World: r3wp

I have probably new bug with Altme server - I can't connect to world. 
It even does not try to, as I can't see any outgoing packets to IP 
of my world on particular port (xyz:5402). AltME client says - xyz 
exists, but not-online. But - our worlds ARE online. When I go to 
altme.com/check.html, the world seem to be online, and the site also 
is able to connect to it.


So I inspected TCP packets in Wireshark, and it states: "cmd: find 
data: ["xyz" 0 1.2.17.3.1 4811897].cmd: lookup data: inactive ."

OK, sent official mail to altme.com feedback describing the issue 
...

was contacted by Altme feedback .... wow, there's someone live :-)

who's there?

My guess, Carl's wife, Cindy.

Dunno - it was signed as Safeworld's technical support :-) The issue 
is still not resolved and I can't get to my worlds ....

Strong argument for sticking with FOSS

There's an old issue I hit again recently, where new connections 
to the world can't be made, but existing sessions still work. Restarting 
the world from a shortcut doesn't work to solve it. You have to start 
AltME and choose 'Start a World'.

Time to restart the OpenAltme project.

Anyone else seen a trojan warning for AltMe pop up in their antiv 
virus software? Microsoft Security Essentials just told me that there's 
a virus in one of the AltMe chat files. Any idea how to see to which 
group the file belongs? The file is called 380.set.

380.set is the "Chat (Not web-public)"

It is _unlikely_ to have a virus, as it is basically a text file 
consisting of REBOL blocks (you can load it into a text file to take 
a look) But who knows how clever virus writers are these days?

Yes, I've seen some false positives with REBOL products before.

If you look in the file:
   altme/worlds/rebol3/users.set
you can see the group-id to titles mapping.
Again, just a text file.

Yeah I'm sure it's just a false positive, I wasn't concerned or anything. 
I use Windows only for playing games, it doesn't have access to any 
important files and I use sandboxie for stuff I'm not sure about. 
Before MSE I used AntiVir and that one does report even more false 
positives, pretty annoying. Usually a company can contact anti virus 
software companies about these false positives in their products, 
do you know by any chance if that was done for REBOL in the past?
And thanks for the info about the file/group mapping :)

rebol/sdk also returns a false positive on several virus checkers

The Jan-2008 R3 alpha shows up as a false positive in AVG, still.

The MSE false positive for the chat set was for a javascript exploit. 
Were there any javascript discussions in that chat file?

If it is just a numeric mapping, it would be amusing if the numbers 
involved were also used in a javascript exploit :)

BrianH, I still got the chat  file in the MSE quarantine, I'll take 
a look at it next time I boot into Windows and look if there's any 
javascript code in it. At the moment I don't use it that often since 
Windows 7 keeps rebooting every few hours and messes up my new harddrive, 
seems to be a common problem with Windows 7. And it worked so nice 
for a couple of days, meh.

Heh .. there is a javascript channel here .. maybe someone posted 
some sample code?

damned - once again lost registration for my worlds. This is starting 
to become insane. It is at least 6th case in half a year. This service 
is becoming unreliable ....

I contacted Carl privately, I think that someone should provide some 
explanation to what and why is happening there.

Reichart and team could not duplicate or explain.  As I stated earlier, 
hosting only one world on the same system seemed to greatly reduce 
the occurences of this.  I was never given any info on what was done 
to identify the problem, but I also didn't push for it.  Maybe Reichart 
can add something on this?

I think he can't. Last I heard Altme is now fully handled by RT, 
hence Carl is probably the right person? :-)

I would like to know the mechanisms, which checks for the 10 day 
time-out period, so that it could free timeouted worlds. There must 
be bug there. Both my worlds were running yesterday, I visit them 
on regular basis. So I wonder how some script or whatever sits at 
altme.com, can fail on check here?

Lost my Worlds too...


Pekr, Do you think that is the problem some bug in the 10 day use 
limit?

If so, will subscribing the name stop this from happening? 

Does anyone here have ALtme "save" the world name for them and if 
so have they avoided this problem?

Anyway to script some sort of "ping" to check periodically if the 
world still exists?


I hate thinking its been down for hours or days if I have not visited 
for a while.

amacleod - apparently, there has to be some bug. There has to be 
some script/job, which investigates, if the name is free or not. 
That script fails, or simply does not work upon the docs, which say, 
that your world will expire after 10 days. But maybe the logic is 
twisted, maybe such job is being run not on a daily basis, but on 
a 10days basis, and if so, then it is wrong.

... because you can have 1 hour outage, and such script reaching 
your world, will claim it does not run for more than 10 days.

Dunno if paying customers have the same problems, but most probably 
not.

Pekr, how did you contact me?  I was not aware that there was a problem 
here.

AltME saves the world-name two ways:


1. When you run your server, it pings the world-name server every 
few minutes to indicate that it's up, and what IP it is using.


2. If you buy a registered world or AltServe, then the world-name 
is locked and cannot be reallocated.


But, that said, there could be a bug!  Please tell me any details. 
 For example, what AltME version, and what platform.

BTW, Safeworlds does not intentionally deallocate names that are 
in use.  So, it's definitely a bug of some kind.

sounds like a good sci-fi title ... "The lost worlds of AltME" ...

Carl - private message on R3 chat. I did not contact you with prior 
problems, but this time I got denerved, when it happened second time 
in one month :-)

I will dig some information later and post it to you ...

Is Carl suggesting that teh $10/yr subscription avoids this problem 
of losing worlds?

Just wondering what algorithm is used in Altme to set the user state 
to active or inactive.  Does it monitor keyboard and mouse usage?

$10/year is a really trivial sum ...if it solves the issues.

Exactly..

...but... the feature shouldn't be broken non the less.

Am I the only one having connection problems today?

no, you are not. I experience occassionally reconnection, sometimess 
even full lose of the connection ...

Very slow, unreliable. More 'Internet Busy...'

I often see "Internet busy" in the status line up left, and my post 
doesn't get delivered. I found, that if I reconnect (login again 
in AltME), I can get my post out.

So it's probably in the AltME server end of the communication?

yes, server issue ...

I too am seeing this a lot today.  Maybe we should get Henrik to 
host this world on linode for us ?  :)

Just for the records, the reason AltME went down last week was a 
hardware failure of the Network card.

Suddenly it went normal here. What switch did Reichart flip? :-)

We are also moving some lines, Carl needs to flush some IP tables, 
he might have done this today.