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.

Experimenting with EXP IV

Last week I bought another old PC from the junk computer store, just like the one on the left there (except mine has a CD drive).

What a piece of CRAP, eh?

I always liked those old iPaqs. Back around the turn of the century, they were pretty futuristic. I have a fond place in my heart for them, and since the price was a mere $39.95, I figured what the heck, take it home and have some fun.

It came with Windows 2000 Professional, so I wiped the drive and installed Xubuntu 9.04 on it. Runs Xubu like a top. 1gHz PIII & 512MB of RAM with a 20G hard drive. It's not going to blow anybody's doors off, but it's a nice little "Mail & Web" PC.

But I have one of those already so I decided to play around with it.

I moved a copy of EXP IV over to it, called it "EXP V", made sure it wasn't advertising itself on the Web, and fired it up just for funsies.

And the little bitch pissed me off! It played UT much better than my Hot Shit AMD64x2 with four times the RAM and processing power.

So now I'm mad and I need to know WTF is the deal with the AMD box. I'm not sure where to start but I think a good place to begin is the NIC, although I've been down that road before.

But it BUGS THE HELL out of me. Something has to be done.

Nali BITCHes

I stopped by the Unreal Admin Page today, something I rarely do anymore. Somehow, one thing led to another and I bumbled across the NaliWeaponsIIX package. Evidently it's been around for about five years, but it was new to me so I figured what the heck - give it a shot.

After all, I haven't done anything new and exciting with the servers in a long time.

So I put it on BITCH House.

Does anybody play UT2004 anymore?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Anyway, I stumbled across my cdkey while looking through some old files on the Proxy Project system and found out what I was doing wrong. I'd bring it online if there was any interest, but the truth is no one really played it much when it was "popular".

Alien Arena

I have found this game mildly amusing. Even bothered to recompile it for AMD64, so it can go on the new box any time. I played it online a couple of times but there was not much action on the few servers that were out there.

EXP IV Move

This didn't make much difference, although one thing definitely improved. Before the move any network activity caused the system to report high (90%) network utilization. Now it's dropped down to something like "normal". Still, it didn't help.

However, dicking around with the system today I happened to notice the "hinky" account (that's me) was getting flooded with email from the cron process, causing disk utilization to hit the roof.

It made no sense. It was cron activity from root, and nowhere in root's config or in crontab was there any directive to send email to "hinky"! This is not the first time I've had issues with email filling the disk up and I thought I had it hammered. Now, it's fixed (famous last words) and nobody is getting any email at all on the system.

And I don't mean the "nobody" account.

EXP IV Has Been Moved

The EXP IV box used to be the longest link on HinkyNet. I had a very long ethernet cable from the Old Days (1995 or 1996) that I used to link it in. The said cable spent many years in the trunk of the Hinkymobile and was used as an emergency measure back in my consultant days, which are now almost ten years behind us.

As a result of the use, abuse, and neglect of this cable, it was quite kinky and probably not a good choice to put "in production". And since I'm a Cheap Sun of a Bitch I was damned if I'd go out and actually buy a decent cable for this purpose.

So I moved the whole damned box across the room, as well as the UPS. I put it on a cable that is about six inches away from being too short. Hopefully this tightens up the whole "collision domain" and complaints of LAG will, if not disappear, be minimized.

But you never know.

NIC Death/Resurrection

Today I moved EXP IV to its Final Resting Place (FRP), hooked it up to its woefully underpowered UPS, re-installed NUT (Network UPS Tools), played a quick game, and forgot about it.

About four hours later I noticed the sucker dropped off the network.

I guess it took that "Final Resting Place" concept too literally.

The FRP, where EXP III used to live, is at the end of the longest wire on the network. It leaves the switch, travels across the fireplace mantel, and drops down to the other side of the fambly room. Maybe twenty five or thirty feet max. Apparently, the built-in NVidia NIC was unhappy with that situation, because I plugged my laptop into that wire and it was happy.

So I added a RealTek NIC (RTL 8129C) and edited the udev settings to tell the OS eth0 was now eth1 and eth1 was now eth0 and rebooted.

Maybe this had something to do with the reported lag. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it will die again.

I don't know. If you see any improvement drop me a note.