Eye-Cloud

Last month, the hard drive which powers my bot chain decided to physically fail.  As you might expect, this was not a fun experience for me.  Fortunately for me, I run my bots in a virtual machine and had recently taken a backup.  So while it was time-consuming to create a host machine and configure the virtual machine host, the bots themselves were unaffected.

This got me thinking… what if I had not had a recent backup?  Not only would I have had to install a host machine, I would also have had to install each and every bot.  This is not the most exciting task to be doing.

Even if one starts from a Master Bot virtual machine, one must go inside each virtual machine and configure each one individually.  Yes, Library makes this task a little easier.  The server holds the advertising messages so I can retrieve them.  Library also makes a backup of its settings which is very useful, just not so useful in cases where the hard drive physically fails.  How could I use the backups that Library creates so that I can retrieve them when I need to?

If one is willing to spend a little time tweaking and has a little bit of programming skills, one can solve this problem using the Cloud.  For purposes of this discussion, the cloud refers to online storage.

Many companies offers a base level, typically five (5) gigabytes from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, and a lesser amount, but more than enough for our purposes, from a plethora of smaller companies.  So how do you do it?

You choose a service you like and sign up.
Install their drive synchronization program.
Select the MTGO directory and configure as needed.

Once this is done, the synchronization program will update whenever there is a change, be it from Library itself or whenever you change Library’s settings, like prices or number of cards to collect.

So once you have a backup, how do you restore?   After all, a backup is useless if you can not do a proper restore.

Restore the Windows Library runs on, be it a virtual machine or a physical machine.   Make certain to include MTGO.
Install the drive synchronization program.
Copy the files from the Cloud drive to your local drive.
Launch Library as normal and you’ll be back online.

Hurricanes on Vacation

I have a copy of my bots on my laptop. Purely as a backup. However, I never realized how important that little investment would turn out to be. You see, my company paid for me and the family to take a vacation and we decided to visit the In-laws. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Before we left on vacation, I shut the power to everything but the bots. I fully expected the bots to remain in operation while we were enjoying mandatory family time.

However, after we left a hurricane decided to visit. Since I went through hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, and Wilma, I know what can happen and what needs to be done.

The hurricanes were on a direct path for my house. What's a bot owner to do? Simple, I simply started the laptop and started to run the bots, and I remotely shut down the computer running my bot.

But how did you do that 2,000 miles away?

Easy. I opened a trade with the bots and entered the command to shut down the bot using the shut command. You see, if you have set up an account as administrator, you have access to some commands that can be used for a variety of things. In this case, I could use the kill or shut commands to terminate the bots and run the bots off the laptop.

Next time we'll look at more administrator commands. Oh, and how did this episode end? We lost power for a couple of weeks, so I had my family stay with her parents and I came back as scheduled to deal with the cleanup and post-hurricane chaos that exists. When power was restored, my wife shut down the bots on the laptop, and I started up the bots as normal on the bot machine. Downtime throughout this entire ordeal, just minutes.

Copy and Paste Magic

In our continuing series on little used MTGO bot features, I'm going to refer the reader back to my prior series, Building Your Own Bot Server. I went over the advantages of not using a backup but of installation of Windows and MTGO because of the increased stability. What I neglected was that I do not do ALL of this. That's right, I cheat.

How do I cheat when installing a new bot or moving a bot to another machine? I do manually install Windows and the updates and MTGO. Doing this is not any great chore as for the most part, the installation is painless, just a time consuming background task.

However, when it comes to setting up the details of the bots, such as how many of each card to pick, which sets to buy, etc, I do not do that. Instead, I simply restore the settings from the backup.

What do you mean, restore the settings from backup?

Exactly that. If you look in the Magic Library folder, you will see two (2) files:

[botname]user.data

[botname]buyerSetting.data

Each of these is a simple file which houses all the particular settings of your bot. You copy these files and transfer them to another machine. Then you're done. No more micromanaging settings and clicking all those check boxes.

But wait! There's more!

Once a day, Magic Library takes a backup of these settings. If you look in the “setting backup” folder, you will see files in the “dd-mm[botname]user.data” and “dd-mm[botname]buyerSetting.data” format. This way, if there is a corruption somewhere, you can restore those settings by using the proper files from a time when the bot was working flawlessly. (Dropping off the date part first.)

That's it and now you're back in business. Next time we'll continue the series on little used bot features,