Server Question...

[Schattenjager]

I was wondering where the main server is actually located at? I noticed the game day flipped an hour early and was wondering if the game server was located in the US, or in Europe somewhere.

Thanks...

Schattenjager

[sativ]

i think it's located somewhere in the us...

by the way... how come you chose "schattenjager" as your nick?

[Schattenjager]

i think it's located somewhere in the us...

by the way... how come you chose "schattenjager" as your nick?

It came from Gabriel Knight and the line of Schattenjagers from Germany.

Check out this link

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/3028/schat.htm

Schattenjager

[WATER] Leader[/url]

[sativ]

ah, i see. the page is down by the way. ^^
i just wondered... since i speak german... :lol:

[Schattenjager]

ah, i see. the page is down by the way. ^^
i just wondered... since i speak german... :lol:

Thats messed up... it was working a few days ago... I printed out the info on it though... One of my best friends took German in college... failed miserably. Maybe you could help him?

Schattenjager

[sativ]

sure thing. i would never learn german if i wasn't born there... :lol:
must be very hard to learn...

[SaucyWench]

Um, yes the server is in the USA. I *think* it's in EST - but don't quote me!

[Booger]

Um, yes the server is in the USA. I *think* it's in EST - but don't quote me!

oh, I just couldn't resist... *hides*

[Nightwind]

maybe, but aparently it's physical setting is someplace where they change it's clock baced on dayliht savings on a differnt day

[Arillius]

The only two places in the US where it would not be affected by the Daylight Savings/Standard time zone flux is a small piece of Illinois and the entire state of Arizona.
All other states shift. (Well, except Alaska and Hawaii which are in their own time zones.)
Is this bulletin board on the same server? When I signed up I had to put in my time zone + or - GMT and the default was 3+. Since I'm 6- it led me to think the Central server was in Europe or Great Britain.

[JCP]

Ok, as far as the current physical location, I don't know.

The server has moved several times and for a while was in Europe. We have since changed hosting.

Don't read too much into the time change - we actually use more than one server and when that happens a lot of bad things can happen to clocks, as each one decides to adjust the clock on all the others.

And there's no guarantee that any of them are set to the right time, anyway. ;)

[Schattenjager]

Ok, as far as the current physical location, I don't know.

The server has moved several times and for a while was in Europe. We have since changed hosting.

Don't read too much into the time change - we actually use more than one server and when that happens a lot of bad things can happen to clocks, as each one decides to adjust the clock on all the others.

And there's no guarantee that any of them are set to the right time, anyway. ;)

Thanks to everyone who responded. I gather that the server is out there, somewhere, churning along within the folds of the space.

[onedarkdemon1]

well im pretty sure is on est because i have the central time which is an hour early of est and its eleven when its the new day so its pretty much garenteed and you can quote me on that

[Deimos]

The server time could be set to Eastern even if the server itself were in, say, Finland. Or the game's opinion on what the server time is could be offset from the actual server time. So that's no clue.

[echucker]

Seems to me the server is located near Dallas, TX.

[Sholva]

Seems to me the server is located near Dallas, TX.

I came to the same conclusion.

[Arillius]

Puts on "Server" Detection equipment and walks outside...."Nope, nothing here."

[Enderandrew]

The server is part of the Matrix.

[Sichae-Saracen]

I know where it is... but I isn't gonna tell any of y'all. :P

[Dekar]

C:\WINDOWS>tracert.exe lotgd.net

Tracing route to lotgd.net [67.19.28.242]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <10 ms <10 ms 14 ms 192.168.0.1
2 69 ms 27 ms 14 ms wbar16.tmp1-4-61-248-001.tmp1.dsl-verizon.net [4
.61.248.1]
3 14 ms 13 ms 14 ms 4.9.7.34
4 68 ms 28 ms 27 ms ge-6-0-1.mp2.Tampa1.Level3.net [209.247.11.221]

5 55 ms 41 ms 41 ms so-1-0-0.bbr2.Dallas1.Level3.net [64.159.3.217]

6 124 ms 192 ms 41 ms ge-1-2-52.car3.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.68.122.38]

7 42 ms 178 ms 41 ms 4.78.220.10
8 41 ms 41 ms 42 ms dist-vlan31.dsr3-2.dllstx3.theplanet.com [70.85.
127.30]
9 41 ms 41 ms 192 ms dist-vlan22.dsr1-2.dllstx2.theplanet.com [70.85.
127.76]
10 220 ms 41 ms 192 ms dsr2-1-v2.dllstx4.theplanet.com [12.96.160.39]
11 165 ms 41 ms 42 ms gig1-0-1.sm-car6-7.dllstx4.theplanet.com [67.19.
255.26]
12 137 ms 41 ms 41 ms 242.67-19-28.reverse.theplanet.com [67.19.28.242
]

Trace complete.

ps: the host admin and root passwords are not very secure :roll:

[MightyE]

ps: the host admin and root passwords are not very secure :roll:

Oh yeah? Please enlighten us.

