" to="hana" />
        <link from="wraith" to="hana" />
        <link from="kane" to="hana" />
    </map>
</locationmap>

This plugin includes the excellent pixel font: Semplice Regular by Style-force.net.

The latest version of this plugin is current version 1.0 which can be downloaded here. After downloading, extract the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it in the administration panel.

See the readme for easy integration in your template or post contents.
Requirements: PHP5, GDlib, Wordpress >= 2.5 

Our demo map:

A server hosted by Fliehe & Schwab IT Solutions has been testlinked to Oceanius by admin DJ_Mirage. As a member of the Executive Board, this testlink was granted without a vote. Our server monitoring company, Panopta, suggested this datacenter location so we feel that it will be a solid European Hub. Please congratulate DJ_Mirage on this testlink.

Due to stability issues at the Chicago facility wraith.* was located at, in addition to the new testlink of kane.* in Chicago, we have made a decision to move wraith.oceanius.com to the Hurricane Electric facility in Fremont, California. We feel that this server will be a solid location for West Coast users in the United States. Enjoy!

A server hosted by ServerCentral in Chicago has been testlinked to Oceanius by admin Tank71. The link was granted after a small vote by the Admin Team, all of which was in favor of the link. Oceanius previously had two servers in this same facility that were delinked due to funding. Please congratulate Tank71 on this new testlink.