Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Server Crashing / Not Auto-Restarting

As some of you may have noticed recently, the server (game module to be specific) has been crashing and not restarting. Normally there is a third-party monitoring program (NWNX) that detects a crashed game and restarts it. For reasons unknown to me yet, this "auto-restart" has been failing.

The last thing I did was add a plug-in to blank out the player list window. I don't actually know if this is or is not the cause, but I have removed it anyway.

I prefer seeing the player list in this window. My reason is that with it blank, the server appears empty. I do agree that some of it's information is not needed and might even be considered private information that could fall into the "cheat" category.

But, since I don't know how to write for this DLL file to make it work different, it's an "all or nothing" deal. If the server starts to function correctly (recovering from a crash), this is ultimately more important.

If any of you know a bit about programing, I can get you the source code. I think it was written in C, but that just a guess.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Isn't it more important to find out why the damn thing keeps crashing all the time? Why fix the cure instead of the disease.

Qwildurn said...

How often does it crash?
Not very often as near as I can tell.

Regardless of "why" it crashes, it needs to be able to auto-restart. It pretty much sucks if it is down for several hours before I realize. It totally sucks if I'm not at home and I need to stop what I'm doing to go home to "baby-sit" the server.

If it crashes once every two or three days and comes back up in a few minutes by itself, it's not that big of a deal.

As far as why it's not restarting and how to find that problem is kind of hard to do.
- The in-game reset lever works.
- If I close the game, NWNX will restart it in a few minutes like it should.

- The only time it seems to fail is from a true crash.
- I did check other things and make a few minor adjustments with no effects.

- The last thing I did that might be effecting this is the Player List Window.
- Now I have removed that change and must wait to see what happens.
- For all I know, this is what's causing the crashes.

Unknown said...

The server crashed AGAIN and is not restarting around 4:45pm Mountain Daylight Time

Unknown said...

It has been over an hour now

Qwildurn said...

Sending me an eMail would be better Ledak. My public eMail is:
qwildurn@verizon.net
It's on every sign in Dozo, you can't miss it.

BTW, my internet was down. I was on the phone hour hours with them. They finally changed something at their end. I don't have the bandwidth I'm paying for, but the game is back up. The say they are looking into it, "Might take a few days." I'm not holding my breath.