good, let us know, and will see if can help, if not can find someone who can, that runs sbbs.

as far as the spike on the tw2002, that can be common when the twgs is in conflict from a connection and internal conflicts with the alien manager and player manager, cause the twgs controls it all. and is the main program and gui for all within it. when you get high usage in nonperserv, then it is in the alien manager definitely. This happens when you have too many aliens for the server to hanlde effeciently. may cause the same thing on the tw2002 too. gotta experiment again.

Well - SBBS is definitely part of the equation. Tested two thousand turns on ZOC connected to the rlogin port directly and it's been behaving flawlessly.

So, somehow ... between ZOC, SBBS and TWGS there's a problem, but only with all three are involved.

Who da’ man, who da’ man!! No, no, wait let me do that again with my tap dancing shoes on… j/k [:o)]

Problem, rexx? Remember it's not zoc or SBBS that's spiking and SBBS works w/ other things.

Well the easiest solution is to just install twgs as 2002 and route around SBBS all together then. That's what most BBSes do so people can directly access the system. If rlogin from zoc to tw2002 doesn't directly cause the problem... then can you setup a packet capture proxy between sbbs and tw2002 and maybe find the offending data?

also there are threads in here that deal with this as well. that deal with the bbs setup and the twgs together, I will try to find them and post them on this thread to see if they help out.

I personally don't use the bbs in front of the twgs or a bbs at all for that matter. but others do and I think they may have a work around that is suitable.

edit for spelling.

Singularity: I don't really want to limit myself to Trade Wars. There are several other old BBS Doors that I loved playing and have running on the SynchroNet BBS and I would like to have them all accessible from the same place, rather than using different ports or hostnames to get to TW versus everything else. If I ever do go public with this, I have a feeling that would segregate TW players from the other players and I'd rather generate as much crossover as possible there. Besides that, I really don't care enough about ZOC to bother, since it works fine with MTelnet or plain-old Windows telnet (and, I'm willing to venture, probably every other telnet client in the world).

I'm not sure what I would use to capture the packets between SBBS and TWGS, any suggestions?

Vulcan: I think it's entirely possible that no one else has run into this, since it only happens with ZOC through SBBS. If it were more universally SBBS or ZOC and not the combination of them both, I would expect someone else to have seen this. I would give even odds that ZOC through another BBS wouldn't have a problem. I did check for similar things before posting, but that was before we know all the facts. If you do find anything, I'd be glad to know.

In all of these tests, SBBS and TWGS have been running on the same host. I've tried connecting from a seperate host, but never seperating the TWGS and SBBS services onto different hosts. I may check into this, later. So ... now that that's all out of the way ... does anyone else feel like testing this on their own system to make sure it can be duplicated by someone other than myself?

Oh, yeah - and thank you guys, again, for helping me track this issue down.

No problem, I have someone checking on the sbbs/twgs/zoc thing for you as well and may have another person on it too, they have had bbs' with sbbs on their servers for a while and have had similar experiences, I hope they will be able to help and let you know something soon. Also thanks for the patience.

I moved the BBS and TWGS permanently to my desktop, since it's online more reliably than my laptop. I am re-installing TWGS on my laptop and I will connect to that from SBBS on my desktop and see if the problem repeats. I would expect the CPU to spike on my laptop, since that is what will be running the tw2002.exe process, but I will monitor both CPUs. Afterwards, I'll try using a telnet gateway instead of rlogin, to see if that has any effect.

quote:Originally posted by CummingsSM

quote:Originally posted by RexxCrow

OK, to me it sounds like is just a plain and simple ZOC vs. SBBS incompatibility issue.
The problem with this theory is that everything else on SBBS works, including the DOS (3.09) version of TW. The problem only comes in when connecting to the TWGS server version of TW.

Edit: Additionally, it is not ZOC or SBBS (or even TWGS) showing 95% CPU utilization, it is tw2002.exe, which is what I find most odd about all of this.

quote:Originally posted by RexxCrow

Your TWGS settings I am assuming are currently all on default, so there should be no issues with them at this point as causing an issue. Everything else is now running on a fresh install, so I doubt it is a database or corruption issue, either. Perhaps you might consider using another helper such as SWATH or ATTAC, of which you could still use REXX scripts with anyways.
I don't use ZOC for rexx scripts or anything else, really - it's ANSI support was better for some things than the windows telnet client or the version of MTelnet I was using. I upgraded to a newer version of MTelnet and it seems to have the best ANSI support, now, so I don't really need ZOC, but I am still miffed by what's going on here.

quote:Originally posted by Vulcan

or uninstall sbbs and try connecting with ZOC on its own, and if the new version still gives problems, try the older one and see if it helps, You said you are running twgs lite right. So you will be limited on what you can do with the games you create. basically no gold features.
Actually - I have TW Gold. TWGS Lite just limits me to 4 nodes. But ZOC directly to TWGS via telnet works (see my previous posts). I have not tried ZOC directly to TWGS via rlogin.

quote:Originally posted by Singularity

So the problem is something that zoc is doing to SBBS which is causing something to TW2002. What if you just rlogin (not telnet) directly to TW2002 w/o SBBS? Maybe it's something in the rlogin code for TW that zoc isn't friendly to.
Dead on. Trying ZOC directly against TWGS rlogin is a good idea - I will do so shortly.

quote:Originally posted by Vulcan

also to rule out the twgs as well set it to telnet in if it is a new enough version to run independent of the sbbs. and see if any connections spike the twgs then as well. this way we can rule out either the twgs or the sbbs as the problem.
I have already tried that test and it seems to work fine.


