Everyone Please Read!

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
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Don. Edwards
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Everyone Please Read!

Post #1by Don. Edwards » 31.10.2002, 00:37

OK. It seems as though the forum and the gallery are practicaly imposible to get into these days. I have brought this to Chris' attention but for now I think he needs to see how many other users are having trouble with the sites. So if you having trouble getting into the forums or you are noticing major forum slowdowns post a reply.
Also if you know how to access the Gallery please report if you can get into it as well. I haven't been able to into the Gallery since 2:30AM last night. Of course there were times I wasn't online but if I can't get into the gallery even to continue some maintanace in my area there is a real problem here. I hope everyone who has a section in the gallery goes and checks to see if they can get in and do some changes just to see if you can as well. I think these are valid issues and I know Chris has given us the space for free but if we can't get to the space we have problems.
I don't know if there is a way of finding out if bandwidth from the site is being stolen by other sites but that might be a posibility as well. If our pictures are being link to from other sites we are all getting robbed of our time here. Please post replies.
Thanks everyone in advance.

billybob884
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Post #2by billybob884 » 31.10.2002, 01:32

Honestly, I haven't had any of these problems. The forum and chris's site have been working fine.
Mike M.

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TVTExtreme4
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Post #3by TVTExtreme4 » 31.10.2002, 01:49

I havent had any problems with the forums or the site. They work great. :D

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Don. Edwards
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Post #4by Don. Edwards » 31.10.2002, 01:59

Well I don't understand why I am the one having all the trouble. I have tried diferent network cards, different browsers, and still nothing changes.
The forum is still slow to load and I still can't get all the way into the gallery. This is getting to be total B.S.
The only other thing I can think of its something to do with proximity to the main site servers. I am only about 150 miles from them. What gets me is it was 2:30AM almost on the nose when I lost contact with the gallery. I figures it was some kind of automated maintance going on but I still can't get in to the gallery or log into it. :(

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Post #5by selden » 31.10.2002, 02:02

Don,

I'm sure Chris is well aware of the problems you mention.

The throughput of the gateway to shatters.net is very poor more often than not. This causes serious problems for the nameservices, since the primary nameserver is behind that gateway. As a result, nameservice queries for the address of ennui.shatters.net often time out. Because of this, I normally use Ennui's numeric address to access the forum server instead of its alphabetic name. If you use the address http://63.224.48.65/forum/ then the pauses are usually bearable.

Some time ago when I mentioned that perhaps the response problem might be due to heavy access to the Celestia file server, Chris said that it was due to something else and that he knew what it was. Response was quite good for a while after that, but then became poor again.

When response times are good, a traceroute to http://www.shatters.net shows about a .2 second delay at the Shatters gateway. When respone times are poor, the delay is about 1.5 seconds. That's what it is now.

(Just now I was able to get the text of the Gallery page, but then it timed out again.)

My personal guess is that someone sharing the gateway with Chris is running an application that is a major bandwith hog, perhaps a peer-to-peer file service (e.g. Kazaa or something similar).

P2p services are known to be able to bring even the highest bandwidth gateways to their knees. Many universities have had to install "traffic shaping" routers in order to keep p2p services run by students from blocking all their other traffic. This feature lets one control how much of the network bandwiidth is available for different types of services. Unfortunately, routers that can do this kind of traffic shaping are rather expensive, and not something an individual can easily afford.

I think we need to be patient while Chris works out the issue with whoever's responsible.
Selden

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Post #6by billybob884 » 31.10.2002, 02:20

maybe you go on a different time than the other 3 people that have responded...
Mike M.



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Don. Edwards
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Post #7by Don. Edwards » 31.10.2002, 02:31

Well at least that is a clear answer. I will just bide my time them and keep trying at off times.

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Post #8by billybob884 » 31.10.2002, 02:48

Don. Edwards wrote:Well at least that is a clear answer. I will just bide my time them and keep trying at off times.


well, i do my best :wink:
Mike M.



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Post #9by Guest » 31.10.2002, 07:06

i have had not a single problem with these forums... they work perfectly for me. 11:00pm PST using AOL with northern pacific access number.

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Post #10by t00fri » 31.10.2002, 07:07

Since this community seems to be increasingly Windows dominated, the following remark may be of little practical relevance to most:

since some time I have resolved the host name ennui.celestiaproject.net/www.shatters.net
/locally/ in my /etc/hosts file in terms of the associated numerical address.

So even if the DNS times out, the name resolution is performed via /etc/hosts. Since this change, I usually get in, but nevertheless, the connection (also to the forum) is often unbearably slow, as I wrote already....

Unfortunately, this measure does not affect the problem with email, since I send the mail via our remote mail server that does not know locally Chris' numerical address. I just got back this morning several mails to Chris. We usually now exchange mail via the SourceForge developer mailing list for Celestia. Hence this is an acceptable workaround. Still, far from ideal...

