Quote from RealistAdam :

This is very nice. But there are many spelling errors in the text file. They...

That is the LFS code page identifiers as seen in the plain text log file.

I've added an option to see an interpreted version of the file in a browser tab.

Add to the end of the line &html=1

E.g. https://www.lfs.net/hosting/admin/12345/activity?log=Sunday&html=1

I hope to add the links to the activity page today.


About the Join link, that change was intentional. Nearly every time I tried to edit one of my hosts, I clicked the name. Instead of editing the host, my browser tried to start LFS to join the host. This became irritating. It seemed to me the interface wasn't intuitive, so I changed it.

I am in the middle of working on it.

It now saves a week of logs, plus the current day, but that has only started yesterday (Saturday 20 July).

I haven't made the interface for it yet but you can already access your host's logs like this:

Visit your host's "activity" page, so you see a URL like this: https://www.lfs.net/hosting/admin/12345/activity

Then you can add ?log=Saturday to the end of that line to see yesterday's log.

Or add ?log=Today to get today's log.

Moved thread to correct forum section.

Escape then Free View (or SHIFT+U)

You may need to press SPACE or SHIFT+F to see the buttons and you may need to click "edit"

All I can say at this point is that the internet is quite strange at times and I do know of other cases where, temporarily, a user in one location has a different experience connecting to different servers of ours despite them being together on a single rack. And at the same time, every other LFS user reports no issues at all.

Sometimes internet connectivity is extremely strange and is not really possible to understand without some in depth knowledge of what happens at every step between one computer and another.

Sometimes issues are resolved in minutes, sometimes days, they may be a one off or they may be recurrent.

Basically there are sometimes unexplained, full or partial, blockages between one point on the internet and another, and we are unlikely to ever understand why that is the case.

I restarted the Turkish server this morning as our provider made some changes recently to improve the connection again and I wanted the server to have a fresh start.

Just reporting this in case you wondered why it was offline for a few minutes.

I don't imagine that I can help with this but usually such issues are on the internet, somewhere between your computer and our servers.

You could try a traceroute for more information than ping.

What type of internet connection do you have? I believe that these days most problems related to UDP packets are something to do with the use of a mobile phone as a wifi hotspot.

Hello,
Is this reproducible? I mean, can you make another replay and the same thing happens?
Otherwise, it could possibly be related to something done before or after you originally created the replay.
In any case, it would be good to know. Usually if we know how to reproduce it, we can work out if it's a bug or not.
Different LFS versions are not usually supposed to cause an OOS. Different versions of a mod are not expected to cause an OOS, unless you manually renamed them at some point between recording and playback.
So... basically we are short of information at this point.

One possible explanation is if https is allowed but http is blocked.

But why that would be, I don't know. Router? Firewall? Antivirus? ISP?

Maybe you could try accessing some site that you can visit directly by http - to see if the same issue can be reproduced in a browser, unrelated to LFS in any way.

EDIT:
Can you connect to these http-only sites in your browser?
http://httpforever.com/
http://example.com/

Last edited by Scawen, Wed, 3 Jul 2024 13:59.

Yes, it's safe to use and protects websites against DDoS attacks.

If you are interested in the 100 second timeout issue, feel free to read.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38536167/is-it-possible-to-increase-cloudflare-time-out

Well, we are a bit stuck at the moment as it's no longer possible to switch off Cloudflare. Constant attacks that bring down the website entirely must be avoided. This is the modern world, some people love to break things and we have to be protected.

Victor doesn't want to work much on LFS at the moment and I really have not a clue how to convert to a new upload system that can avoid the Cloudflare upload time limit. I've spent the first half of this year mostly working on the website, learning how to maintain a large system created by someone else. Development on LFS.exe itself ground to a halt due to the current situation.

Luckily Victor is still there to deal with urgent things I can't deal with. But sorry to say he didn't seem interested when I asked him about ways to get around the Cloudflare upload timeout issue.

I guess I could try to press him on it. But quite honestly I try to avoid bugging him if possible. I'm just starting to have a bit of time to develop LFS. When I looked into it, the special upload thing was way beyond my website capabilities.

There is an issue with long uploads through Cloudflare that is not simple to fix. A possible solution is to reduce the size of the upload and there is an editor option for that.

You can read about here: https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/2090164#post2090164

Hello Hosters,

As some of you may know, I've been looking around in the hosting system a lot recently and have done some fixes and updates that were necessary as some things were going wrong. It's a big system that Victor created but as he has a separate full time job, he prefers to be less involved with Live for Speed these days. He's still there to help but a lot of the website and hosting maintenance must now be done by me.

