When you find the **** that's doing this feel free to send him to my house. I'm surrounded my moorland,reservoirs and and old airfield. Plenty of places to hide his remains
The times that the server falls over is most interesting and has helped narrow the search for a culprit down. I'm reasonably confident that since the problem began two people have been involved, right now we just have somebody in an American timezone doing it - which is immediately suspiscious to me because of some misleading information posted elsewhere. Suspiscions are not enough though, evidence is required which is why we can only be sure of 1 person at the moment.
Well let me put it this way, other operators are having the same problem and the crash seems to correspond to a number of known exploits for which a tool has been developed to make use of, and we're running the same versions of software on the server that was previously stable before the tool was released.
Unfortunately the nature of the hack is such that there really is not much in the logs to go on in terms of preventing it, and the one person we have a definite fix on uses a floating IP address so we cant stop them anyway.
Basically we're holding on for an LFS patch, Scawen does know of the issue and hopefully it will be fixed soon - but also consider that he's half developed patch Y and you see that patching this out hasn't been an instant fix as often is the case with these things have been found in the past. Consequently, at least one person is prooving a point, and I suspect but cannot prove (due to the pattern of the attacks) that another is just a jerk.
It is entirely possible that this is a bug, I dont think it's the X-System as other operators are having similar difficulties, but it is plausable that the problem is in the LFS dedicated server software - however that ran fine for a long time then suddenly we all started having problems with dissapearing servers after the hack was released.
For your reassurance, i'm not any more in the loop than you are and have no special relationship with the devs. Don't get me wrong, there's things i'd like to do that their respective wives would not approve of, but the fact is i'm just an end user like you guys.
If I was to hazard a guess, i'd say the absense of an immediate patch says we're closer to a test patch or full release than we are to patch X. Given the nuisance of servers closing many times a day, my hunch is that we should see something any time now.
Either that or the hacks really are problematical to fix, which given the new queuing system and the test patch problems we had prior to the launch of patch X, is also quite possible.
Damn. We (dSRC) had just restarted our servers yesterday (actually..more like last night) and now they're gone again. Never had we so much problems.. I hope this will be over very soon.
... no? OK, well I thought it was ironic...
