Hell has frozen over ?!

[communist]

Pezman (ATARI forum admin etc.) is asking for information when the Master Server started acting 'weird' again:

Master Server Problems

Can someone please clearly state the current state and history of the master server?

I'd like to attempt to track this issue down but I'll need details and information on what is currently wrong.

So in case you have some valuable info to add over there (besides the regular ATARI flaming ) feel free to post it

Here is the link:
http://www.ina-community.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=376161

 

[Mantik]

Pezman's pretty decent. He was one of the few producers that ever bothered to email me back..

And I'm fairly sure he'd know all the info already, but maybe referring him to the sticky post about the master server in these forums couldn't hurt?

 

[BaRrOw]

Bump... this is important. Anyone know dates/times when the server went down? Might help with tracking down bugs in logs or something...

 

[Jackal]

yeah well um, the master server went down like a month or two after XMP release, if not sooner.

 

[BaRrOw]

I meant specific dates that it went down... not when we started having the problem.

 

[[DF]phalanx]

erm it went down yesterday

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

If anyone is posting some dates/times add:

11th Apr 2004 at 08:42 PM (eastern time)

That was when I originally posted in the "cant get XMP to work online" thread and I did that about 5 minutes after installing the game and I was getting the master server down if that helps.

I've also noticed lately the pings on the servers are reporting correctly (no 9999's) BUT I've found something else...

I've found most servers in my list aren't reporting player count accurately. It tells me the server has 0 people in the list but when I click on the server itself the window on the bottom shows players... and when I join there actually are that many people on it.

 

[Mantik]

Nice ATHF quote Boogity +10

And the reason it's not showing player count correctly is usually because it's regetting the list but not refreshing the servers in the list too.. sometimes it doesn't do both for some weird reason.

 

[Demo_Boy]

The master server problem is this:
The server managment list managed by the master server gets corrupted slowly as long as the server is online.
Its a bug they didn't have time to fix.
Maybe a mem leak, maybe mem fragmentation, ... or something else.
In any case the master server starts sending out bad info, eventually it just crashes, and there's no auto restart. I think some manual efforts need to be done to restart it.
So basically, someone has to go over every day and reboot the machine and relaunch it.
Since it's not easy to do, it gets put off, till the server goes down.

 

[TherMight]

Master server went down April 27 2004 in the late afternoon.

 

[shoptroll]

Haven't all the master servers been having trouble of late?

I know Dr. Sin has been working on the UT2004 one a lot.

UT99's went down for a couple of days.

And we all know about the XMP one.

 

[MrMaddog]

Aren't there other master services we can use besides the ones sitting in Atari's HQ? I already included the ones from GameSpy and All Seeing Eye for XMP, but even they don't work (I might be missing something on the technical side...)

To be honest, I don't miss UT99 much online...only play Domination when I do. At least I can still play Unreal co-op when I get tired of playing UT2K4