Server problems! Please read.

[Colen]

Hi everyone,

Some of you may be experiencing issues with our server right now - problems activating or buying our products, or the inability to download updates. Here's the explanation.

Last Tuesday, we moved offices, which meant that we had to move our server and get a new DSL connection set up. All the changes should have been finished up by Wednesday night. Unfortunately, there seems to be some new, sinister problem making itself known.

It appears that about 50% of the people who try to access our web server (at http://www.lonewolfdevel.com/) simply can't. It's totally consistent - if someone can see the site, they can always get to it. If they can't, refreshing the web page or trying again won't help. The problem is worldwide - I've had people here in California, people up in Canada, and people in the UK and the Netherlands test things, and about half of them simply can't access the web page. It doesn't matter where you are or what kind of computer you have - there's about a 50% chance that you'll have problems.

I've spent a few hours on the phone with our ISP's tech support, but unfortunately the people we need to talk to won't be at work until Monday morning. So there's nothing we can do until then. If you're having problems, I apologise - I'll post again as soon as I have an update (hopefully some time Monday).

(Technical explanation: For people having problems, the server is reporting windows error 1236, which means "The network connection was aborted by the local system". It's doing this because no web traffic is getting through to them for 30+ seconds after they ask for it, which causes the server to drop the connection. The current theory is that something is screwed up with our ISPs equipment that is causing this to happen consistently with certain people and not at all with others.)

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience.

Colen

[drakist]

Just so you know, I live in NJ, and I work all over. I just happen to be in philadelpia today and tried to get to lonewolfdevel.com with no luck. Your provider may have a major routing issue somewhere.

[Colen]

Monday update: I've made some changes and things seem to be working now. Tomorrow I might play around with things to try and work out what's actually happening, so the site might be down sporadically tomorrow during the day. Thanks for your patience why we try to resolve this issue.

[kanonfodda]

thanks Colen, all the hard work isn't going unnoticed

[Colen]

Thanks kanon, I appreciate that

Tuesday update: I've swapped out our oldest router, and that seems to have cured the problem for now. I'm going to leave things like this for a few days to see if everything stays stable.

Starting now, everyone should be able to hit http://www.lonewolfdevel.com/ just like they used to. If you still experience problems hitting the server, please post here with the following information:

Your IP address (you can find this out by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org/ )
Date and time the failure occurred

So we can try and find any new problem that pops up.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!

[kanonfodda]

well, I can now get to the site, but I still do not seem to be getting the license emails

I get

An email with the list of all associated license numbers has been sent to the email address you specified. You should receive the information shortly.

when I enter my email address and request my ARmyBuilder License.

IP address: 82.34.231.193

12/09/2006 22:22 (British Summer Time)

I have turned off all spam filters etc I can find on my mail account (hosted). I have emailed your support address regarding this, but I saw no point in chasing it any further, until now, based on the issues so far.

Many thanks for any help.

KF

[webkilla]

By sigmar's loin-cloth!

When will the licensing feature work again!??!!


When I DLed AB and bought the license online I first when "WTF" and wrote an email to the tech support here. That was the 21st september....

while waiting for that I looked in the forum here and found this thread.

The 25th of september I got an email saying that I might have some firewall software blocking the process

I try disabling my firewall, no effect, I try giving AB full unrestricted acces to and from the internet, no effect either.


Do notice that this is yonder 1st Octobor people

When I can I start using my AB?

[rob]

The licensing mechanism is working fine. Since the hardware change made on the 12th, there have been ZERO problems with communications on our end. There have been many hundreds of users successfully activating and manipulating licenses with our server since then. So any technical problems with access to our server that you might be experiencing are unfortunately due to configuration issues on your end.

When something like this happens, the problem is almost always due to some sort of security tool blocking AB's access to the internet. A common issue is Windows Firewall being configured to block everything except for programs that are specifically allowed through. The solution is to add AB to the list of allowed programs. There are numerous other security tools that people use, and sometimes users will have multiple tools active on their computers. Until ALL of them are properly configured, AB won't be able to get through. This is nothing that AB is doing wrong - it's entirely a matter of the tools being configured correctly on the user's computer.

In order to re-configure your system to let AB through, you'll need to consult with whoever set the computer up for you. In the meantime, you can activate your license easily using the manual license activation method. This will utilize your web browser instead of having AB try to do it for you, so you shouldn't have any problems accessing the server. This is accomplished by using the "Manual License Activation" option under the License menu and following the instructions presented by the wizard.

Hope this helps,
Rob


At 04:38 AM 10/1/2006, you wrote:

By sigmar's loin-cloth!

When will the licensing feature work again!??!!


When I DLed AB and bought the license online I first when "WTF" and wrote an email to the tech support here. That was the 21st september....

while waiting for that I looked in the forum here and found this thread.

The 25th of september I got an email saying that I might have some firewall software blocking the process

I try disabling my firewall, no effect, I try giving AB full unrestricted acces to and from the internet, no effect either.


Do notice that this is yonder 1st Octobor people

When I can I start using my AB?