[MUD-Dev] randomly dropped connections

[adam at treyarch.com]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> I have been having a rather serious problem lately with Achaea, and we are
> relatively baffled. What is happening is that players are spontaneously
> getting their links cut.

tcpdump is your friend.  Generate a complete log of several sessions that
end in link-cutting.  Figure out where things are going wrong.  If it's
not entirely obvious, you may have to go a level lower (such as UDP or
ethernet packets).

Not having the actual network code at your game makes things difficult.
It may be that the code hasn't changed, but perhaps something in your
network (hardware, software, or connection) has changed in such a way to
trigger a subtle bug in the code that has always been there.

If you do suspect something external to the actual mud, you might try
randomly swapping out components - a fresh install of the OS, a different
NIC, a different motherboard, a different connection type.  For example,
I was getting a strange error where high-bandwidth demands on my DSL line
would stall incoming connections indefinitely.  I assumed it was a problem
with FreeBSD and reported a bug.  Sometime later it occured to me that it
might be something else - I plugged it into a Linux box and the *exact*
same thing happened, so I knew the problem was somewhere between my DSL
modem and the rest of the world.

Adam





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