[MUD-Dev] randomly dropped connections

[cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA]

[Matthew Mihaly <diablo at best.com>:]

> I have been having a rather serious problem lately with Achaea, and we are
> relatively baffled. What is happening is that players are spontaneously
> getting their links cut. This cannot be the fault of our code (which is
> interpreted by the vortex engine), as we don't have the power to cut
> someone's link in this manner (Basically, they lose their link, and then
> our routine which cycles through looking for players with lost connections
> ditches the player). It's happened to me a few times, and, when telnetting
> straight from a linux prompt, the only message I receive is the
> "connection cut by foreign host" (or something similar). The weird thing
> is that it seems to 'follow' a character around for a bit. It COULD be our
> vortex engine, but the author of it assures me he's not touched anything
> to do with networking for over a year.
>
> Something JC said in his post about network setups made me wonder if maybe
> our ISP (mudservices) has a bad piece of hardware. Could a faulty router
> or something be causing this sort of problem?

I'm not a networking expert, so hopefully you'll get some replies from
some of them. However, the one thing that occurs to me is to find out
what you are seeing at your end. One way would be to get the author of
Vortex to put some debugging stuff in, to show the reasons for any
disconnection. If both ends of the connection see the equivalent of
"connection dropped by other end", then it sure looks like your ISP or
something.

Another way would be to put some kind of network tester box between your
host machine and the network connection. It should be able to see which
end is triggering the disconnect. From what I know of TCP/IP, such a
box should exist, but I don't know of any in particular. They won't
be cheap, so you would have to borrow one. Actually, a cheap PC with
a pair of ethernet cards could do the job, but I don't know if software
to handle it exists out there.

--
Don't design inefficiency in - it'll happen in the implementation.

Chris Gray     cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA
               http://www.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA/cg/



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