just curious, can 2 servers share the same DB, or is ther a system in place to prevent that

As far as I know there is nothing to prevent that from happening, though I have never actually tried to have two servers up at the same time hitting the same DB.

An issue might come up in tracking character data, although each character record should also store it's server_id. Long, long ago, I wanted to separate the "World" data from "Player" data, for this very reason... multiple worlds sharing 1 source of world data (static data). I never followed through because I think I realized the server_id might do the trick. Just messy bookkeeping

I really want to separate the world server and individual zone servers. At some point.

i have been running 2 server instances with same db for a while (never logged into both at same time though
instance 1 is local through minilogin mostly my debugging world
instance 2 is my emu world that is using the emu login
neither share any character info though
but as for shared db seems to be no issues otherwise