UT2004 *NOT* Online!

Yet.

It seems I forgot more than I ever knew about putting up at UT2k4 server.

One of the problems is that you need to have the game installed in order to test the server.

That was a trial. I looked everywhere. It took about a half hour but I finally found all 6 CDs in the original package hiding behind a book that was leaning next to my stereo amplifier.

After firing up CD #1 it said "Enter the activation code on the cover of your manaul".

Manual? Uh-oh.

I found the CDs in the box, but no manual. Crap.

Luckily I had it installed on my old Windows XP box (which is using most of the RAM for the Proxy Project) as well, so I dug into the Windows Registry and, to my surprise, found it! I scribbled it onto CD #1's envelope for future reference.

After about 45 minutes of setup it says, "Insert Play CD" so I get the CD out of the box and there, underneath the Play CD, is the FUCKING ACTIVATION CODE!!!

"Manual" my ass.

In goes the Play CD and setup chokes on it. It try everything to get it to read the CD (including the toothpaste trick) and nothing works, so an hour after I started this mess it says "setup failed".

But I click on the shortcut and eveything's fine. It runs better than it ever did on the old XP box (probably due to the PCI Express video card and the AMD64 CPU).

I had moved the files over to the BOT House server and then noticed that there's also an AMD64 binary, so I moved it again to my Dual Core AMD64 Mythbuntu system (I haven't said much, if anything, about the MythTV project that had me tearing my hair out earlier this year, but this is the most powerful box I own).

What followed was about an hour and a half of fiddling around with the INI settings, but I finally got it running off-Net. VERY smooth performance.

I need to check into a lot of things before it goes online. There have been a ton of patches and I'm not sure which ones I've installed. There's the issue of downloads. I have none of this stuff in the utmods folder on www.mrhinkydink.com so I'm hoping to find a public download server. That was the problem with running it before. All the downloads were sent locally, which caused serious LAG on the other servers.

If I can't find a public download server I'll burn a DVD with the data and sneak it online over the 40mBps connection we have at work. While no one's looking.

heh.

Of course, I'm the only who ever looks. I'll have to make sure I'm looking the other way.

Hinky's Revenge

I'm sure you remember the December Disaster. I lost a lot of stuff that was very near and dear to my heart, including:

• My UT2004 server, BITCH House 2004 (a very unoriginal name, yes thank you)
• My SOCKS code, a big, BIG part of the Proxy Project

Well, nine months after the disaster, Fortune has smiled upon the Dinkster!

Today I took down Experimental /// in order to add a USB 2.0 card to it (it was only capable of USB 1.0, seeing as it's almost ten years old). I found a Web cam that actually works on Linux and I wanted to play with it, but that's incidental.

While I had the box apart I went looking for that USB card amongst my huge collection of computer junk (note to self: always find the parts first, before taking the box apart). I found the card and a couple of hard drives. One was the Hitachi that died in December and the other turned out to be a good drive I had installed Vista RC1 on last year (I was never impressed with Vista and I'm not upgrading as long as I can avoid it).

I also found an old dual IDE-133 card that had been a great disappointment. This card was a dud if there ever was one. The manufacturer made a Windows 2000 driver and then promptly went out of business. But I figured I had an extra drive and a card to plug it into, so I slapped them both into EXP/// and fired it up.

Worked just fine.

I figured I had nothing to lose so I shut down and plugged the dead Hitachi drive in and booted back up.

ALL THE DATA WAS STILL THERE.

I don't know where the magic came from because I've done this a half a dozen times trying to recover that stuff and it never worked before. I think it's part Linux and part weirdo IDE card. Perhaps the card is just too stupid to know that the drive is bad.

I don't know and I don't care. I'm just glad I got the stuff back!

EXP/// will be down while I tinker around with the hardware and add the extra drive (not the Hitachi). It shouldn't be much longer.

And look out for BITCH House 2004! It's coming back, BITCHESSSS!!!!

I hope nobody liked "Keller"

Because he's GONE now. And all variations on ".*Keller.*" as well.

You have to be careful about who you say "FUCK YOU" to. It might just be the sysop and ... who knows? ... he could be in a BAD MOOD.

So... don't do that. Don't be a jerk. It's not nice.

I wasn't really in a BAD MOOD, even though GoDaddy's been JACKING ME AROUND ON THIS GODDAMNED 426 PROBLEM THEY HAVE WITH THEIR SERVERS.

I feel sorry for the poor little lady who answered the phone when I called yesterday (Friday 8/1/08). That morning I woke up to The Proxy List trashed and The Map script getting kicked from the server every time it tried to upload game data, which if you're familiar with the process happens twice a minute if anyone's playing (like Keller won't be from now on).

It took several tries to manually upload The List in tact and if I hadn't been pressed for time (this was at about 6:30AM, just before I leave the house for my Day Job) I would have gotten back on the phone for another "Technical Support" session.

Ugh.

When the day was done and I got back home I slipped into my beer-swilling outfit and sat down in front of the monitor just in time to see...

426 Connection closed. Transfer aborted.

... staring back at me, twice a minute, in beautiful, bold, 12 point Lucida Console.

You see, for about two weeks I've kept the live ftp transfer log opened in an ssh window to keep track of this problem. Usually, it just runs and runs with no problems. Let me repeat... no problems.

So I get my customer account number, my PIN, and my incident ID in front of me and call GoDaddy. While I'm dialing the number and navigating the menu, it stops. Everything goes back to normal.

Then this... ummm... gal answers the phone. Probably a nice young lady, I'm sure. I explain I have an open ticket and give her the incident ID number, which she proceeds to ignore completely!

"Just tell me what's happening," she says.

And I said, "It's all in that incident ID I gave you. I've explained this a dozen times and I'm tired of explaining it. They told me to call whenever it happens and it was happening before I called but now it stopped."

"Well," she said, "this is the first time you've explained it to me."

I tried, boys and girls, I sincerely tried. She wanted to know, like several of her co-workers before her, what "ftp client" I was using. They want to hear "FileZilla" or "Internet Explorer" or something, anything mainstream but I said, "The ftp client that comes with Debian Linux 4.0r1."

"What's it called?" she asked.

"`ftp`", I said.

"No I mean what's the name of the ftp program you're using?" she said.

I said, "It's called 'ftp'. Do you want me to spell it for you?"

Needless to say (every English teacher/professor I ever had always used to scribble "Then why say it?" on any paper I ever wrote with those three words in it - they weren't very original) the call went downhill from there.

"Listen", I said, "it stopped. We're done. I'll call back when it starts happening again becuase I know it will start happening again. I was told to call back when it happens and it happened but it stopped. We're done. Please don't send me a Customer Satisfaction Survey."

And that was it. She was kind of flustered, blubbering "Why won't you let me help you?" as we... well, I, ended the call.

It started up again about 45 minutes later. I got a different Tech Analyst, who took my Incident ID and immediately escalated it to "Second Level Support". They witnessed the problem (not the first time, but it hasn't ever helped) and I was told ONCE AGAIN that I'd get a response in 24 hours.

We'll see how that works out. They've said that twice before and never sent a response. But it's the third time, so that should be "the charm".

So remember, boys and girls, when you play UT on the Dinkster's servers, he likes to play incognito. And, even though it's not your fault, he might be in a Very Bad Mood.