APIs for product controls

[Gallomimia]

So I've seen two threads requesting access to the donation details in order to display them on websites and whatnot:

http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... f=4&t=7955
http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... f=1&t=6188

I'd like to say that I was wishing for APIs to get access to more things. I am a VPS customer and of interest to me are details on bandwidth usage, access to starting, stopping, restarting servers, and possibly even automating the purchase of a new box and selection of initial OS image, or upgrades to existing boxes.

I am not experienced in your other services such as voice and game and webservers to realize what other features could be built into this system, but I figure if you're going to the trouble of building a secure API, might as well make it count!

[Edge100x]

Extensive APIs would certainly be neat. Only a few customers would use the more esoteric features, but I'd still like to have them there. It's just a matter of finding the development time.

[moiph]

Copying this from my dupe thread

My main scenario would be for server monitoring in case a restart is needed; rather than relying on the built in service that checks every 5 minutes for the server being offline, I can roll my own monitoring solution to kick a server back to life after 1-2 minutes. While it's a small detail, short downtime vs 5-10 minutes downtime can make a big difference in players rejoining a crashed server

As an added bonus for some encouragement here's what you'll look like after implementing the support for our use:

[Gallomimia]

It's just a matter of finding the development time.

I'm still several months away from being anywhere close to wanting to use APIs like this. This is why I'm posting it now and hoping things happen for you guys.

Make some lackies do it!

[Edge100x]

I do not recommend running more frequent monitoring than every few minutes because other factors (packet loss, attacks, long map changes, etc) can also lead queries to fail without the server actually freezing (note that if it were crashing, it would be immediately restarted, so yours must be freezing). If you have problems with freezes, I recommend that you investigate the root cause.

[moiph]

Sorry, yes I should clarify it's server freezing that would be the case.
The cause is running TF2 + various mods (e.g. saxton hale through sourcemod) which lend themselves to be quite popular and thus a busy server, however stability of such mods isn't always the greatest; while monitoring to force restarts is really only a workaround to a problem, it's one that's not always in my control (unless I want to go patching the plugins and figuring out what could be wrong). Not always worth the cost/benefit there.

When I ran servers on an unmanaged VDS I did very frequent checks and the false alarm rate was very low, though again this was specific to TF2 and I'd tailored timings for that (I've never seen map changes take absurd lengths of time).