Forgive my question, I am a bit behind on this thread. You are on SBBS? As in the DOS SBBS system software, or SBBS as in Synchronet?

The reason I ask is I ran SBBS (DOS BBS system) and I run Syncronet SBBS Software.

Thrawn702: Sorry for the confusion - I use SynchroNet (the most current version, 3.13a).

After 445 turns, I was able to duplicate the problem with SynchroNet and TWGS hosted on different systems (i.e., ZOC from computer a to SBBS on computer a via telnet, SBBS on computer a to TWGS on computer b via rlogin). I'm going to set TWGS to telnet and access it through the telnet gateway and see if the problem persists, that way.

Oh wow. So even if TWGS and SBBS are on different computers it still does it. Then it's obviously something that SBBS is sending to TWGS... not just a memory or allocation conflict. For the packet capture idea, just make a simple proxy. Listen to port X, connects out to port Y. Record everything that passes thru and use it as a tunnel.

quote:Originally posted by Singularity

Oh wow. So even if TWGS and SBBS are on different computers it still does it. Then it's obviously something that SBBS is sending to TWGS... not just a memory or allocation conflict.
Indeed. But wait - it gets more interesting. Using a straight telnet gateway (TWGS set up as a telnet server instead of an rlogin server) works fine. I just finished testing it - 3,000 turns with processor usage under 10% the entire time - it does seem (subjectively) to use more processor than usual (on the TWGS host) in this configuration, but it never spiked. So, not only is the problem particular to ZOC, it is also particular to using an rlogin gateway, and probably specific to SBBS's rlogin gateway, in particular.

If I could pass a username into TWGS via telnet, this would be a good workaround, but having to log in twice is annoying. I wonder if SBBS's telnet gateway would let me pipe in a username.

quote:Originally posted by Singularity

For the packet capture idea, just make a simple proxy. Listen to port X, connects out to port Y. Record everything that passes thru and use it as a tunnel.
I get what you're saying, but I don't know any software that does that. If you have some suggestions, I'd be glad to give it a shot. I guess I could use a packet sniffer since my SBBS to TWGS traffic is now going between different hosts, but I don't really have a good way to set one of those up on my consumer grade wireless router's switch. Any clue whether this would work if I put the sniffer on one of the hosts (either the SBBS or TWGS)?

Vulcan: Just a sidebar here. My original setup procedure was based on one someone posted in your forums. http://vulcansforge-online.net:99/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2926&sid=7c50f9be39f0f468f4ebc7b5bff51236. Just found that amusing.

Try Asniffer? If you put it on the TWGS you should capture the traffic just fine.

It's probably something in the rlogin protocol. Maybe the way zoc keeps the connection open or something equally funky.

quote:Originally posted by Singularity

Try Asniffer? If you put it on the TWGS you should capture the traffic just fine.

Asniffer seems to be Etherscan Analyzer, now (http://www.etherscan.com/). I'm setting it up right now.

Edit: Okay ... or not. Launching that program triggered Windows DEP protection, so I think I'll try another one. I've used Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/) before, so I'm going to go with that one.

This looks like a dead end. I see the data back and forth but what I see in Ethereal is exactly what shows up in ZOC.

In this case, I was at the end of a sale and I pressed <enter> to select the suggested prices, the port replied "Agreed! We'll purchase them!" and it froze at the end of that line, without sending the line break character.

I ran it again, this time a few "pauses" into it, and here's what I have in ZOC:

We are buying up to 320. You have 85 in your holds.
How many holds of Fuel Ore do you want to sell [85]?
Agreed, 85 units.

In Ethereal I see the docking sequence text. I reply with an ACK for the received packet, then a data packet with a carriage return line feed ("\r\n"). The server responds with a data packet that says "\r\033[0m\n\033[1;36mAgreed, \033[33m85\033[36m units.\r\033[0m" and I send an ACK for that packet.

The problem is that that packet (the last one from the TWGS server) is incomplete. It should contain a a carriage return line feed and then the next lines of text. When I hit enter, I get that text, which reads as follows:

We'll buy them for 2,053 credits.
Your offer [2,053] ?
FINE, we'll take them, just leave!

Note that my enter, as before, has been read by TWGS into the next prompt. The offery to buy has been delayed by the TWGS into a subsequent packet that was not sent until after I pressed enter (which was a good five minutes after the pause). Also note that it has inserted another pause by not including the the next lines fo text, which should be a Command: prompt (because this port has nothing to sell). When I hit enter again, I get the lines of text that SHOULD have come with the previous packet but didn't, and I also get a re-display of the sector, because TWGS has again read my enter into the next prompt, but this time I got all the text that I should.

So, I don't think this tells us anything new - it's not SBBS dropping data between SBBS and ZOC, it's definitely TWGS dropping data between itself and SBBS. I don't see any clues as to why it's occuring from the packet data.