Bye Fridger

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Don. Edwards
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Post #11by Don. Edwards » 31.10.2002, 09:06

As I said I my first post. Getting into the forun ins't the problem for me. At times its gets slow but I can get in. The problem is the Gallery at http://www.celestiaproject.net/gallery/albums.php
This is what I can't get into. Its nearly been 24 hours and all I get is the front page with some text and black boxes were there should be pictures.
On an occasion I will get the pictures but I still can't navigate or login into the site. Until something can be done I just can't see waisting anymore time trying to upload any further pictures. I will have to seek some other kind of solution. I just ticks me off to no end for you all to keep saying you have no problem getting in. Try the bloody gallery and see if you can get in and navigate the thing. If you can I just don't see why I can't.
I have said my peace. I may not be happy about it but I guess nothing can be done for me. :x

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Post #12by Thilo » 31.10.2002, 12:24

t00fri wrote:Since this community seems to be increasingly Windows dominated


Yes .. that's a shame :( :P


, the following remark may be of little practical relevance to most:

since some time I have resolved the host name ennui.celestiaproject.net/www.shatters.net
/locally/ in my /etc/hosts file in terms of the associated numerical address.


In the windows root directory there exists a file named "hosts.sam" ... it is working exactly the same way the /etc/hosts file works in linux.



I do not have any problems at all. The forum loads fast - i am at the german Provider T-Offline

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Post #13by selden » 31.10.2002, 12:50

Access to http://www.shatters.net and the gallery is working fine at 8am EST. traceroute shows a 130ms delay at the shatters gateway. Since it's 5AM on the west coast, that may explain the difference.
Selden

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Post #14by Darkmiss » 31.10.2002, 17:58

I did post a message about this a litttle while ago
about the very same thing.

And I got a reply from Toofri, saying that the server was being shared by another
group at certain times of the day

and that time was about 12:00 noon till about 17:00, GMT
so I just avoid these times

not sure if the server bandwith is still being shared though.
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Post #15by chris » 31.10.2002, 18:44

Here's the deal with shatters.net . . .

http://www.shatters.net (aka ennui.shatters.net) is a Linux machine sitting in my house at the end of a 640kbps (up and down) DSL line. In the past 30 days, the web server has delivered 28 gigs of data. This doesn't include downloads of Celestia 1.2.4 source and binaries, which are fortunately hosted by SourceForge. I pay about $130/month in ISP fees to run shatters.net--if someone can recommend a better solution for the same cost or less, I like to hear about it. I need lots of disk space, support for 1+ gigs/day in traffic, absolutely no ads, the ability to setup whatever PHP and CGI stuff I want, and permission to give accounts to other users like t00fri and Rassilon. Suggestions?

The reason the server is slow hardly ever has to do with Celestia related traffic. It's the damned file sharing programs like KaZaa that bleed every drop of bandwidth. And no, I'm not the one running them . . . I try to make sure that these get shut down as soon as I notice the server running slowly, but that can sometimes take a while.

--Chris

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Post #16by Rassilon » 31.10.2002, 19:53

In Feburary I 'plan' on having a server with 1 terabytes of hd space and possibly a t1 or better connection....which I would gladly set aside 20 gigs for celestia...but right now its all up in the air....

Nothing is better than having your own server though...but with the number of people that hit this forum and the website your going to need a t1 connect...There are some possibilities along the lines of webservers on the net...which will cost $30 a month but not all of them have the correct setup...I dont know everything about networking but Im learning :mrgreen:
I'm trying to teach the cavemen how to play scrabble, its uphill work. The only word they know is Uhh and they dont know how to spell it!

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Post #17by selden » 31.10.2002, 22:54

Chris,

My understanding is that in general most Kazaa traffic on well-connected sites is outbound, not inbound, since the high bandwidth connections wind up carrying most of the server traffic. Are your friends aware of this? Would they object to no longer being a server site? I.e. have you considered simply blocking all outbound Kazaa traffic?
Selden

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Post #18by Don. Edwards » 01.11.2002, 02:50

It was about 4:30AM and I tried to get to the gallery and it worked. So somebody somewhere shut down something and it corrected the problem. I was able to do some gallery maintance today and so far so good.

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Post #19by chris » 01.11.2002, 03:02

Don. Edwards wrote:It was about 4:30AM and I tried to get to the gallery and it worked. So somebody somewhere shut down something and it corrected the problem. I was able to do some gallery maintance today and so far so good.

Glad that it's working better. I like the new images very much--the shot of the dark side of HD28185-E is my new background image.

The only difference between today and yesterday is that no filesharing stuff was running. I suspect that it's a very rare day when Celestia-related traffic is responsible for the site slowing down.

--Chris

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Post #20by Redfish » 05.11.2002, 22:39

More is better, T1(180kB/s) download seems quite okay, but considering the fact that many ppl might also want to download big texture files, i think it's not enough. But the dasmirnov server which is quite slow is adequate though. So T1 might also suffice. :D


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