Managing Characters with Vaultster

[orth]

Hi all,

Our world has been having problems with the ActivatePortal function crashing the server due to what I think is simultaneous Write/Reads on a character's .bic that is shared over one NFS Servervault.

I've been playing around with Vaultster but came across an issue I'm not so sure how to deal with and was wondering how others have implemented it.

Currently our world is divided into three separate servers all on the same lan, with the one Servervault on it's own separate server. The player password is given to only one world and based on the persistent table entries saved for the character, upon login they are redirected to the appropriate server where they last saved, if necessary.

I was thinking that all regular portals to the other servers could use the Vaultster plugin but this automatic portal that happens on login would not, as we don't want to overwrite the .bic with an older one.

Maybe an example would help illustrate it better.

Joe logs on to our "West" server.
Joe takes a ship to the "Central" server using Vaultster to send his .bic.
Joe logs off on Central.
Joe returns later to West, and is autoportalled to Central this time with just ActivatePortal not Vaultster. (As the latest .bic is on Central server, so I don't wish to copy over the old one leftover on West)

I don't like the feeling about this for some reason and have a sense that it is being done better, but I'm just not sure how. I'd be willing to give out the passwords to all the servers, but there's still the issue of what happens if they login to the wrong one? Also what if one server goes down, and the portal fails, what happens to that player?

Perhaps others have some suggestions to throw my way?

Thanks in advance for any help or information.

Cheers,
orth

[JeroenB]

I would say that you should not use the Vaultster plugin in a networked environment. Using a shared network drive is usually much faster and you don't have these problems you talk about.

[orth]

*sigh* Alright then. So maybe you have a solution to our problem with the ActivatePortal crashing our servers?

Like I said when the player comes from one server to another, I think the sending server is still writing the bic as the receiving server is trying to read it, causing a crash...

[JeroenB]

You might want to send a message to the Avlis team. I know they use a networked environment and can portal between servers without crashes.

One thing you could try is exporting the character yourself before the player actually portals to the other server.

[twinj]

Are you using seemless portalling or are you having to confirm the data.. password and IP. This made me crash?

Use seemless if that's the case.

[orth]

Using seamless. It seems to most often happen when the receiving server is quite busy.