July 31st, 2014, 19:57
(This post was last modified: July 31st, 2014, 19:57 by NobleHelium.)
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(July 31st, 2014, 19:13)Caledorn Wrote: (July 31st, 2014, 18:01)Krill Wrote: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=530923
So, basically the thunderstorm was just random, and this occurred because I reloaded the games when it was over.
Thanks for spotting this, Krill.
Not sure what we do now, except possibly increase the timer.
Well we can try what xenu and I have been suggesting. First we identify what kind of messages it's sending to motd.gamespy.com (and any other Gamespy servers), then see if we can write a dummy server to return those calls. If we're lucky those calls are only being issued by the host, so only the host would have to run the program.
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(July 31st, 2014, 19:57)NobleHelium Wrote: (July 31st, 2014, 19:13)Caledorn Wrote: (July 31st, 2014, 18:01)Krill Wrote: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=530923
So, basically the thunderstorm was just random, and this occurred because I reloaded the games when it was over.
Thanks for spotting this, Krill.
Not sure what we do now, except possibly increase the timer.
Well we can try what xenu and I have been suggesting. First we identify what kind of messages it's sending to motd.gamespy.com (and any other Gamespy servers), then see if we can write a dummy server to return those calls. If we're lucky those calls are only being issued by the host, so only the host would have to run the program.
Well, I did run a packet trace on my own computer while logging in, and there was no trace of anything Gamespy as far as I could tell. Would be nice to get that confirmed by someone who is not connecting from my LAN though. Wireshark is the program I use, but it's not very understandable unless you've got a fair understanding of TCP/IP networking. I found it helpful to turn on DNS resolving for anyone who might have the necessary knowledge and will to try it.
motd.gamespy.com is the only address that resolved though related to Gamespy. There might be some IP adress-only stuff going on that I'm missing, or the problem might even be related to a specific host that was coded with the DNS name, which is now unresolveable for the client/server.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. - Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
July 31st, 2014, 20:17
(This post was last modified: July 31st, 2014, 20:31 by NobleHelium.)
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Okay, I did a quick run on Wireshark and it looks like it's calling motd.gamespy.com on port 80, so I'm going to guess that's HTTP. We can set up a quick web server and see what the actual HTTP message is, and go from there.
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(July 31st, 2014, 20:17)NobleHelium Wrote: Okay, I did a quick run on Wireshark and it looks like it's calling motd.gamespy.com on port 80, so I'm going to guess that's HTTP. We can set up a quick web server and see what the actual HTTP message is, and go from there.
Great!
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. - Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
July 31st, 2014, 20:56
(This post was last modified: July 31st, 2014, 20:56 by NobleHelium.)
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Okay, so that worked somewhat. I pointed motd.gamespy.com to 63.236.67.45 which is 2k Games's web server, and got an HTTP response back:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL /motd/vercheck.asp was not found on this server.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache Server at motd.gamespy.com Port 80</address>
</body></html>
That's on Pitboss server startup, so we know what web page it's trying to retrieve now. The time to reach the "New Game" menu decreased drastically with this. I say you try that and see if that fixes things.
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This has marketing department written all over it.Track how many people who are playing online, don't bother to tell them that they are doing so.
Suffer Game Sicko
Dodo Tier Player
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I missed a few posts while I was doing my testing, so some of this may be redundant now.
I detected two servers in my packet trace when I was hosting a pitboss instance. I have not tested connecting to a server but it looks like that's what Noble did? Anyway, the following comes from running a few packet trace sessions while launching the pitboss.exe program (through step 3 "Network Select") using both Direct IP and LAN options. The program seems to treat those two largely the same in terms of outside server calls.
civ4bts.available.gamespy.com:27900 (Master Server UDP Heartbeat)
motd.gamespy.com
Here's the basic sequence of events when you launch the pitboss.exe application and choose Direct IP or LAN:
1. There is a DNS lookup for civ4bts.available.gamespy.com
2. Receive a response, IP address 69.10.30.248 (a subsequent packet shows that thet destination port is 27000)
3. DNS lookup for motd.gamespy.com
4. Receive a response, IP address 69.10.24.123
5. TCP packet sent to motd.gamespy.com (69.10.24.123) (looks like it could be an HTTP request?? the destination port was 80) (Yeah, Noble already found this)
6. ICMP response of "destination unreachable" (aka, Gamespy took the server down, so basically ping failure)
7. Retransmission of the TCP packet (from step 5 above)
8. Retransmission of the TCP packet (from step 5 above)
Nothing further. I ran the test a few times under Direct IP and LAN, it seemed the same each time but I'll admit my eyes got a bit bleary after reading through Wireshark for so long. Anyway, I thought I'd try to bypass those outbound DNS lookups and the inevitable server timeouts to see what happened.
I added to my host file and tested:
127.0.0.1 motd.gamespy.com
127.0.0.1 civ4bts.available.gamespy.com
Pitboss launched MUCH faster, as in, it didn't freeze/lag/delay after choosing the network selection type. I did not see outbound DNS lookups in the packet trace (obviously, since HOST file entries take priority over DNS searches), meaning the pitboss.exe program didn't need to wait for a timeout. We don't know what those two Gamespy servers do with the normal operation of a pitboss instance, but we can test connecting to a real pitboss instance with the host file modified and see if it works at all.
That said, there is a third Gamespy server involved if you were to try using the "Internet" network option. That server is (was) named gpcm.gamespy.com and I'm guessing it was the server that handled Gamespy pitboss logins, since it didn't appear in my packet capture until I tried to log in using the Internet method (which we already knew wasn't going to work since it was taken offline in June). I'd say it's very unlikely that this third server is relevant for our use here, since it was only in the packet capture when I tried a feature we already knew wouldn't work.
So to circle back, the primary question I have right now is: What is the Master Server (civ4bts.available.gamespy.com:27900 (Master Server UDP Heartbeat)), what does it do? And will we be able to get a decent, multiple player simultaneously usable pitboss connection going again if we can bypass the two servers that seem to be involved here? Whether it's via host file entries or setting up a dummy server, I'm up for trying anything that works.
July 31st, 2014, 21:23
(This post was last modified: July 31st, 2014, 21:23 by NobleHelium.)
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You did that without running a local web server? If so then we should just try it with just those two hosts file entries, first just for the host, and see if it gets us back to our prior state.
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(July 31st, 2014, 20:58)pindicator Wrote: This has marketing department written all over it.Track how many people who are playing online, don't bother to tell them that they are doing so.
Legal defense: "We named it GAMESPY. It was right there in the name all along, we were telling people we were spying on them when they played their games. Can't blame us!"
But yeah, this wouldn't surprise me in the least. I mean, why wouldn't an option basically called "Direct connection" phone home before launching the game? "Indirect by way of the Mothership" just doesn't have the same ring as Direct IP. (Or my god, the LAN option...I've never tried launching a LAN pitboss session without a working Internet connection turned on. I'll be the freezing screen would have been quite obvious there, too!) 
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(July 31st, 2014, 21:23)NobleHelium Wrote: You did that without running a local web server? If so then we should just try it with just those two hosts file entries, first just for the host, and see if it gets us back to our prior state.
Yup. Just two lines in my host file, I'm not running any web services on this machine.
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