On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 13:58:59 +1000
James Cameron <quozl at us.netrek.org> wrote:

> On the basis of Karthik's observations and my confirmation of them, and
> in the absence of a response from Carlos, if I get seconding for this
> from Dave Ahn, then I will take action to remove the entry from
> metaserver2.  (Otherwise I wait for Carlos).

I indeed noticed today that I received a message from Karthik yesterday
reguarding the issue.

Checking the server, multiple ntserv processes were stuck in a
cpu-hungry loop, and although rarely, this has occurred before.  It's
definitely the result of some bug (and possibly exploitable to go in
that state reliably).  The server code I run is old by today's
standards, and I have no time to take a serious look into the bug or
upgrade and reconfigure it.  Since the situation occurs more often
lately (I quite recently restarted the server for the same issue a
couple of times), I suspect an exploit being regularily run (not
impossible, as previous non-standard servers have been victim of attacks
before), or simply late client changes or normal stress-testing by
client developers to trigger the bug inadvertently.

Since I can't dedicate the necessary time to deal with it, I'm shutting
down the server.  If in the past it helped newbies to develop their
skills and eventually switch to real human tournaments on twisted or
pickled, it could at least reach its goal for the time being.

I have even considered temporarily dropping the netrek-dev mailing list
subscription because I am not able to keep up to date reading it.  It
has more traffic than it used to, and this is a good thing, of course.
:)

Eventually if I get more time to play with netrek or develop for it, I
might put up a server again with up-to-date sources and re-subscribe on
the list.  At that point I might also revamp the metaserver protocol,
which has been bugging me for some time (it lacks proper versioning
support and is vulnerable to certain attacks).  There were also various
known problems about my current server configuration which would easily
be solved by some hacking, time permitting.

Thanks, and best wishes,
-- 
Matt