Zoning problem of a different kind
 

For some reason, I suddenly lost the ability to zone into eastkarana. I can zone to all other places I normally go with no problem. But when I attempt eastkarana, the chatbox tells me "Loading, Please Wait" and the splash screen says "Entering East Karana," then it boots me to the login screen. This is a persistent problem. It is a custom zone that I overwrote long ago (yes, I know . . . I should have used zoneproxy), but it has always worked with no problem up to now. I have other custom zones that are working fine. Any idea why I'd have this issue? Thanks.

Only thing I can think of is to check your Zone_Dump table and see if it has anything listed for that zone in it and remove those lines. I think there is an issue if you have a static zone and mess with changing it to dynamic after a state change as been recorded (or something like that).

I think I found the issue.

My initial suspicion was that is had something to do with changing the server from persistent state 0 to 1 and back to 0. I checked the Zone_State_Dump table, but I didn't find much helpful information there.

On a whim, I began checking server logs. There was one named eqemu_quest_zone_xxxx.log. It showed that a recently created script (for eastkarana) had some errors in it (in particular, three quotation marks within a single quest::say statement, rather than two). I made the fix, restarted everything, and now I can enter the zone fine. Could a simple error in a quest script have been preventing access to the zone? It seems odd to me that it would, but I'm not an expert on this so what do I know?

Yes, quest files can most certainly cause zones to crash or be unreachable. I have a script that I wrote that intentionally crashes the zone in order to remove player ghosts on Windows servers.

I've not had this ghosting problem on my windows server. What causes this in general?

Sometimes when a player /exits or /quits the game, or even every now and then when they camp properly, they will leave a character ghost in game. This looks at first just to be a player that is AFK. You can easily tell if the player is a ghost by turning on inspect (/toggleinspect on) and then right clicking the player. If an inspect window pops up, they are just a normal player, but if no box ever pops up (might want to try multiple times just to make sure) then that player is no longer connected.

This issue can build up overtime and cause considerable bandwidth and performance issues for a server if you have a decent number of players. These ghosts will stay there until the zone is shutdown and restarted, or until the server is restarted.