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Event:
Harvest Hunt

Start:
2023-11-13 05:00:00 UTC
End:
2023-12-04 05:00:00 UTC

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Archive for January, 2014

Updating…

Monday, January 20th, 2014

So, to those who didn’t see it on the Twitter feed, I’m doing a bunch of updates to the OS on the server right now and the server will be down for a bit while I get things going.

EDIT: I’ve been at this for over 4 hours now, and I still don’t have everything back up yet. I’ll continue working on it when I get up in the morning.

EDIT 2: There’s still a lot of work for me to do, but I think that I can safely bring back up the PSO server. So, I’ve done that. I’ll still have to do a number of reboots along the way, probably, but I’ll time them when nobody’s online.

EDIT 3: So, I think the update is completely done now, save for rebooting one last time. So, once the server clears out, I’ll do that.

EDIT 4: Something screwed up… I’m working on resolving it now.

EDIT 5: Well, it’s still not quite right, but I suppose it’ll do until I figure out what’s actually wrong. At least everything is back up for now.

EDIT 6 (and hopefully the last one): I think I fixed the issue now. Weird voodoo bugs with files not being updated properly during the kernel upgrade are not cool.

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To the idiots…

Saturday, January 18th, 2014

To the idiots who thought it would be cute to use the Sylverant DNS resolver to launch DNS-related attacks, you really are not amusing. Thanks to you idiots, the DNS server I host is now locked to only provide the addresses for PSO-related hostnames. I’m also reconsidering whether I should host said DNS or not at this point, since it is obviously more trouble than it is worth. Not that I expect said idiots to ever read this post or anything else anyway.

To those who aren’t amongst the idiots, I guess this needs a bit of explaining… One of the options for connecting to Sylverant with certain versions of PSO for the Dreamcast (Network Trial Edition, USv1, EUv1, EUv2) and all versions of PSO for Gamecube was to use the Sylverant server as your DNS in your network configuration. This works because I host a DNS server that provides the IP addresses for certain PSO-related hostnames that the game uses to try to connect to a server. All of these addresses resolve to the same IP address as the Sylverant server itself. For convenience, the DNS server could also be used for general day-to-day use and with other online games, as it would recursively look up any hostnames it did not know about, and return the correct IP address for said servers by way of (primarily) Google’s Public DNS server. However, someone recently decided it would be a good idea to use this service that I provide (the DNS server) to launch a DNS query amplification attack (see here for more info on what that is). Thus I have had to stop allowing recursive lookups to prevent someone from performing such an attack. What that means is that the Sylverant DNS is now not usable for general day-to-day lookups (not that I expect many people were using their Dreamcasts for web browsing), nor can you use it in your network configuration for playing games like Quake 3 Arena on the Dreamcast any more (which was probably more commonly done).

I highly suggest that anyone playing PSO on the Dreamcast that does not already use the Sylverant PSO Patcher disc consider doing so in the near future. I may end up having to discontinue the DNS service if people continue to abuse it, so I’d like it if everyone was prepared for that possibility.

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Happy New Year!

Wednesday, January 1st, 2014

Well, another year has gone by, and Sylverant is still around. That’s good news, I suppose. 🙂

I don’t really have anything Sylverant-related to post about, but I wanted to ensure that everyone knew I was actually still around. Follow along below the fold if you care to know why things have been so quiet around here lately…
(more…)

 
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