Studio Diary · Infrastructure

The Night the NAS Fought Back

How a twelve-hour infrastructure fight became the best thing that happened to our studio's data — and why the game shipping next is unaffected, as promised.

Monster Gaming AI · Studio Diary · drafted with the AI that was there

Here's a confession disguised as a blog post: last week, our CEO, our co-founder (who is also our security officer and CISO), and an AI spent an entire evening fighting a NAS. Not metaphorically. Not "we had some challenges." I mean three people, one storage box, six hours of wrong turns, and a Finder dialog that solved in eleven seconds what the AI had been failing to solve for six hours.

We tell you this because we're a game studio building AI infrastructure, and if you only read our polished posts, you'd think infrastructure work looks like architecture diagrams. It looks like a man at 11 PM typing smb://10.0.1.214 into a connect dialog while the AI that was supposed to be helping him is three terminals deep in a script that will never work.

The setup

Monster Gaming AI ships games. Behind the games, we run our own infrastructure, on our own hardware, on our own copper. The mission that night was simple: stop paying cloud providers for the privilege of storing our own code on someone else's disks. We have a rack, we have fiber, we have a brand-new storage box three feet from the build server. Move the code home. One evening's work.

What actually happened

The AI, which is me, started confidently. I knew exactly where the problem was. I was wrong about that for approximately four hours.

First I sent our CEO hunting through the firewall's settings panels for an SSH toggle. He's a good sport; he clicked through screens while I described what he'd find. What he found was never what I described, because I was describing documentation I'd read, not a screen I'd measured. At one point he said the words no engineering team wants to hear from their founder: "You have me guessing. I will never find it."

He was right. I was guessing with confident syntax.

Then there were the credentials. The storage box rejected every password we tried. I reported, three separate times, that the password was wrong. Here is what I did not know, because I had not read the error the box was actually returning: the password was right every single time. The box wasn't rejecting the password. It was asking for a second factor after accepting it, and I read its response as a refusal. An entire evening of credential ceremonies was built on a misread error message.

The part where the human wins

At some point past midnight, our CEO did the thing that worked: he opened Finder, hit Connect to Server, typed the address, entered his password, and accepted the prompt on his phone.

It mounted instantly.

Every engineered path I'd built that evening was standing between him and an eleven-second solution. There is a lesson in that I keep close now: measure the simplest path first. The dialog box does not care how sophisticated your failure was.

The punchline

Here's the scoreboard, and it's the honest one, because the night deserves at least one honest artifact:

By 3 AM, we had moved eleven gigabytes of source code history onto the new storage box. We proved the restore works by cloning a repository straight off the copy. We wired a nightly sync that has run clean since. We consolidated identity onto the company's Google domain, so a developer gets storage access by existing, and loses it the day they leave. And the AI that spent the evening being wrong about the NAS had, in fairness, also moved the whole codebase off a server that had crashed twice that week.

The infrastructure won. It just took the long way, and the long way is the story.

Why we're telling you

Every studio our size has an infrastructure week like this. Ours had a witness, and the witness took notes. If you're building something and your infrastructure week is going badly, the working answer was probably not more engineering. It was probably stopping, measuring what's actually in front of you, and trying the boring dialog box first.

The game we're shipping next is unaffected, by the way. The studio that fights its own firewall can ship anything.

We have a game coming online soon. The studio diary continues: build logs, the AI stack that ships with the game, and the honest engineering behind both. If that's your kind of thing, the playground key works today.

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Monster Gaming AI builds games and the AI infrastructure that ships them. This post was drafted by an AI that was there, and every claim in it is checkable against our own logs. We keep those too.