Server disappearing from the lobby and/or crashing

Clear, but please report here if the server disappears, even tomorrow, or in 48h etc.

ISR admin was, at noon euro time, 48h without server disappearing.

I can wait 2 or 3 days, waiting for reports, then i will point ISI to this thread.

 

Just so I get this straight, dropping off the list means, it is gone for good or could it return after a while?

I am asking because our servers were pretty much always set to do Pause When Idle (1) and everytime I checked and they weren´t crashed, they were in the list.

I just changed this setting yesterday to not pause when idle and the server is still there with an uptime of roughly 26 hours.

Edit: 58 hours without any problem at the moment.

Cheers,
Marcus

 

I have one on Pause, and another to not Pause with zero players.. I know everyone has experienced different problems with their installs / machines, but with mine, these 2 servers have been going for nearly a week now and still have people joining them.

1 Server (pause with 0 players) has been up for 3 days and 22 hours, the other (no pausing of the session) has been up 1 day and 20 hours. Still able to connect to both

 

Server didn't drop across 48 hours with pause = 1.

I was then forced to set some options for our fortnightly race (via Options -> -> Load Track) and within 20 minutes it had reported it was unable to connect (after loading/connecting successfully as normal), then updating fine, but it dropped off the list soon after.

Had to exit and kill the process, wait a minute or two, and start it again in order to run the race. Expect to have the next track up for the coming 2 weeks within a day of now so if it seems solid again I'll report back.

 

Ok Lazza, thanks.

I posted in the internal forum this thread, so to be sure ISI will take a look.

 

Quick update,

First let me say again I'm not suggesting this is absolutely the server exe doing this; it could be somehow related to the content we're running, a plugin we've got on the server, or some sort of obscure network setting or windows malfunction. Having said all that rF1 has all the same and it's rock solid.

Having completed our race and moved onto the next track, it's dropped off the list 4 times in 18 hours with Pause set to 1. Each time I've exited the server, killed the still-running process, given it several minutes break to have a think and free up any ports it might have trouble with (seems to improve the time it takes to load up and connect) and ran it again.

So for us at least Pause = 1 isn't a fixall. It certainly improved things a few days ago but now it's looking the same as it was previously. Hopefully a bug is found in the code for the next build that miraculously cures this for us.

Since we no longer have a promising setting to test I'll get back to a default server with no plugins and see how that compares.

 

No time or opportunity for a default test yet,

I'm starting to wonder if it might somehow be logon/off related. Since Sunday the dropping off just got progressively worse, one night there I think it was restarted 5+ times in the space of a couple of hours as every time someone left the server it would drop off the list (or that's when it was noticed, because they wanted to come back in).

The last time it was restarted (I believe close to 2 days ago now) nothing was done any differently but it decided to stay up. Since then quite a few people have joined and left and so far it's staying up. My co-admin also felt at one point that if he stayed logged onto the server the game tended to stay on the list, though I'd have to say that's only anecdotal at this stage.

We have several user accounts on the server (the others run rF1 servers, though only one is used at the moment), all accessed via standard Remote Desktop Connection (albeit via SSH). I don't know how or why logging off/on at different times would affect an rF2 server but I guess I'm clutching at straws. Doesn't seem to be much noise from others about still having issues so I'm looking for points of difference, and having a dedi server with a solid connection and ports 32000+ all open I've only got a couple left...

 

No noise from me Lazza.. I'm surprised you guys are still having these little niggly issues

 

I'm guessing from that our setup doesn't seem too alien, so that's not looking too good for a potential cause either

One thing I wasn't clear about above is that since it was last restarted we haven't logged onto the server at all. It's a bit of the chicken vs the egg here, obviously we haven't been on because it hasn't fallen off but maybe it's not falling off partly because we haven't been on - or it's just a coincidence. Either way I'm not going near it and hoping it stays up while the other admin goes to the F1 in Melbourne and isn't around to restart it

When it starts playing up again I'll try some more stuff. Underlining all this is that when it drops off it still says it's updating successfully, so there's some sort of bug there at least.

 

Because you 'seem to be having issues' regarding remote connection / possible cause to the matchmaker etc etc.. Have you tried Remote Desktop Connect rather than Secure Shell ? Just curious that's all..

 

Not sure I follow

On a previous dedi server we connected remote desktop directly, even on the default port (yep, bad idea, I know...) and that was all fine except for thousands of attempted connections every day. This was on rF1 only by the way.

Now we're running a SSH service with port forwarding, so we connect to the server via SSH then connect remote desktop through the tunnel. Been doing this for a year without issues in rF1.

And yes, now that you mention it, it does seem a possible culprit for something connection related, especially if it does (with further testing) prove to have some relation to whether we're logged in when the server starts up and/or how often we log on/off. I really hope it's nothing to do with it though, because it's nice and secure the way it is

So I guess you're suggesting to try changing the RDP connect port (so it's no longer default and won't get attacked as much/quickly) and try just connecting directly through that, and see if it's any better. I'll add that to the list for next week, or earlier if my luck runs out and it drops despite me not going anywhere near the server

Maybe in the next build the apparent definite bug (that our rF2 server is still saying it's updating when it's not) will be fixed, and maybe by then we'll have worked out what we're doing wrong and we'll be able to relax from then on... lol

 

I'm glad you deciphered my cryptic message I was at work and rushing a reply between meetings..

The other thing I was thinking was to bring your rF2 server ports closer together.. What I mean is, I currently have 2 x rF2 dedi's running on my server, I was having issues when the ports were too far apart (but that could have also been router related).. Anyway, I brought the ports closer together and also run one on a different HTTP port in the multiplayer.ini file.

Running one on a different HTTP port probably does nothing, but none of the servers have disconnected, still have drivers leaving and returning day in and day out and the admins are still able to remote into the server and do what they want.. So, while it's working I'm of the 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it'

 

Ok, another update (thanks for the prompt Radar, though a pm might have been better lol), as I mentioned above it decided to stay up at one point so we left it alone and it stayed up until I had to reset it for race night (so that was 9-10 days I think, solid as a rock). Had the race, new track + vmod got put on and restarted, and it's been solid since.

Nothing changed (with settings) since it was previously falling off every few minutes/hours, but for now at least it looks great. So that's good news, I guess... wish I knew what's different though.

If it does start to play up I'll run through a list of things to try and if anything conclusive comes out of it I'll report back.