[TI] GE 1 down

Am I the only player waiting for GE 1 server to come online?
It was down for ~3 hours on June 9 (could be a day +/-), then today started to be very unstable and unresponsive, working in an on-and-off fashion at around midnight server time.
Then, at 2 AM server time it just died... To make sure it is not my side problem, I used another ISP and even online traceroute and ping tools, which have shown GE 1 is indeed down.

Anyone else having problems getting on GE 1?
If yes, when can we expect it in fit shape and running smoothly?


Thanks in advance.

 

yup i think it is dead, i try to switch to ge1 but it cant load it.

 

Thanks for the confirmation.

I wander how no one else asked about it, GE 1 is completely down for about 7 hours now (at the time of posting this message).

 

Hi, I've just successfully logged into that server. If you are still experiencing issues then you should contact support.


Regards

 

Are we talking Global Europe 1 or Germany 1?

 

We are talking about Global Europe 1, but NOT Germany 1...
And I confirmed the problem with few people in chat on Great Britain 1.

 

hmm odd, I just logged in on my admin account with no issues. What ISP you all using?

 

Well, that's odd because I can log into GB 1, US East 1, GE 6 and GE 7. The online checking tools I am using also show these servers as 'pingable' and their port 80 as open.
IOW: these servers are accessible by me, my ping tools and by the online ping/traceroute tools:

• us1.darkorbit.bigpoint.com (port 80 open/ping OK)
• gb1.darkorbit.bigpoint.com (port 80 open/ping OK)
• int13.darkorbit.bigpoint.com (port 80 open/ping OK)
• int14.darkorbit.bigpoint.com (port 80 open/ping OK)

But no luck for GE 1 and www.darkorbit.com (these are the aliases for the same host):

• int1.darkorbit.bigpoint.com (port 80 closed/port 80 times out/ping FAILS)

I'm using the same ISP i was using 1 day ago, 1 year ago, 5 years ago...
Are you sure that GE 1 is completely functional for you? Can you ping that server?
This all started like 3 days ago, then the server was OK or 2 days, now it's down for more than 8 hours.
I would suspect about my ISP and even online tools that certainly use completely different ISP (and accessing the servers from different geographical area)... but as I posted above - only GE 1 of 5 tested servers shows down - not only for me but for the online test tools as well. :-/

Naturally, I would like to see more reports about successful logins to GE 1 as this situation completely drives me nuts.

--------
EDIT:
GE 1 just started working. Online test tools also show port 80 as open and ping it OK, just as my own console tools.
But boy... this was one long downtime. :-/

 

I'm still trying to make sense of what happened, because what I found really confuses me. And I mean - really...
Facts that I have are:

• GE 1 was the only inaccessible out of 5 servers I tried.
• Consistent results between 4 ISPs: I used my usual one and G3 mobile ISP, plus sites hosting online tools for ping/traceroute/portscan. One such site was Europe based, the other one was based in North America. That was verified with IP address locator.
• Report in this thread, and also reports from 3 persons in a chat on GB 1 server about GE 1 being down.

Needless to say, traceroute output was pretty much different between my local 'tracert' command and the output given by the online tools.
The European server had faster ping time than my computer, while North American was slowest, only slightly slower for US East 1 than my computer.

But here comes the part that troubles me the most - after I managed to get onto the server, the history of all 7 auctions (while the server was unreachable for me) were as usual for the respective hours. This means people were on the server and bidding and playing...

Then I remembered that not so long ago, DO servers were subject to DDoS attack. Looking at traceroute outputs, they contain hosts like:

Code:

unknown.prolexic.com [72.52.48.109]

This suggests DO is using Prolexic service for stopping DDoS attacks, probably since the incident. Of 5 tested servers, it seems traffic goes through Prolexic filtering only for GE 1, GB 1, and GE 7.
Also, Prolexis is partly automated, partly human expertise (i.e. a live person). And there could be a problem in either part...
For some reason, the automated part of the Prolexic system probably recognized my legal traffic as well as traffic from online tools as BotNet attempts to access GE 1 server. I suspect about that because now I can see that traceroute stopped at one of "unknown.prolexic.com" hosts.

Could this theory be correct? My concerns go for future incident as I suspect that 3.5 hours downtime from 4 days ago had the same reason - no one here posted about it but above mentioned players in chat were aware of that downtime as well.

How can I check if my ISP occasionally becomes detected as part of BotNet by Prolexis (or its misconfiguration)?
I would like to hear possible players' as well as admins' opinions and experience before being brickwalled for a week or two...


Thanks in advance for any feedback.

 

Looks like you have a good grip of some issue or other there. I'm afraid it's beyond my expertise and also beyond the scope of forums help topics. Can I ask you to send the information you have, the traceroutes etc, to support.

Thanks in advance

NM

 

Thanks for the suggestion and leaving this thread open.

Since then I didn't have any problems so have decided to wait with contacting support, but I have some additional info. Perhaps it can be useful to explain the problem even further.

I have been monitoring GE 1 server since the first period of inaccessibility on Jun 6. When It came back (for me, at least) on Jun 12, the server was not responding to pings even though it worked, just like on Jun 6. Other tools were also unable to ping it, though I am using ping on a regular basis to estimate possible lag.

Now what is important to emphasize is that the other two, what appears as Prolexic protected servers (GB 1 and GE 7) were responding to ping, their traceroute had only two hosts belonging to prolexic.com domain - presumably the entering and leaving points for traffic filtering - and were 9 hops long.
When GE 1 became alive for me (on Jun 12), its route was 14 hops. Couple of days later, the route was changed and shortened to 9 hops, and ping started working again. Needless to say, all extra 5 hops belonged to prolexic.com domain and were probably the source of the problems because of unnecessary round trips.
Here, I missed the opportunity to take the snapshot of 14 hops invalid route and send it to support. But since it was radically changed, it is safe to assume someone noticed and corrected the problem.

You may now close as the server is working fine since the original report.


Cheers.

EDIT: I just realized the route is now only 8 hops for GE 1, GB1 and GE 7; one less hop...

 

Hi bisphenol,

Since the server appears to be working fine for you once again i shall close the thread.

I would like to thank you though for extensively looking into and investigating what may have caused these issues for you. If you do experience similar problems on this server in the future, may i ask that you send any data you collect to support so that they can investigate it further and look into the probable causes to the issues.

Best,

~Ddraig