World: r3wp

ahh, I see. So it's nothing for the faint of heart ;-)

Yeah, a whole three lines of code.

I'm not talking about these 3 lines for this exact problem, but about 
understanding enough to find the same info for another post ...
Of course, this may be equally easy.

: ) (I know), but it is cool that such a thing can be done with so 
little code because of a) REBOL b) the format AltME files are stored 
in.

Where AltME is terribly wrong (or I am terribly stupid):

Today I tried to run start two altme servers. I want to try to get 
some guys hooked. I would like to state, that I am semi experienced 
(still not guru) networking guy, and I do run wi-fi network with 
30+ routers for 420 customers, so not novice.

So what do I think AltME id doing wrong, or at least not making life 
to admins easy? There is no problem for me to to open ports on FW. 
This is not about opening ports only, but precisely speaking it is 
about setting DST-NAT to your target PC on internal network:


1) AltME records your internal IP adress when setting up your world. 
Don't even try to run it on different PC in your internal network. 
Even if you have all ports OK, this one thing will ruin all your 
efforts. Dunno if it adds to any kind of security, but in my eyes 
it is completly unnecessary obstacle. But maybe it is usefull when 
running altme servers fully on your local network, so that AltME 
"DNS" can direct your local clients to correct internal altme server. 
I can live easily with this one, but ...


2) Today I created new world. No matter how you try, it always registers 
AltME world on port 5400. There is no ability to set it differently.


3) Even if you start altme -s "my-world" -p 5401, it will not help 
you, and it still opens the world on port 5400 (at least that is 
what I saw with netstat -an), which is imo a bug


4) even if you change \servers\my-world\info, still no luck. When 
you go to http://www.altme.com/cgi-bin/lookup.cgiand you type-in 
your world name, you still can see, that AltME.com has registered 
5400 port, but not e.g. 5401


5) even if you run your altme -s "my-world" -p 5401, and even if 
you send your client to 5401 port by changing \worlds\my-world\config.txt, 
you still has no lack. It is apparent, that no matter how your client 
is instructed, it takes info from altme.com for granted, and overrides 
your local settings, which can be proven by 6)


6) Running two worlds - my-world on 5400 and my-world1 on 5401 (names 
obfuscated here), I found out, that Altme client does not care of 
Altme server name at all. That can be proven by typing my-world1 
and using account from my-world, you are succesfully logged in to 
my-world, instead of my-world1, as client obtains port 5400 instead 
of 5401


I have one and only one question - how can I change my world port 
number on altme.com, or in other worlds - how do I REGISTER world 
on different than 5400 port? :-)

Thanks eventually and sorry, if I miss some important steps, but 
I tried to follow docs, which should be sufficient enough me thinks 
:-)

in 5) lack = luck

Pekr, my limited experience with multiple altME worlds is you need 
to have the other worlds you are hosting running at the same time 
you create your new world.  It will assigne the next available port 
to that world.

I had lots of problems with this in the past as well as I was trying 
to setup some test worlds to hook some people.  I created the worlds 
consecutively with no other worlds running and ran into the same 
problem of them all being associate with 5400.

I also had problems with worlds that were not 'reserved' running 
on theh same Win98 machine.  I had frequent drops of the worlds... 
the world server thought people hadn't been on the worlds in 90 days 
so the server released the name.  This happened really frequently, 
even though the worlds in question were accessed every day or every 
couple of days.

I finally gave up and resolved myself to only host one world.  Seems 
to have remedied the problem, although I still have occasional world 
name drops.  The other problem I had is it would not allow me to 
connect to my world, and when 'restarting' the world, it would say 
my world name is in use, thus forcing me to change my world-name 
and asking my users to do the same when trying to connect.  Luckily 
it was just for family, so they did it without complaining.

Same issues here.

I've been defeated .. I've changed all my passwords to be the same 
:(

Just been locked out too many times with the wrong password.

Something weird corrupted my AltME login to this world. I had to 
delete the file "state" and let AltMe recreate it. This happened 
right after the new AltME update. 

Before I deleted it, it was logging me in but keeps giving me an 
internal error about state path being none while I am already logged 
in. I sent the error to feedsback 3 times.
Deleting the "state" file fixed it for me.

Brock - the only one thing is needed to those experienced - one field 
for manual port assignation. If you are admin, you have to know what 
the port means anyway, as you have DST nat connection on your router 
....

Yes, I agree that is needed.  I'd also like to see a way to re-assign 
a world name after it is dropped and no longer 'reserved' or associated 
to my IP, but don't know if this is possible, since it seems to have 
lost my IP... maybe this is an ISP thing when IS recycles IPs since 
I have a Dynamic IP... probably the answer.

