Improved availability of the CnCNet service

[hifi]

Hello Commanders!

 

Following Sundays long downtime, we have set up redundancy to avoid it happening ever again.

 

Before, CnCNet was running on only one server. Today we run on two separate servers: one in the US, one right here in Europe. Both are linked together to form a network where all players share everything. If one goes down the other one will happily serve the players. If one server goes down or there is some issue with network connectivity between them, they will "split" and the players will only see other players connected to the same server. People familiar with IRC will know this as a netsplit. It is unfortunate when they happen and will cause some disruption. However, this will ensure you can always connect to CnCNet.

 

So what does this mean for you? First and foremost, the default server hostname, irc.cncnet.org will throw you randomly between the two servers. When the other one goes down we will try to quickly update it to point only to the working server. Alternatively we have new additional hostnames now: us.irc.cncnet.org and eu.irc.cncnet.org that only point to their respective servers. If you have connectivity issues to one of the servers you can alternate between them manually to find out which one is down and which one is not.

 

I hope this will improve player experience and cause less disruption than relying on a single server. Thank you for your patience.

[weaveR]

Oh cool did NODEDEPLOY hand out another mirror server for free?

 

Too bad CnCNet doesn't let you choose the server anymore but it'll still be good to know there's redundancy.

[hifi]

It wasn't a NodeDeploy server that had networking issues. Our setup used our testing server as the CnCNet 5 live server for a long time. Our NodeDeploy server is now linked together with it.

[Myg]

Great work!