Hai!

So, let me introduce myself. I'm a nublet recent new Chivalry player looking for a regular, crowded and well managed server to play on after getting tired of hacking up orcs in the ancient game 'Drakan: Order Of The Flame'.
I'm also a 23, MtF transgender; Leader of a clan in a other Indie, UE3 game called C&C Renegade X; A huge IT nerd (cryptocurrencies, *nix systems, programming) and love groundbreaking technology. OH, and I also love make-up! <3

So, after harrassing asking Jenny about the networking topography of SM servers, she said: 'Go ask monkey!'. So I registered because, why not! I expect the top secret blueprints to land in my PM inbox by tomorrow.

welcome to the site

Asking jen about the servers probably gives you this impression: Servers

For specifics, I'm a little wary of details for reasons of security. The servers run on wintel vms in two geographically separate dc's on 4770k's. Specifically chivalry doesn't really multithread, so many cores/hyperthreading are less important than core clock speed. Hence there's some talk of upgrading a server to something like an oc'd devils canyon. Chivalry is usually bound by core cpu, rather than things like memory/disk/network, which frankly for a typical UE3 game are minimal, irrespective of tinkering with tickrate to match the 60fps the game locks to for people who've not been tinkering with their inis. However the netcode was developed optimally for 24 slots with the largest official being 32 slots. We did trial 64 slots but found regardless of the hardware thrown at it, it was still laggy. Also we tried 128 slots for a laugh, pings often hit 200 with increased latency on the server processing end of things. There are some other things in place like preventing the default behaviour to autoadjust pawn relevancy. We do find from time to time a specific IP with be targeted for a ddos attack, or occasional routing problem, so it's nice to be able to switch the guids of the 3 servers we run between 2 different dc's.

I think I remember C&C renegades - wasn't it a fps version of the classic C&C series? (imo nothing beats red alert 1&2 on that front).

For myself my phd is specifically in cryptography, so could merrily and boringly warble on that subject for hours. Nix systems are heavily used in my work (although more rhel/aix for business, while my personal pref is xubuntu as don't like kde) and a big fan of c#

Most of the =SM= members right now:

I actually understood the gist of it. Some of the words are weird, but nothing context can't solve.

well she said huge IT nerd, so thought I'd be a bit more specific on the server front

Apparently, I don't get response notifications in my mailbox. Need to fix that.


Anyways, Monkey thank you very much for the explanation and some info about yourself! Don't worry, not going to ask about your services, processes or IDS.
I was thinking of either a ip-conflict or some hardware like a switch messing up things, as the specs were quite fine! With a netcode build for 32 players, workarounds to keep things flowing correctly and DDOS(themmad?) I can also quite understand why sometimes things get laggy.


C&C Renegade is indeed, a FPS based on the C&C universe. Lately, an indie company somehow managed to arrange a contract with EA to remake the game with their copyrighted content. The catch: it must remain free, or the evil elves will burn the project to the ground. See this link for more info!

I always lol@how chiv servers run on windows and not a unix based system. ♥ UDK ♥

I'm also a programmer by day although I'm not as clever as you crypto-nerds I'm more of an interactive developer with a big interest in all things 3D. I did a little scrypt mining back in the day and made a little money. My fave linux distro used to be Arch but now I settle for the less time consuming Mint Debian release.

Anyway welcome to the site!

Thanks to the bastardisation the Unreal Engine, we typically find that windows servers (while more costly and resource consuming than nix equiv) are more stable. That is to say that the crash often as opposed to very often.

Which is a shame - the older servers like l4d were nice linux ones and generally (aside from l4d bugs) behaved themselves well.

As for the chiv servers, there should never be an IP conflict. Some info is passed between the various servers over something like a qinq vlan, some stuff passed internally (sql instance) and some stuff like master stats passed externally.

Btw the intermittant periods of freezing we see normally relate to a full stats update being pulled from the master stats. The more players there are on the server the more impact this has (and it's not bandwidth, it's tends to be massive delays in handshaking and uptake)- nothing we can control

The game servers don't really have much in the way of attack vectors; usually there people trying to use json rcon type stuff (which the server monitoring alerts on many failed connections in a short time, by log shipping and parsing, sadly) or by ddos attacks. The latter usually by ragey kids who got themselves banned, they don't normally amount to much or for very long, but there are some alternate ip pools we can use if need be. (had to change the IP's around 6 months ago due to some persistant trolling )

The ids stuff mainly relates to the website; we used to get a lot of automated and actual attempts here (although 95% of the time are skiddies or people trying the odd sql injection). Not so much of either these days.

@5: I've heard good things about mint, so might give it a go. Especially since there seems a nice version of xcfe