Knights moving to a new server.

[Stephen]

Happy Easter everyone.

I have decided to move Knights onto proper VPS hosting instead of running a home server. I'm doing this because I want to consolidate all my web related stuff onto one server, which will make it easier for me to keep everything organized.

What's probably more of interest to you guys is that the new server will be faster -- which should hopefully result in faster website response times and lower ping times in-game.

I plan to do the migration later this week (perhaps Wednesday or Thursday). This may result in 1-2 days of downtime but the site should be back up again by the weekend. Apologies for any inconvenience.

[Stephen]

The server move is complete, everything seems to be working, EXCEPT that I couldn't get any of the mods to work on the new server. Therefore the game server is running without any mods at the moment.

I will try to get this fixed once I figure out what the problem is, in the meantime sorry for any inconvenience.

If you notice anything else that doesn't work then please do let me know.

[K9]

Thank you for the update and new (maybe faster) server, hopefully it will be put to the test with the regular weekly games Saturday and maybe Sunday too.

[Anxious to see how things turn out.]   Done...

Moo and I were able to successfully play quite a few quests together both Saturday and Sunday without any significant issues (only Saturday Moo was disconnected a few times while he was waiting alone and myself at least once or twice with him during gameplay).

Other than those disconnect flukes which could have been unrelated to your changes, the new Knights vps was very smooth, fast, reducing both our usual pings by about 15 points.

Unfortunately we didn't have good load tests with only ourselves this weekend, but hopefully will see a few more of the regulars return next weekend to enjoy the speed increase.

It was nice being able to hit a barrel without getting attacked by spiders  :D
And pleasant change going back to basics with less monsters, we're hoping to see all the mods return sometime. 

Is it just an issue with lua?  I hope the vps can support it.

Talk with you later...

Thank you.

[Stephen]

Hello K9, sorry, didn't see your edit there for a few days.

Glad to hear that the new server is working and especially that the ping time is better. I was wondering what sort of connection quality we would have, good to know that it is better than before :)

The disconnection seems to be an issue with the hosting company. They reported that they were having network connectivity issues last weekend. They didn't say specifically what the problem was but they say they have applied a fix, so hopefully that won't happen again.

I am not certain what the problem with the mods is. When I enable the mods and try to connect to the game, the client just sits on the "Joining Game 1" screen without doing anything. There does not appear to be any network activity and there is no CPU activity on the server either. It is just sitting there doing nothing. Eventually it times out and disconnects. Not sure why this is happening -- probably I have just misconfigured something. I will have another look tomorrow and see if I can figure out what's wrong.

[ImpassIve]

"When I enable the mods and try to connect to the game, the client just sits on the "Joining Game 1" screen without doing anything."

Hm... sounds familiar. I had exactly the same issue while trying to join game in Knights with my previous router - I was unable to play Knights from home for something like 0.5-1 year, until we have got a new router once again.

P.S. Just noticed what I don't have an avatar anymore.
Tryed to upload a new one:
"An Error Has Occurred!
The attachments upload directory is not writable. Your attachment or avatar cannot be saved."

[Stephen]

Hm... sounds familiar. I had exactly the same issue while trying to join game in Knights with my previous router - I was unable to play Knights from home for something like 0.5-1 year, until we have got a new router once again.

That's very interesting. (And I'm sorry about you not being able to play for a year...)

As it happens I have been away from home recently and have been using a different router (actually it was a public WiFi access point). Yesterday I got back home again and using my normal internet connection I was able to connect to the server with no problems (with and without mods). So it seems I had the same issue you did.

So I guess the router must be blocking certain Knights packets, but it's not clear why or how. It is not blocking ALL Knights packets because I was able to connect to the server (just not join the game) and indeed everything worked properly when mods were disabled. So what's different when mods are enabled? Well, basically, the server sends all of the mod's ".bmp" files to the client when the client joins the game. That can be quite a lot of data so perhaps it is something to do with "large" packets being blocked. Hmm.

I have re-enabled mods on the server. If anyone else finds they can't connect, please let me know.

P.S. About your avatar. Sorry, that was my fault, I forgot to update some of the forum settings after the migration. I think I got it working, it looks like you have an avatar once more :)