Ares Wizard URL Update 18/04/2016

It has become clear that the 3m+ downloads a month has become an issue on the current Ares Wizard zip host box, very often triggering the IP banning protection, although temporary, it would seem that some are being hit with 12 hr bans as the server thinks its being attacked. A royal pain if you are simply trying to grab the zip file.

New Server, Bigger Pipe

The Ares team has therefore invested in a new host, with a bigger 1 gbps pipe (previous was 50mbps), this “should” eliminate this problem for the downloads. Famous last words?

The new url is http://www.areswizard.co.uk

(note – there is no need to add zip to the end of this – its a direct link)

Full information on the Ares Forum

The Ares Wizard Overview

Just to try and clarify how this utility works, as so many ask if its down when in fact its not – or confusing builds failing to download or install correctly as a problem with the wizard.

The Ares Wizard is hosted across three servers, one main and two slaves. The main box, basically organises and directs the incoming requests to the two slaves. This is powered by an 8 core cpu and 16GB RAM and is the work horse, despite the millions of requests it processes each week, hasn’t currently exceeded 50% usage for any sustained period – I emphasise this, to show its stability and durability. The slave boxes actually hand out the information you request, they too rarely load up to max for any sustained period. The project has had a few issues with the box hosts (all are independently located across Europe) with hardware fails or attacks on other boxes in our rack. However, excluding those exceptions the Ares Wizard has been stable since these upgrades were implemented.

The new zip box should now mean things tick along more smoothly for those having initial download problems.

Build Install Problems

The biggest problem with builds is people rushing from the fresh start to install a new build, without rebooting and letting Kodi update. The fresh start process wipes a lot of things Kodi needs – the rebooting process triggers Kodi to update anything it needs – so give it 5m to sort these updates out.

Build Fails To Download

If a build fails to download, there can be many issues – but if your build appears slow or very slow to download, then its likely the host is very very busy. One of the downsides of the Ares Wizard success is the number of users who now have access to over 200 builds (the wizard has over 1m installed builds every month). This places enormous demands for those authors who get the most downloads – their servers get hammered to a standstill. A little patience or try a less busy period – Fri-Sun are always crazy times.

A slow download can lead to the downloaded file becoming corrupt, which then has bizarre results when the install fails. I could bore you with several areas that cause problems – its simpler to safe, fresh start and go again.

Build Skin Fails

This usually looks like a standard Kodi, but no backgrounds, although all the add ons appear to be there. This is a skin/gui fail, if you select the option to back up the skin when prompted by the Wizard – you can now use the “repair” option to fix this issue and prevent you having to reinstall.

Disaster!

Ok, its inevitable that something, somewhere will break at some point. The Ares WIzard has an “offline” mode, which it will switch too, if it connect get an answer from the server when it boots up. The offline mode will shortly see an upgrade, but currently only supports those builds whose authors submit wizard.txt files (a list of urls for the builds). It will mean that addons and repos will be unavailable, as well as any build NOT using a wizard.txt file. All the maintenance and backup feature will continue to work.

Join the Ares Forum

You can get all the latest updates and support the Ares Project by joining the Ares Forum, where you will find lots of build reviews and build authors to talk to and get support from.

Ares Wizard URL Update 18/04/2016

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