FYI, 'host admin' is not a term I'm familiar with. Semantically I understand what you mean, but from a technical perspective I've never heard of it.

The root password was randomly generated with a strong password generating tool. If you *do* know what it is, and consider it a weak password, I'd like to know what you consider a strong password, since the Linux community (specifically the GNU developers who wrote the password tool) disagree with you. Oh, and root login on SSH is disabled. You'd have to authenticate as my super sekret username first, then su to root before you had permission to do more than read my empty ~ directory.

The boxes are firewalled off, providing exactly two external ports to the world. Only one of these ports is a valid administration interface.

You're pretty good at erasing your tracks when you log in too.

You did successfully manage to tracert the box from your Winblows machine. I guess I've been 0wnzored.

Even if you did compromise me, I remotely back up the database and game every 6 hours, and I have incremental backups going back well over a year. If I'm ever successfully hacked, I can always roll back to pre-compromise. I have nothing on these machines that I wish to hide, and the worst thing you could do is create game downtime and force a rollback.

By the way, there's plenty of lawyers looking to make a name for themselves in cyber crime, if you do hack me, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have no problem finding one to represent me, and I hope you hack the ISP's servers too; they log action on my administrative port (the only successful logins are mine, from my IP address). Unless you live in Texas, it's a federal crime, and if you possess the skillz to pwn me, you're smart enough to know it ain't worth going to jail to hack a small time site, and you're smart enough to know that the illusion of anonymity on the Internet is just that: an illusion, once the law gets involved.

The bottom line here is this: Don't make claims about hacking someone when you don't know what you're talking about. Aside from being called out for doing so (such as this message), it's my understanding that it's illegal to claim you committed a crime that you did not commit, or even to claim you committed a crime that wasn't committed at all. You can go to jail for telling the police that you murdered someone, even if you didn't. I could seek compensatory damages for the time it took to evaluate the validity of your claim, and I could sue you for libel since by claiming you hacked my passwords, and that they are further "not very secure," you damage my reputation, and have done so in writing.

You may feel free to apologise profusely, donate, or both to earn your way back into my good graces :-).

[MightyE]

By the way, for those who wanted to know, yes, the server is located in Texas.

The server is part of the Matrix.
You were actually pretty close :-) The box itself is owned by ServerMatrix, a division of ThePlanet. I'm not sure if it's in their Dallas data center or not; they have several in Texas, but I do know that that's the location of their uplinks (thus the name that appears on their reverse DNS entries).

[Nightwind]

I belive in recrational hacking. I'm not in the same skill level I used to be, so I can't DO it anymore, but...

If i had the skill to be able to tell you, what you just said here, I'd concider taking up a job in security consulting.

Belive it or not, there's a strong and growing trend in people who hack sites, do nothing to them, and then mail the administration logs of how it was done, and how to fix it, as a form of RESUME...

wish i was still that good.

[MightyE]

Belive it or not, there's a strong and growing trend in people who hack sites, do nothing to them, and then mail the administration logs of how it was done, and how to fix it, as a form of RESUME...
That's an extremely dangerous way to go about submitting a resume. Speaking from experience as someone having worked at several companies with a pretty crappy security, most companies are more interested in protecting their networks with lawyers than with competent security admins. If you compromise them in ANY WAY, they are more likely to send you to prison than to hire you.

And companies with really competent security precautions are going to have honeypots set up, so merely successfully hacking them doesn't prove you're any better than their security guys, it proves you got tricked into hacking an intentionally vulnerable system, in which case you can be pretty sure the feds are going to be knocking pretty soon.

I don't have a honeypot set up (that I'm willing to admit to :-D), but I'm pretty confident in the strength of my security precautions. If someone sees something that they know specifically to be a problem, I'm more than willing to listen, but I'm not really inviting anyone to attack my machines, and I can promise that if someone does attack me, I'll come down like a load of bricks, to whatever significant extent I have it within me to.

I like to think I'm well above average knowledge regarding computers (certainly my employers have all thought so, and I seem to have built a bit of momentum with my programming skills [which aren't really all my skills any longer, so much as a community's skills]), and I'm certainly smart enough to not ever ever want to try to hack someone else. Presumably anyone more advanced at using computers than me is at least smart enough to realize the folly of doing so.

