/usr/rain/

In 2010 and 2011 European private servers installed their files in /usr/rain/. It was the convention, copied from guides, and nobody asked why. A German thread from April 2010 searches for "usr/rain/channel/share_data/locale/hongkong/map". F The shell prompt read Mcncc#. F The archives were called rain.tar.gz and rain_mysql.tar.gz, after the name of the Chinese user who had packaged them. F A whole generation of European administrators worked inside the home directory of a man they never met.

Who rain was

rain is user number 3 on the Mcncc forum, registered on 1/29/2009: the forum's administrator, still active in 2017. F The forum was born in June 2005 (registered in Sichuan, same owner until 2026) as a Chinese private-server forum in general; the "Mcncc" brand was already signing "one-click" packages for other games in March 2009, with the universal password mcncc.com. F In April 2009 it had a "coLinux platform" for its one-clicks. F Metin2 was just one more title in a catalog, and the forum's 倚天2 section is born between September 8 and 25, 2009 (two preserved pages of the homepage, without and with the section, mark the terminus ante and post quem). F

That rain was also the operator of the Chinese private server 5imt2 (Fuzhou) is stated by a former Metin2.SG developer in 2013 ("probably"). T It is consistent with the leak machine, administered from Sichuan and holding longju characters in memory, but it remains a testimony.

Fourteen days

On October 3, 2009, on a Western forum, someone points back to "Rain's forum" for the guide. F On October 4, on an international private-server forum, the password circulates: mcncc.com. F On October 8 the Chinese mcncc guide is hastily translated ("Full Yitian 2 server + database + tutorial set up!"). F On October 9 the files are made public in the West, "because I heard there are people selling them"; F the same day at 22:04 alladyn5 steps in, a Pole from Tychy registered since November 2008, who on October 17 declares "DesktopFreeBSD Server Work": the first Westerner on rain's buyer list to declare a server up and running, and the same person who in January 2014 will certify the fingerprints of kraizy.tgz. F On October 24 a Spanish impostor searches for the "virtual disk mcnncc.com", with the name garbled. F

The Western scene learned of the Chinese source within two weeks, and at first got it for free: on the preserved page from December 9, 2009, rain's post has no price and no buyers. The 20-coin paywall and the 148 buyers appear between December 2009 and October 2010, after the West had already shown up. F

The Czech forum

The finest piece of evidence is in Bohemia. On May 10, 2014, someone circulates a ready-made virtual machine on a Czech forum, "čistá SF by Rain", and publishes the credentials:

login    : root
password : mcncc.com

F The name of the Chinese forum where it all began, five years earlier. The password from the founding post, copied hand to hand across five years and three countries, by people who had no idea what they were even typing. Another Czech forum, in February 2011, explained that "one of the best is RAIN, where you have to do everything yourself": "Rain" had become the common name for the files. T

What still survives

In 2016 and in 2025 the "Rain serverfiles" still change hands in the scene. F The password to the virtual disk, recalled in the Western scene in December 2021, is the same one. T And in July 2026, on a Chinese forum, a reworked "2025" version circulates: the chain that started with rain is alive after seventeen years. F