Intermud-3 Router Testing

Yes. You read right. I've been working on a router in my spare time. Some of you no doubt know this, others may not. I've arrived at a stage where it can be tested more widely than just my group of test connections.

First off, this router is *NOT* considered production and should not be used in place of your current connection to the main one. If you wish to join in helping to test it, it's highly advisable you use a secondary port so as not to disturb your main game in case it crashes you.

Secondly, it does not support everything yet. Of note, channel-admin packets are not processed, channel exclusion lists are not yet supported, and private channels will not keep unwanted members off of them.

And finally, privacy. Expect none. The router is set to log all packets in and out to monitor for anomalies and for reasons behind crashes. Don't send anything you don't want me to see via tells and such. This is not a green light to abuse things. If you are found to be abusing the test, you will be banned from connecting. Crashes as the result of normal use are to be expected though.

So if you're willing to give this a try, you can change your I3 configuration to point to the following:

# The router information. Currently only one.
# Information below this point cannot be edited online.
router i3.arthmoor.com~
port 9900
routername *arthmoor~

Users of the Diku I3 client I distribute can paste that directly into their configs. Other clients will just have to cope

LP Muds are welcome to participate as well, though not all services you might be used to having are being supported yet.

Known issues:

The router is currently sending blank packets after pretty much everything. If you have your packet debug running, you may see odd characters at the end of your packets, or it may appear as though you got a double packet. This doesn't seem to be causing any trouble, but don't be alarmed if it happens.

Recommend that those using the Diku I3 client upgrade to version 2.25 since there is a great deal of data sent at initial connection that might overflow the buffers in older code.

I'm interested in this. I have SmaugFUSS, which came with i3. I'd like to see it, but not sure how to activate it.
"The mud is not currently connected to I3." I can probably get this working, so I'll try it out. I'm new to this, so bare with me.

[EDIT]
Log: Attempting connect to router i3.arthmoor.com on port 9900
Log: I3_connection_open: Cannot resolve router hostname.
Log: Closing connection to Intermud-3 router.
Log: Will attempt to reconnect in approximately 5 seconds.

Something I'm doing wrong?

If the DNS doesn't work ( can't imagine why not, hrm ) try the IP: 66.116.74.116

Ugh, sorry, I copy'd that info, so it was
router router i3.arthmoor.com~

I was thinking that was was "router,i3.arthmoor.com~"

I'm connected, lemme see how to do this, heh.

Just an update for those interested. Several nagging bugs have been slain in the router code, with accompanying bugs in the client being fixed as well. Things are looking more and more stable as days go by, but of course there is still a long way to go before it can be considered a production level router.

Current client version is at 2.25, and anyone not using this version is advised to upgrade ASAP. Not only for router testing, but for general client fixes that will impact use of the main router as well.

Also - of note - the main router has now been down for 3 days and counting. While I'm not anywhere CLOSE to running my router production, I do welcome anyone who wants to make a move now so they can at least stay in touch with people using I3. The main router going down as often as it does is the whole purpose behind my putting another one together. :)

BTW: Known issue:

Mudlist packets don't seem to be getting delivered in their entirety. There should be 146+ muds delivered after connection. For some reason most connections are only able to recieve between 120 and 135 and I haven't solved why.

AHA! Found the mudlist packet issue. Silly logic mistake. It was skipping counts, and as a result wasn't delivering a full list. Now that this is out of the way, any further muds connecting that aren't getting a full list should let me know since that might be a socket buffer issue.

Just a quick update:

Private channel support is now in. Any channel which is private will automatically add the host mud to the approved mud list to prevent the channel from becoming unadministerable. ( Is that even a word? :P )

A new packet exchange has been created as well:

chan-adminlist - packet to request an administrative list from the channel. If you are the host mud it will reply back with a chan-adminlist-reply packet detailing the muds which are either invited or banned. This is not a supported feature on the "official" main router, but it's been something I wanted to have available for some time.

This more or less brings all basic support online except for filtered channels. I'm debating on even bothering since it doesn't appear as though any channels on the main network are using this level of support.

Just a quick question, how would you "i3who" a MUD that has a space it its name? I tried quotes, no quotes and it still didn't think the MUD existed.

i3who mudname

You don't need quotes, apostraphes or whatever. The i3who command accepts whatever you pass it as the mud name you want. So leave those off.

My question would be which mud did you try this on, and are you sure your packet was sent? I can send i3who requests to your mud and it responds fine.

Thats because my MUD name has no spaces in it. But... odd. It used to do this:


But it works now. I guess I can add a space in my mud name now, because I thought spaces weren't working correctly. Thanks.

Ah, I see. Yes, that probably happened because of the earlier problems with delivering a full mudlist. Chances are you're receiving them all now, properly. As was mentioned in the outset, this is still an experimental router. Though it may be stable at this time, it probably still needs work. So if something doesn't work like you expect it should, let me know.

It may also be worth your time to upgrade to the 2.3 client which has the ability to keep a configuration for more than one router. The plan is to eventually get the code to communicate among multiple routers.

How/where would I upgrade it? Oh, and also how long does it take to update the mudlist? I changed my MUDs name, and it still think its the old one.

Client upgrades are available from www.afkmud.com/i3.php

Ah, I thought that was where it would be. Before I install it, I'm using Smaug 1.4b, aka SmaugFUSS. Its ok to install it right? Also, since I'm simply upgrading it, are there some steps I can skip, or should I just install everything?

All you need to do is drop the 3 source files that are in the zip into your directories, make clean, recompile, and that should take care of it.

Oh, and be sure you update your i3.config file as well. The muiltiple router setup required a change to that file's format. If you don't update it, you'll get errors on load.