The biggest thing to realize is that no matter who you are, there's always someone smarter at computers than you, or with more resources. I won't state that I'm infallible, and certainly I'll admit there's a possibility that someone could hack my machines, but anyone who did so would not criticise me for the weakness of my passwords, because there's no way they'd be considered weak by anyone who doesn't own a quantum computer. Like I said, I back up every 6 hours to a box I own elsewhere in the country for another purpose (as evidence, LoGD has been on a machine that had a disk failure once before, and on a machine that was cut off from the net once before, I've always preserved the database within a couple of hours), and I have no real information on the boxes that would harm me in any way if it got out. Player passwords aren't even stored in the database, they're md5'd first, so the real damages to being hacked here are pretty negligible.

[BLOODDRAGON]

ps: the host admin and root passwords are not very secure :roll:

Oh yeah? Please enlighten us.

FYI, 'host admin' is not a term I'm familiar with. Semantically I understand what you mean, but from a technical perspective I've never heard of it.

The root password was randomly generated with a strong password generating tool. If you *do* know what it is, and consider it a weak password, I'd like to know what you consider a strong password, since the Linux community (specifically the GNU developers who wrote the password tool) disagree with you. Oh, and root login on SSH is disabled. You'd have to authenticate as my super sekret username first, then su to root before you had permission to do more than read my empty ~ directory.

The boxes are firewalled off, providing exactly two external ports to the world. Only one of these ports is a valid administration interface.

You're pretty good at erasing your tracks when you log in too.

You did successfully manage to tracert the box from your Winblows machine. I guess I've been 0wnzored.

Even if you did compromise me, I remotely back up the database and game every 6 hours, and I have incremental backups going back well over a year. If I'm ever successfully hacked, I can always roll back to pre-compromise. I have nothing on these machines that I wish to hide, and the worst thing you could do is create game downtime and force a rollback.

By the way, there's plenty of lawyers looking to make a name for themselves in cyber crime, if you do hack me, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have no problem finding one to represent me, and I hope you hack the ISP's servers too; they log action on my administrative port (the only successful logins are mine, from my IP address). Unless you live in Texas, it's a federal crime, and if you possess the skillz to pwn me, you're smart enough to know it ain't worth going to jail to hack a small time site, and you're smart enough to know that the illusion of anonymity on the Internet is just that: an illusion, once the law gets involved.

The bottom line here is this: Don't make claims about hacking someone when you don't know what you're talking about. Aside from being called out for doing so (such as this message), it's my understanding that it's illegal to claim you committed a crime that you did not commit, or even to claim you committed a crime that wasn't committed at all. You can go to jail for telling the police that you murdered someone, even if you didn't. I could seek compensatory damages for the time it took to evaluate the validity of your claim, and I could sue you for libel since by claiming you hacked my passwords, and that they are further "not very secure," you damage my reputation, and have done so in writing.

You may feel free to apologise profusely, donate, or both to earn your way back into my good graces :-).

Bavo, im sorry but you seriously took him to school MightyE, *golf clap*

[SaucyWench]

Oh... that resumé thing doesn't work? Dang, why on EARTH did I hire Kevin Mitnick?

(Who? History Assignent: If you do not know, Google is your friend.)

As an aside, I have personally heard MightyE's proposed retribution to anyone hacking the server, and it is two-fold. One, their personally identifiable details will be plastered over the MOTD once we restore the game, with an invitation to 4,700 players to contact the perpetrator and personally thank them for causing the downtime; and two, a sizeable cash reward to anyone with video evidence of the perpetrator stomping out a flaming bag of dog poo on their front porch.

Now I think the first one is far more scary... trust me, the Whine Power is extreme after only a 10 minute downtime, but after a character rollback? Sheesh, man, leave the country. They will hunt you down.

[Syrius]

Oh yeah? Please enlighten us.

:D :D

Aaah, have I ever mentioned that MightyE is my God? Hehe.

Now I think the first one is far more scary... trust me, the Whine Power is extreme after only a 10 minute downtime, but after a character rollback? Sheesh, man, leave the country. They will hunt you down.

Oooooh. Clever.

*Rubs her hands together at the thought of retribution*

[Vode Andreas]

Shot down by MightyE... Once of the many things I wish to learn at some point in my life are some basic hacking skills, but looking at the other things I wish to do in this life (even at this young (late teen) age), I'm not quite sure i'll get around to it :wink: