New & raw web based Dominion II game server

[Norfleet]

I've sent Mose the details of how to send the files to me, which would be a hell of a lot simpler than emailing it to me anyway.

Of course, after I find the problem, there's the troublesome matter of getting a solution going, and how to get the game either back to Mose, find and notify the person whose turn is causing the problem, or notifying everyone that the game has been moved...

[Norfleet]

I received the file from Mose. The first, most striking thing is that Abysia's 2h is missing, while the server page, and the game prompt, said Abysia was current.

I found this discrepancy odd, so I attempted to connect to the server again...and now Abysia is reported as not having taken its turn. Attempting to host with the files without Abysia proceeds normally, but attempting to crowbar the hosting on the server itself nagots.

It is even more weird that there is *NO* Abysia.2h included in the zip Mose sent: Either he somehow omitted it in whatever process that he used to zip it, which would be very strange, given that it's a Linux box, and it makes no sense that "zip Pascentiful.zip *" would miss anything. Why is Abysia's 2h missing? Did something prevent the zip program from reading it? Are the file permissions on Abysia.2h FUBAR'ed, this preventing both Dom2 from reading it, and preventing Mose from zipping it?

I am baffled.

As all attempts to reproduce the error locally yield no result, and Abysia has once again not taken its turn, I am forced to conclude that there may be file corruption which prevented the file from being included in the uploaded zip, and is yielding this odd behavior. I shall tell Cohen to reconnect and upload his turn again, after which the server will attempt to host. If it proceeds without incident, then I'll consider it a bizarre unsolved mystery. If it still fails, I'll have to either try hosting the game on kludgemush.com, or have Mose clean out the directory and replace all of the files with a fresh zip from after the hosting, whichever is less complicated. We'll see what happens when I get Cohen to redo his turn.

[ May 22, 2004, 09:44: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

[Cohen]

It nagotted again ...

[Norfleet]

Okay, I tried receiving the missing 2h from Cohen manually, and dropping it in. The game hosts without complaint when I do that. Nothing I do seems to be able to reproduce the error.

Given that Mose did not send abysia.2h in the zip file I received, and Dom2 still refuses to host on Mose's server, I'm inclined to suspect that there's something bizarre going on with the file permissions - but I can't reproduce the error on Linux, either.

I remain baffled.

In the meantime, however, if this is agreeable to everyone, and people can be found and notified, I can host the game on kludgemush.com, where it seems to run without incident.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

The abysia.2h file is my fault. It was there until I accidentially deleted it when creating the zip file. Looking through the log file I see 2 strange things, speaking like any Monty fan:

1. The game reports a CD violation?! (Jotunheim, I believe it was)

2. My server scripts had apparantly crashed a number of times. I have since changed the code a bit, so it should be more defensive now. Still, it had been restarted a lot since crashing.

3. There is a known bug which I don't know how to solve. The socket lingers (in TIMEWAIT2, I presume) when the server is killed, which means that the program cannot be restartet before an interval has passed. And the perl script cannot access information on this level. I'm planning on reading up on sudo to solve this problem, though. In practice this means that you HAVE TO CHECK whether the server really restartet. It may state that it was a success, but a reload of the page will reveal that the server instantly crashed. Just restart the server again, and all will be fine.

[jimbo]

I am happy to continue on a new server...just post where...

The Jotunheim CD violation was my friend...I infected him with the game, he ordered it, he took my CD home so he could play it immediately, and when he got his game in the mail he never reinstalled. We found this out when I infected him with this server (hehehe), he signed up in this game as Jotenheim, but when he went to take his turn (on turn one) he CD violated.

Unfortunately he set the position to computer controlled before we back tracked and figured out he never reinstalled his own CD key...which is fixed now of course...live and learn.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Esben Mose Hansen:
The abysia.2h file is my fault. It was there until I accidentially deleted it when creating the zip file. Looking through the log file I see 2 strange things, speaking like any Monty fan:

1. The game reports a CD violation?! (Jotunheim, I believe it was)

That can't be terribly recent, because Jotunheim has been AI for a very long time now, since he staled turn 1 and hasn't returned since. Could by why he staled, though, if he had a pirate copy...

2. My server scripts had apparantly crashed a number of times. I have since changed the code a bit, so it should be more defensive now. Still, it had been restarted a lot since crashing.

That's not likely to be the problem, since the game always nagots right when it hosts.

3. There is a known bug which I don't know how to solve. The socket lingers (in TIMEWAIT2, I presume) when the server is killed, which means that the program cannot be restartet before an interval has passed.

That's not the problem. All TCP/IP implementations are like that, it's there for a reason. I've come to sort of expect this behavior if the game tries to reuse the same port after live connections were up when the game dropped.

You don't really need sudo to do it, though. Just parsing the contents of netstat -n will tell you if the port is in use or not. Just do a netstat -n | grep :, and if you see anything there, it's not dead yet.

However, none of this addresses the current problem. So it looks like since the cause of this cannot be determined, Pascentiful on Mosehansen is dead.

The game has thus been moved using the files I received to: kludgemush.com 10345