Login Server Down?

[Arcaan]

My thing was that it seams that the people runing the LS are being gracious enough to run it but they are not supporting it as much. There is this torn state between keeping comunity together and letting someone else in on what could be a "security risk" situation. What I am trying to say is that it is very frustrating when stuff goes down and nobody is really around to contact because people in charge are not as involved anymore. A community this big needs at least one person that is on top of the LS and heavily still involved if we are going to all depend on it. To have all these server admins and devs frustrated because they are unable to do anything for their community when the LS goes down because whoever is running it is unreachable is really a bummer for everyone. I really ask that the EQEmu people look into this cause it is getting worse and worse. If you want to keep the community together then it needs to be a fully supported community.

[Yeormom]

Report when it is having problems on irc in #eqemu and Doodman or Rogean will reboot it.

[Fifflefluff]

Whoops. Double post; see below.

[Fifflefluff]

For what it's worth, I've never once been able to ping eqemulator.net or complete a tracert -- every time I've tried, it times out after the hop to ge2-edge.mia.infolink.com [64.251.0.71]. That said, I can still access the site, although sometimes it acts like it's loading but doesn't actually load anything at all, and sometimes I'm able to log into the login server. So it's a bit of a mystery to me.

Also, I've had problems with my Linksys Wireless Range Expander, which seems to interfere somehow with my ability to connect to the actual servers.

[Yeormom]

You can't complete a trace route to my servers either because I drop requests that are not needed, like ICMP for ping/tracert. It's a security/performance issue more than anything.

It isn't bandwidth/network problems with the server. If it we're, you would get 404 errors when hitting the forums. If your browser is running stateless, you can hit the web page when the server is acting up and two hours later, it will actually do whatever you told it to. It seems to be a process running on the box that starves everything else, imo.

[trevius]

The Login Server issues lately have really been getting out of hand. It was one thing 6 months ago when it would only happen for a few days a month, but now it is a regular occurrence that is happening weekly or even multiple times per week.

I think the problems are probably related to what I think is an increase in popularity and population on the emulator. It has increased the number of MySQL connections and I assume that is the cause of the failures. It is good that the project may be growing in popularity, but I am sure it would be much more popular if it wasn't for these Login Server issues. It is to a point where the Login Server issues aren't just an annoyance anymore, they are taking a toll on the entire project.

Just to guess as to the cause of the problem, I think that either the max connection setting or the idle connection timeout setting for MySQL are probably set wrong for the population that the emulator has now. Here is a post that describes a problem that appears to be the same thing that eqemulator.net is experiencing:

http://forum.siteground.com/showthread.php?t=2096

I am not saying that the settings listed in that post are the solution to the LS issues, but at least that is an idea of what might need to be looked into or adjusted to see if it makes improvements.

We need to see if we can get more support from Rogean or doodman to see if we can get this problem resolved. If they can't/won't do it themselves, maybe they could finally allow someone else access (KLS or Cavedude maybe) to the server host so they can play around with it. At least having access to someone that will be able to actively work on this, I am confident that the problem could be resolved for good or at least, improved greatly. Really, I don't see why they wouldn't want to spend the few hours it would take to work on this issue in trade for not having to deal with restarting MySQL multiple times per week.

The thing is that I don't remember Login Server issues like this ever happening on the old hosting. Even if they did, it wasn't nearly as often as they do since the hosting changed. So, the old host must have had better settings to handle the number of connections that it needs to. That being the case should mean that this should definitely be a resolvable issue and I don't see why a little time can't be spent on it. This is affecting thousands of members and the entire project as a whole. It is definitely one of the biggest factors holding back the emulator for a long time now.

[Angelox]

We need to start working on a new, open-source LS, and put the old LS to sleep - The decaying LS is one big reason why I went Minilogin (it's not open source or open-anything, therefore, I don't want it).
It's incredible the recent amount of progress that has been made in such a short time, over and over again I've seen some of the new Devs prove statements like "it can't be done", wrong. So I'm sure a new Public LS can be made too.
The day will probably come, when you will all get up to a LS that's gone, never to come back again, and that will be a big blow to everyone. Loosing these forums, will not be so bad, as there are other forums around that can pick up the slack, but I guess it would be terrible to loose all the years of help posts, and history, someone might want to consider storing all this.

