loading ... - forever

[kobnach]

So I managed to navigate my way through the newbie area, got all my clothes, right clicked the ladder, and the game froze. Eventually something timed out and I ended up back on the login screen. I then tried again. That time, my friends tell me I was visible at the top of the ladder, and one of them invited me to become kin. That showed on my screen, I accepted, and my friend tells me she now sees me as kin. That's all that happened. This time I killed the game window. My friend tells me my character disappeared just as I did that. I then killed the other java game I'd been playing at the same time, relaunched haven & hearth, and tried again to login. I'm now stuck in "Loading..." and have been there around 5 minutes. My friend suggests that I'm blocking the ladder and no one else can come in from char creation till I manage to move. She also tells me that I've just got "Zzz" floating over my head, which she says is the game's AFK indicator.

My computer and network are fairly powerful; I doubt this is a simple resource problem at my end, but it's presumably somehow specific to my computer or you'd have other reports of this.

[jorb]

This is a know problem that has to do with fragmented UDP packets being dropped client side. The problem most likely lies with your router.

See also: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=229 or viewtopic.php?f=2&t=34&p=119

[kobnach]

It might be a firewall issue in my case. I've got a packet filtering firewall, and I've allowed UDP source port 1870, which got me this far - but I'm not sure whether the port is included in fragments after the first one. (I'll check that, just don't remember the protocol offhand.) If it's not, and if the firewall is forwarding the packets as received, not reassembling them, which seems likely, then I'll need some other filtering rule to allow them, while not allowing random UDP based attacks. What IP(s) are you sending from?

Edit - I looked up the RFCs, and that's almost certainly the problem. The UDP port is only in the first fragment, since from the IP point of view it's part of the payload, not the header information. Now I get to experiment - hopefully all of havenandhearth.com will turn out to be a single host (and thus single IP), since I'm not set up to easily sniff what's being sent from the internet to my router/firewall.

[2nd Edit] Allowing all UDP from 213.101.208.103 fixed my problem. Will add a note to the thread you referred me to.

[loftar]

If it's not, and if the firewall is forwarding the packets as received, not reassembling them, which seems likely, then I'll need some other filtering rule to allow them, while not allowing random UDP based attacks.

Personally, I have to say that sounds a bit over-paranoid. Fragmentation may not specifically be required STD functionality, but I'd expect things to break randomly if you do things like that.

However, if you wish to keep it like that nonetheless, I think you should simply be able to let packets through whose fragment offset (in the IP header) is non-zero. As long as you block the first packet, the reassembly buffer will never fill and will be dropped after the time-out passes.

[kobnach]

If it's not, and if the firewall is forwarding the packets as received, not reassembling them, which seems likely, then I'll need some other filtering rule to allow them, while not allowing random UDP based attacks.

Personally, I have to say that sounds a bit over-paranoid. Fragmentation may not specifically be required STD functionality, but I'd expect things to break randomly if you do things like that.

However, if you wish to keep it like that nonetheless, I think you should simply be able to let packets through whose fragment offset (in the IP header) is non-zero. As long as you block the first packet, the reassembly buffer will never fill and will be dropped after the time-out passes.

Hmm, you don't want to do that, because of the possibility of a fragmentation attack - you can do a denial of service by flooding a target with fragments that will never assemble; the result tends to be resource exhaustion, at least on general purpose Unix systems. But that's OK, you don't need to - I'm willing to trust the specific server that hosts Haven and Hearth, at least to the extent of letting it send random UDP messages to a (gasp) windows machine. (I tend to regard windows systems as insecure by design and unsecureable, so I'm generally very paranoid about what I'll let one receive.) And that's all I need. I suppose I could be more paranoid, and not allow it to send non-fragments to UDP ports I don't expect it to use, but this is good enough.

And by the way, I'm <em>not</em> a "black hat"; I'm merely a software developer working on Unix kernels for a networking company. You learn a lot about security issues if you keep your ears open.

[Dwarfu]

Read the above posts and threads - I've been playing happily since I found this game in the DF forums.

Only today, in fact, since the last server reset that you announced, I'm now having the eternal loading screen happen to me. I know I can click and walk around, but the screen never loads (anymore).

Am I out of luck now?

[loftar]

That seems weird enough. I didn't change anything related to map transfer or anything like that in any past couple of updates, so you shouldn't have been affected. Maybe you're just having problems with some temporary overload on some router along the way?

Maybe it's time for me to try and fix this problem, though.

[jorb]

That seems weird enough. I didn't change anything related to map transfer or anything like that in any past couple of updates, so you shouldn't have been affected. Maybe you're just having problems with some temporary overload on some router along the way?

Maybe it's time for me to try and fix this problem, though.

The map might also have gotten a lot more fragmented in the last couple of days/hours/minutes. I had that happen once.

[Dwarfu]

Maybe it's time for me to try and fix this problem, though, and add in animal domestication.

Fixed.

EDIT: Oh, well, nothing I do seems to work - I guess it was fun while it lasted. I'll keep checking back in the coming weeks - hopefully something breaks loose.

EDIT2: Here's something odd...I can play just fine on another character. What does that mean?

[StarChaser]

There are currently 3 places I can't travel to. Old Camp Noctis, a few meters north of the RoB and The Dwarves Bottleneck. I can manage to blindly move out of the camp tile but then what can I do? I have to much left in my house. It's all valuable to me. I have only been playing every couple of days and that was just to investigate and introduce myself to new villages.