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

[kuni_tetsu]

Colen,

Recently this happened to a friend of mine, although in reverse. He could see
most web sites but when trying to reach one, his packets just disappeared,
never to be seen again.

Turned out, Comcast gave him an ip address that ended in .0 - which is normally
not assigned to a machine. One switch on the way to the web site was simply
discarding his packets.

Perhaps there is something like that going on here?

--- Colen <colen@wolflair.com> wrote:
> 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.

<..snip..>
> ...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


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[Cullyn]

Not to be a pest (don't you hate it when a post starts that way ) but I was just curious if any progress has been made on this. I've just reinstalled Card Vault and need to retrieve my licenses so that I can use it as intended. Actually, I'm using this app to test another app called CrossOver that's letting me run it on my Mac natively. However, that's besides the point.

I've still not been able to access the lonewolfdevel.com site, and just now started having issues with the wolflair.com site (though that last bit might have just been a hiccup considering that I'm here) and wanted to see if there were any updates or a possible ETA.

Thanks!

[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.

Wolflair.com is on totally separate servers, so there shouldn't be any common issues with that at all. What problems have you been seeing?

Also, how is CV running under Crossover? I'm always interested in finding a way to satisfy the people who really want to run our products natively on macs.

[Cullyn]

Thanks for the update! I'll give the devel site a try here in a moment. For the most part CV is running very well under CrossOver. The only thing that I've been running into thus far is the fact that you can't actually click on any of the GUI buttons in the program. When you click on them, however, it does highlight them so that you can tap the ENTER key to actually activate the button. Thankfully though, you guys were thoughtful enough to put pretty much every button's functionality on the menu system somewhere so that I can still access it.

The CV Cache program works perfectly (though there were still some errors in the Magic: The Gathering downloads, but not nearly as many as there used to be so thanks for that update as well ) and the deck building section seems to work just fine. The inventory is a little difficult because you can't actually click on the + or - buttons or use the same buttons on the keyboard, but thankfully again, you guys set it up so that you can use a menu option to enter inventory and the like. It's not quite as convienent... but neither is rebooting into my Boot Camp partition every time I want to build a deck.

I've passed that bit of info on to the developers of CrossOver and they actually downloaded CV and were able to reproduce the problem, so they're working on that bit of it thankfully. Besides, it's still in beta, so I expect some hiccups now and again.

Thanks again!!

[Colen]

kuni_tetsu: That's an interesting situation, I'll keep that in mind for the future. Thanks!

Cullyn: Thanks for your help! As soon as I can get more than 17 seconds of free time in any one day (the server problems I've been working on, plus we just moved offices last week, plus I moved this weekend and my apartment is currently full of boxes, plus my actual work...) I'll borrow one of our Mac Minis and try that out myself.

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!