70+ Hours On 2.6.32

I am declaring myself the victor in this epic battle against kernel 2.6.32!

Disabling DMA on all IDE interfaces did the trick. If BOT House was a file server I'd probably be pissed at the resulting loss in performance, but it's not, so I'm a happy camper. And if there has been a drop in performance I haven't noticed it (nor do I have a baseline to compare any tests against - tests which I haven't performed anyway).

UT Files seems to work OK. There is one music file in Classic ]I[ on one map (formerly) in BITCH House (DM-Clementine) that had issues with the remote versions, but it is a very fast redirector.

Stunningly fast.

In fact, it's almost too good to be true. I don't see it lasting for a long time, although the guy has over 1000 UT servers as clients. But, he depends (???) on donations, so how long can that last? The cheapest plan at his hosting provider is $75/mo ($900/year).

Maybe he makes the Big Bucks with ads (I wouldn't know, I haven't seen an Internet ad in years). Regardless, I have no Plan B if this guy goes down, which bugs the HELL out of me.

With that in mind I'm going to take another look at trashing the connections of players who download directly from my servers. I didn't find anything the first time around, but I have devised a better approach this time, using one of the many VMs I have with UT99 support built-in (or perhaps the old EXP III server itself - it hasn't been powered up in months and the last time it was powered up it was having "issues"). So that's back in the Master Plan.

I still plan to consolidate the GoDaddy servers onto their buggy Linux platform. That issue is really weird. Sometimes it redirects, other times it doesn't. To make matters worse, the log files available to me don't seem to bother to report a 302 redirect when it happens. This must be some kind of weird load-balancing hardware that they haven't ported to their "beefy" Windows servers yet (hence the "not a good long-term solution" comment by "Just Jonathan" of GoDaddy fame). Internally, something appears to be juggling IP addresses around. Although the IP of the server externally is 97.74.26.128, the logs show that the last octet is changing frequently. BUT the different address is not in the redirect responses. WTF is up with that?

ATTENTION: "Just Jonathan" at GoDaddy

I told you I'd have the #1 Google Search for "just jonathan godaddy" on Sunday and now I have it.

Enjoy.

You bastard!

Fuck GoDaddy and "Just Jonathan"

And the horse they road in on.

I went to The Unreal Admin Page originally to rant about GoDaddy and their suck-ass Tech Support but I ended up just browsing through the forums. While there, I found someone promoting an Unreal mod redirection service, ut-files.com.

Since they had all the files required for Classic ]I[ Online, I set them up as the redirector. I'm not really comfortable with this decision, because I can't stand relying on someone else to always to the Right Thing, another reason I set up the GoDaddy account originally. But since GoDaddy has demonstrated they are incapable of doing the Right Thing anyway... well, why not use ut-files.com?

I contemplated this switch for some time, but in the end the deciding factor was speed. UT Files turned out to be three times faster than GoDaddy's junky servers. And, there's no "Terms of Service" agreement at UT Files (or at least none that I can find so far).

So I opened an account and I'll be uploading the files they're missing that are required to run BITCH House (not many, actually), at which point I'll move it over. BOT House has nothing special besides FuckIdlers, my custom-hacked version of KickIdlers.

And apparently everything needed by the Too Many Mods server is there as well.

There's another part of the puzzle I'm looking into: dropping the connection when a player requests a file from poor, bandwidth-limited me instead of the redirection service (naturally, via iptables). If I can nail that one down, you can kiss lag good-bye forever.

UPTIME: Forty-Five Hours

This is the longest-running BOT House 2.6.32 kernel yet.

I was going to bounce it this morning "just because" but I think I'll let it run. Besides, Pinky Dink has the day off and I can have her bounce it if worse comes to worse.

I am looking into some 3rd party hosting options for the UT mods and in the meantime I've been twiddling file attributes at proxyobsession.net to see if I can get around the 302 redirects reliably, regardless of whether I'm violating GoDaddy's Terms of Service or not. That seems to be working, but it "seemed to be working" last time I messed around with it, too.

During all that messing around I discovered a few mod files were missing, so I uploaded them. One was BP4Handler7C.u.uz, which is part of UTPure. It's a file everyone needs when they play BH. Since it was missing it was probably the cause of some short-lived lag on the server.

Anyway, it's Monday morning. Gotta run.

GoDaddy SCREWS THE POOCH AGAIN!

As if I don't have enough problems...

I just got off the phone with "Just Jonathan" of GoDaddy. He's not getting a favorable Customer Satisfaction survey from me.

Here's the scoop: as I mentioned earlier, I have two hosting accounts at GoDaddy. A new, Linux-based account and good old reliable mrhinkydink.com, which is Windows.

Up since 2005, mrhinkydink.com is where you get your UT mods from when you play on any of my UT servers. Since Day One, that was the reason I opened the account, and it has worked well for that purpose. However, getting it hosted on Windows was a mistake in the first place. Now, I want to put everything on the Linux server.

Sadly, it can't handle UT mods!

When you ask for a mod, your UT console sends an HTTP request - a regular, "nothing special" HTTP request like millions of other http requests made every microsecond - for the file. The Web server then sends you that file, no questions asked. Sounds easy? Maybe it's too easy. GoDaddy's Linux servers send UT a "302 Moved Temporarily" redirect back to UT, which it dies not understand.

For instance, if you ask for SkeletalChars.u.uz in the "utmods" folder, their Linux (Apache) server responds like this:

HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: /utmods/SkeletalChars.u.uz?29e15220

... whereas the Windows (IIS6) server responds:

HTTP 200 OK

...and sends the file. Notice the appended "?29e15220"? What the HELL is that? UT doesn't understand and drops back to downloading it from my server. I don't have the bandwidth for that. I never have had the bandwidth for that, which is why I got the GoDaddy account in the first place.

I explain the situation to "Just Jonathan", who puts me on hold while he goes to talk to Someone Who Should Know About These Things.

"Just Jonathan" comes back to tell me that BY SERVING UT MODS I'M VIOLATING THE TERMS OF THE SERVICE AGREEMENT and they don't have to support my issue. He says it's not a good "long term solution" (although I've been doing it for ALMOST FIVE YEARS NOW on a GODDAMNED WINDOWS BOX I NEVER WANTED IN THE FIRST PLACE) and if I really want to do this kind of thing I need to buy a dedicated hosting account.

Some "Tech Support" that is. Can't fix a problem? Upsell the sucker to a dedicated account and let him do his own fucking tech support.

UnFUCKINGbelievable.