One thing I noticed is that the host log files just keep on growing endlessly but I don't think this is a good idea. For example, the biggest one is 15 GB in size which I think is just too big for a file that no-one ever looks at. Six other hosts also have a log file over 1 GB.

This is not an urgent problem but I think it should be fixed before too long. I'm wondering how it should really be done.

A few questions I am wondering about.

Do you even have access to these log files? I know you can see a few pages in the 'Virtual console' window - is that it?
What should you really be able to see, or what would you like to see?
I'm wondering if there could be some practical way of preventing the endless growth but provide what is needed. For example, maybe you only really need a few days' worth of log to be visible?

Just brainstorming now, but how about if each day a new log would be started, and only keep the logs from a few days? Maybe there's a normal way to do this kind of thing, I don't know so that's why I'm asking. Just try to keep it simple and practical please.

No, there is no maintenance work today.

Yesterday there were DDoS attacks. I can't see evidence of that at the time you restarted your host today.

But "servers are down" is not a good description. I do not know what symptoms you experienced.

I think I may know the reason and I have made a change. Please let us know if you can connect now.

Please be aware you don't know the history of this struggle.

After so many weeks doing almost nothing but this battle, I feel it may be beneficial to try to explain what our aims are, in case they think maybe we are the 'bad guys' in some way. You know, like one of these big companies that despises its customers and tries to think of ever more ways to suck money out of them, to keep the shareholders happy. Really we aren't that at all. There are no shareholders, just a couple of developers. We are trying to be the good guys, and we are part of the community ourselves. I'd like to make sure the attackers know that, in case they have misunderstood us.

I'm not sure if this is a welcome suggestion but have you checked the price of second-hand PCs? A old PC good enough for LFS can be very cheaply bought. It's not like you need an up to date computer. Not recommended for delivery but local pickup type of options could work.

Have you tried graphics options like:

Textures: low res
Texture filtering/AF: 1x

Misc options:

Full physics for remote cars: [no]

In case the attackers might read a message, I will ask sincerely:

What is it that you really want?

We are two people - a programmer (me) and an artist (Eric) that try to provide a game for anyone in the world to play. Also, part time, Victor does a few things on the servers (he did a lot more in the past) and Geraldine helps with support emails. That's all. This is not a big company.

We are massively helped by community members including forum moderators, mod reviewers, creators of mods and software, race organisers, broadcasters and people simply participating in races and events online. People do this for a hobby, to have some fun, entertain and interact with others around the world.

In addition to the free demo, so that we can continue developing, we have a license, people can make a single payment and play for ever, getting free updates for life. What could be fairer than that? Other developers keep making a new version and charging you again for it. It's possible because we have such a small team, our business can get by on a low income, even though we try to provide servers around the world so everyone can play with a good ping.

Why do you seem to want to disrupt our players, who just want to have a bit of fun racing around? Who is it that you are trying to attack? Is it the developers, or our community? Are you on a side, and trying to attack the other side? Have we or our players harmed you in some way? I would love to know, because we really have no idea.

Live for Speed is a system that aims to bring the people of the world together to have fun with each other. A bit of peace in a world with too many conflicts. Can't we all just get along, wherever we are from, and whatever language we speak and whichever culture we have grown up in?

Can't we all just have a bit of fun, try to be one of the good things in the world?

I think your question is about the quality of the internet and its infrastructure. There's nothing I can tell you about the connections and hops between Singapore and the Netherlands, because I don't know anything about that (or the connections between any other locations).

Well for several weeks now nearly all development has ceased on my side as some strange people are doing daily attacks on our servers, for unknown reasons.

I mean, we are just trying to provide some entertainment for the people of the world. And although we are one of the world's smallest game developers, these peculiar individuals derive pleasure from bringing down our game servers.

One of the updates to make the servers more robust was to close open ports. One of those open ports on each server was the one listening for ping requests. As such it was a target for attacks, so the servers are now more resilient without leaving that port open.

Anyway, regardless, the attackers have found new ways to attack so everything is pretty pointless. But now you know the reason why.

The whole year I have been dealing with hacks, cracks and attacks. It's pretty joyless and not the reason I do this job. It would be great if the attackers could find something else to do, and I might get a chance to work on developing Live for Speed, for the benefit of all the world's people.

Most recently faved goes to the top, then after that the most recently visited one moves to the top.

Here is a link to download only the requested file (in a zip)
https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/106062

It's done this way so that when you add or remove favourites, they don't jump around.

You don't need to click refresh to update it, you can click the star at the top of the sorting column.

Thanks for the testing. I've put it on the auto updater now.