You need to start something that will go on for a long time, something that other people can pick up if you get tired and quit.

Originally Posted by trevius

The Login Server issues lately have really been getting out of hand. It was one thing 6 months ago when it would only happen for a few days a month, but now it is a regular occurrence that is happening weekly or even multiple times per week.

I think the problems are probably related to what I think is an increase in popularity and population on the emulator. It has increased the number of MySQL connections and I assume that is the cause of the failures. It is good that the project may be growing in popularity, but I am sure it would be much more popular if it wasn't for these Login Server issues. It is to a point where the Login Server issues aren't just an annoyance anymore, they are taking a toll on the entire project.

Just to guess as to the cause of the problem, I think that either the max connection setting or the idle connection timeout setting for MySQL are probably set wrong for the population that the emulator has now. Here is a post that describes a problem that appears to be the same thing that eqemulator.net is experiencing:

http://forum.siteground.com/showthread.php?t=2096

I am not saying that the settings listed in that post are the solution to the LS issues, but at least that is an idea of what might need to be looked into or adjusted to see if it makes improvements.

We need to see if we can get more support from Rogean or doodman to see if we can get this problem resolved. If they can't/won't do it themselves, maybe they could finally allow someone else access (KLS or Cavedude maybe) to the server host so they can play around with it. At least having access to someone that will be able to actively work on this, I am confident that the problem could be resolved for good or at least, improved greatly. Really, I don't see why they wouldn't want to spend the few hours it would take to work on this issue in trade for not having to deal with restarting MySQL multiple times per week.

The thing is that I don't remember Login Server issues like this ever happening on the old hosting. Even if they did, it wasn't nearly as often as they do since the hosting changed. So, the old host must have had better settings to handle the number of connections that it needs to. That being the case should mean that this should definitely be a resolvable issue and I don't see why a little time can't be spent on it. This is affecting thousands of members and the entire project as a whole. It is definitely one of the biggest factors holding back the emulator for a long time now.

[trevius]

No matter what, the Public Login Server as it is now should never be fully open source. Not only does it contain the information needed to hack player accounts (including GM accounts), but it may also contain the information to allow hacking directly into EQLive servers. If that is the case, then an Open Source Login Server would probably be a quick way to get SoE spending money to try to get the project shut down. There are just too many security issues with making the current Login Server Open Source.

The only way to have it as open source would be for the authentication to actually happen on the EQEmu Server (individually to each server) instead of at the Login Server. I don't know if there is an easy way to do this other than having the Login Server allow any username/password to login (like minilogin does), and then forward that info onto the server that they try to connect to for authentication to happen. It would probably be able to work similar to the Minilogin, accept instead of forwarding the IP of the account that is logging in, it would just foward the password that they used to log in. Then, the password would just be saved as MD5 to reduce the readability of it.

The problem with that is it would need to be hosted by someone trustworthy, since I don't think it is safe to just enter your password on just anyone's Login Server. It probably wouldn't be hard for them to set it to log passwords/accounts and even if they are kept as MD5, that can still be cracked. Any time you are entering a password somewhere, you should always feel that it is as secure as possible. By allowing anyone to run a Login Server, it opens up a bunch of issues that could potentially cause more impact to the EQEmu Project than the current Login Server issues have been causing.

I am sure there is a good solution that we will eventually all come to, but for now, I think our best bet is to try our best to get the current Login Server issues resolved wether that mean contacting doodman/rogean to help with it or give access to someone active on the project, or maybe research if there is anything else that could potentially help from outside the Login Server. The issue could even maybe be helped just by adjusting the default rates that servers make connections to the Login Server. It could also possibly even be helped by more servers running almost all dynamic zones. I don't know this for sure, but I think zones have some sort of connection to the Login Server, and if so, having 200+ static zones is probably not helping the Login Server issues. Multiply that by a few servers and it starts adding up quick. Maybe if enough servers could adjust their own settings, it would help to fix or at least reduce this issue. That might be a long shot, but it is probably worth considering.

It would also be a really good idea to have a backup of the entire site from time to time in the case that the host server dies. Losing all accounts, wiki pages and forum posts would be devastating to the project and would probably be the end of it. It would take a very long time to recover from a loss like that and losing the wiki pages would make everything much more complicated.