Sporadic outage of the RPTools Registry

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Azhrei
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Sporadic outage of the RPTools Registry

Post by Azhrei »

We seem to be having trouble with the RPTools registry. This is the service that lets the system hosting a MapTool server register with our web site under a user-defined name such that players can simply choose the name off the list in order to connect.

This service is convenient for people hosting MapTool games, but it's really just a shortcut so that players don't have to use the Direct tab and type in an IP address and port number when they use the Connect To Server... menu option.

We had multiple reports on Discord yesterday (meaning at least two) of people getting errors when trying to connect their client. I did some looking around and made no changes to anything, but when I tested it myself it worked fine. The log files on the web server are devoid of any mention of a problem. (Murphy's Law, I guess.)

I'm going to subscribe to this thread so I'm notified when a reply is posted, and I'll try to keep an eye on the Discord server as well. If you have a problem, please report it (text is generally more useful than a screenshot, if the text can be copy/pasted) and I'll try to jump on and catch it in the act. When I think it's been resolved, I'll come back to this post and edit the title as well as the first line of the post to indicate that.

Obviously, I'm sorry for any hassle and hopefully it'll be both easy to track and easy to correct. Game on!

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Azhrei
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Re: Sporadic outage of the RPTools Registry

Post by Azhrei »

This has become chronic!

I filed a support ticket with our web hosting provider, then escalated it when they couldn't tell me what the problem is, much less fix it.

In the mean time, give the server's external IP address to clients to use when connecting via the Direct tab on the Connect to Server dialog. You can get that information from https://WhatsMyIP.com/ or a similar service.

(I kind of know what the issue will be: the NGinx web server is returning HTTP 406 indicating that it doesn't like the Content-Type and Accept headers being used. But MapTool hasn't changed and neither has the web site code, so it's a configuration issue. The first level support didn't (or couldn't) tell me what was in the ChangeLog for the web server, so I have to wait for it to be handled by an admin. I think it's going to be a configuration change to the mod_security module, but... I'll post when I have something to add.)

taustinoc
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Re: Sporadic outage of the RPTools Registry

Post by taustinoc »

Generally speaking, the easiest way to get your public IP is to just go to Google and type in "what's my ip" (I'm not sure what it will report if you have only an IPv6 address, since I have no way to test that.)

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Azhrei
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Location: Tampa, FL

Re: Sporadic outage of the RPTools Registry

Post by Azhrei »

Craig has configured his server with the same software we have on RPTools.net, so the registry service is back up and running. I only tested it with 1.5.0 (what I had easily available), but it should work for all systems.

We are considering other options to prevent this from happening in the future, so don't be surprised if you see mention of the registry in the ChangeLog of an upcoming release. :)

In the meantime, the HostGator folks are still chugging through their process. Ugh. I've gotten reasonably good support people in the past, but this problem is annoying.

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