Ride On Part II

[ricketyclik]

Der-dent... Der-dent... Der-dent... WHANAWALAHHH

(To the Jaws soundtrack)

[DrDeke]

Ok, everything should be back up and running. Let me know if you run into any trouble.

[ricketyclik]

Yup... A-OK

[Soltz]

I received an notification and I've played my turn.

[DrDeke]

Good evening,

I'm testing a new firewall policy to address a problem wherein the pitboss server will sometimes spew about 50 packets per second of game protocol data at your computers indefinitely even after you have disconnected from the game.

This has been happening on and off since the game began, and my approach for dealing with it has been to just check on it every now and then, and take care of it* if I notice it happening. That approach wastes a lot of Internet data transfer, though, so I have now set things up so that these unwanted streams should get shut down automatically.

I don't expect this new system to interfere with legitimate game traffic, but please let me know if you start getting disconnected unexpectedly or have any unusual trouble.

Thanks,
Rusty


*If you're interested in how I "take care of it," it seems that the pitboss server will stop sending these packets if I cause my firewall to reply to one of its outgoing packets with an ICMP communication-administratively-prohibited message. This is all well and good, but the server would probably disconnect an actual game connection if I sent it one of these messages as well. So the trick is to avoid shutting down flows associated with legitimate game traffic. I've set my script to err on the side of caution by having it refrain from killing any connections if it detects that any computers are sending civ4 game data to the local pitboss server.

[ricketyclik]

860 played

[DrDeke]

860 played

[Soltz]

Ditto

[Av8tor]

Turn played

[ricketyclik]

880 played

[Soltz]

Played as well.

[ricketyclik]

900 played

[Soltz]

Played

[DrDeke]

900 & 920 Played.

[Soltz]

an' roun' we go!