I think, that AltME would greatly benefit from DevBase model. DevBase 
is live demostration of community collaborative work. If AltME client 
(not necessarily server) sources would be uploaded, we could see 
good bunch of small refinements, fixed proxy, etc.

Is it possible to change associations? For example if I don't want 
Altme to use Notepad?

I think it is built-in. I have not found it exposed in any config 
....

Ingo <I'm not talking about these 3 lines for this exact problem, 
but about understanding enough to find the same info for another 
post>

Apologies for delay in replying.
***

The URL for the web archive has this parameter for the post in question:
    post=r3wp157x10054
And the two lines of code are:

   core-chat: reduce load/all %157.set
   text: last core-chat/10055

As you can see, the GROUP-ID is 157

and the POST-ID is 10054 -- but add 1 for the REBOL code as the file 
has a header line.
***
To get the GROUP-ID either RIGHT-CLICK the group name in ALTME.
Or find the group name in the Web archive:

  http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp
  
Does that demystify it?
As Reichart implies -- it's easy when you know how :-)

What exactly can cause "AltME Error: Registray cannot load dataset 
files: 2" during startup? I'm getting it so many times on various 
machines, I'm starting to think it's a bug in AltME rather than data 
file corruption by something else. Whenever it happens when I'm trying 
to log into a specific world, it's "jinxed" and I can't log into 
it anymore on that machine. It does not help to just delete the whole 
dir, redownload AltME and start from scratch.

it seems also to happen mostly when changing world from one to the 
other. I haven't been able to run multiple AltMEs on one machine 
for a long time.

it's mainly a problem on OSX Leopard, but I see it elsewhere too.

Can you trap the registry accesses ?

Ah... sorry, it's AltME's registry, not Windows'

Maybe it's a permissions problem ?

I was wondering that. However I don't know what could be permission 
denied, if I simply delete the entire AltME dir and reinstall it 
from scratch and the problem still persists.

found it. it's a WHAT-DIR issue.

Anyone ever seen a "Too Many Recent Servers" error when attempting 
to start a world? And is the limit 5 or 3 worlds running on a single 
PC?

Altme has always struggled to show me the latest messages in some 
groups...That's the reason why some people have used "." a lot to 
force a group-specific resync.

I've just noticed some red groups that have updated themselves for 
post in March this year and December last year.

I guess that's good that they arrived without further prodding from 
me.

But apologies if you're still awaiting some replies from me: I may 
never have seen yiur post.

I havne't seen it, but I recall the available server ports on one 
machine to be 5400 and believe it to only go to 5405, but could be 
wrong.

Brock, yes that's what I thought.  I'm wondering if the problem is 
that I requested "Too many Servers" from the Altme world-creator 
itself. I'm talking about starting worlds that I have consistently 
used for years and one more (to make four) that is new.

You've given me another thought though, maybe my own machine is causing 
this to happen(?) At this point I can only run two of the three existing 
worlds and never the newest one. Hmmm.

Make sure all worlds are open when you create a new one, otherwise 
it won't use a new port number.  It always goes to port 5400 if it's 
not already serving another world.

Brock, do you know if the port is stored with the lookup server? 
That is, once created, will that world always serve on the alternate 
port, even if it's the only world running?

yes, the port is stored with the lookup server

It is also placed in your config files on local machine - however, 
no matter how you try, if you registered new world without old ones 
running, altme registers it to existing port and then you will face 
strange situation, when your client is choosing to new world, but 
is connected to another one ...

Pekr is correct from my experience.

Thanks guys! That's very helpful information.

Yeah, it is. That's probably why it doesn't work. And worse, now 
one of my old worlds can't be started. I guess I'll have to wait 
until the others die.

hi everybody ... i met some problems with altme : problems with a 
dataset file

anybody got the same annoyment ?

I've seen various annoyances. 
Can you describe yours in more detail?

I think I found the trick to serving multiple worlds, even if they 
weren't set up correctly at first. In the info file in %altme/servers/<your-world>/, 
change 5400 to, e.g., 5401. When you start the world again, it seems 
to use that port. I haven't tried it with a shortcut start yet.

I believe the file is config.txt in Windows.  There is a server-port 
option.

sorry... host-addr.   Good find Gregg.

Let me start over... host-port is what Gregg is talking about.  There 
is also a host-addr setting that might be the source of my worlds 
becoming unavailable all of a sudden even though they are used on 
 a daily basis.  I'll have to check that out next time my world locks 
me out.

Thanks. I waited a couple of days an now it is fine (4 worlds running). 
Since I didn't do anything on my side I'm wondering if the Altme 
server has something to do with it. Who knows? I'm just glad it works 
now : )