The following letter was sent to all MUD2.COM customers on the evening of Thursday, April 10, 1997. Note that MUD2.COM is now fully operational, the server's motherboard having been replaced the next day.

Dear MUD2 players,

It appears the the motherboard on the MUD2 server has died a premature death. Earlier, we suffered repeat crashes; now, the system does not even begin the boot sequence.

You know that things turned for the worse when your arch-wiz starts using his screwdriver instead of his FOD finger. It is obvious that I need to perform motherboard surgery; unfortunately, I do not keep spare Pentium motherboards in my drawers (you would be amazed to know just what kind of things I DO keep there, but sadly, a Pentium motherboard is not among them). Consequently, we have to wait until tomorrow (it is close to midnight my time) before I can acquire a new motherboard and bring the system back to life.

In case you are wondering, we do have a backup option available in the form of another computer, normally used for other purposes. However, configuring it with the production player database and bringing up under the MUD2.COM domain name would take most of the night, by which time I expect the primary system to have been repaired. I reserve this backup option in case of a longer term outage; i.e., if it turns out that a motherboard swap does not fix the problem, MUD2 will be brought back up tomorrow using the spare system. One way or another, I expect MUD2 back up and running no later than sometime tomorrow (Friday) afternoon Eastern time.

Once again, I apologize for the inconvenience, and hope for your understanding. We all work with computers and know what they are like; they rarely fail but when they do, it is not a pleasant experience.

Thank you very much for your continuing patience and devotion to our great game.

Gandalf the frustrated arch-wizard