Test Patch B2 has a new feature to download mods while you are joining a host.

This process is cleaner and more efficient than getting them after you have connected.

Hosters, please switch your hosts to B2 when convenient. It's fully compatible.
Racers, please use B2 if you don't have a reason to stick with version B.

Thanks for the testing!

List of changes and download: https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/97772

Thank you for your continues hard work on this simulator Scawen.
And I love your approach of fixing everything before progressing on bigger things.

You are an example developer for me. Quality over quantity.

Will test it later today.

It says now B3 in title but just wanted to change our servers but I only can set B2

Quote from RC-Maus :

It says now B3 in title but just wanted to change our servers but I only can set B2

Thanks for updating your servers. It's fine to go with B2 as that is the important one that can send the list of mods while someone joins in B2 or B3 version. It can also send TCP packets slightly faster to allow a player who has lagged a bit to catch up, although this is unlikely to make a noticeable difference. And has the /reinit command removed as it could cause problems, and we aren't aware of a need for that command.

We didn't release a B3 server as there were no relevant changes. The changes from B2 to B3 are only about text displayed on the screen.

Quote from Scawen :

And has the /reinit command removed as it could cause problems, and we aren't aware of a need for that command.

This is interesting as I was in contact with support last weekend, after our server got stuck after using the /reinit command
Once all was running again, I ask if it was safe to use the command and I got the all clear.

We did not use it so far, as we were not sure if it was needed (when we hosted our own servers, the command was used every night to make sure the servers weren't slowly slowing down over time).
Have to admit that we started using it a long time ago, so maybe those issues causing the slowly increasing slowness, was already solved at some point.

What kind of problems did it cause?

Quote from Yisc :

What kind of problems did it cause?

There is a bug, that appears to be a bug in Wine, when you close down a server socket, the port that was used by that socket can remain inaccessible for a while. Not always, but very often. This can even be if you close a socket and exit the program. Then when you run it, within approximately a minute, that port may still be 'in use'. So for LFS servers, that means it will fail to open the port and the host will not start up successfully. As far as I know, this is a very long time bug in Wine. It seems be unable to reliably release the port used by a socket, when the program clearly does close that socket.

So, although Victor fixed one thing related to the reinit function and then said that it should work now, that was only in his own tests. A few days later we heard from another user that had done reinit and got a problem. Victor still could not reproduce, but if you consider the Wine bug described above, it seems extremely likely that would cause a problem with reinit, because it closes all the sockets, exits to the "entry screen" then waits a couple of seconds then goes back in to start the host again.

I believe that without the Wine bug, there shouldn't be a problem. But there's not much we can do about the Wine bug.

Clear and indepth answer, thank you very much.