From: fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: MetaServerII v0.1
Date: 21 Aug 92 22:31:15 GMT
Reply-To: fadden@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA

In the best spirit of reinventing the wheel and combining processes (hi Ray),
I'd like to announce MetaServerII, currently running on charon.amdahl.com.

If you'd like to skip the BS and see what it does, try:

    telnet charon.amdahl.com 3520
    telnet charon.amdahl.com 3521
    telnet charon.amdahl.com 3522
    telnet charon.amdahl.com 3523
    telnet charon.amdahl.com 3524

It's not entirely finished, but I wanted to get some feedback.  If you have
general questions, please post them so that I don't end up answering the
same thing over and over.  Please do the same with clever suggestions, so
that everybody has a chance to comment.

I'll leave it up over the weekend (right now it's Friday 8/21).


MetaServerII is a replacement for Eric's MetaServer.  Features include:

    - Runs as a single process (with lots of non-blocking I/O).
    - Has three different output formats and two "information" ports.  The
      first format is identical to MetaServer's and is compatible with
      XNetrekM, the second is an easy-to-read format with "-h" and "-p"
      so you can mouse-copy it, the third is a verbose format which includes
      player lists (down with T-mode scum!)
    - Variable retry delays depending on server state.  You can configure it
      to wait longer if a server was down or empty.
    - Easy to update configuration file (cut & paste the Frequently Posted
      Server List).  The format is the same as for trekhopd, gwd, etc, etc.
    - Geographical location and administrator's e-mail address can be
      configured in.
    - Output is sorted by server status, then by #of players, then
      alphabetically.
    - Knows about port port-1 (try sturgeon.cs.washington.edu 2591), so it
      won't wake up the daemon when nobody is playing.  As soon as I write
      the code for it you will also be able to get a player list even when
      there's a wait queue if port-1 is supported.  (Thanks go to Donald Tsang
      for suggesting this to me.)


I don't plan to run this on charon indefinitely.  Once it's compete and
stable, I'll release the source code so that somebody with a machine which
rarely goes down (and isn't subject to the "what are you doing with company
resources" mentality) can take over.

I'll have a README done Real Soon Now.  The only glitch I know of is that
one of the ksu servers (the hockey one?) claims to have a person on but
there's nobody there (weird).  Sounds like I'm using two different criteria
for determining whether a player is alive or not; I'll fix it soon.


If it seems to be giving incorrect information, or it takes an inordinate
amount of time to get a response, please let me know.  For inaccurate info,
send ck_players output along.  Note that MetaServerII may report more players
than MetaServer or ck_players, because ck_players only shows characters
whose state is PALIVE (so if they just died, they won't appear).

-- 
fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
[ Above opinions are mine, Amdahl has nothing to do with them, etc, etc. ]