Multiple Servers on the Same Network Allowing Players to Connect

[trevius]

Well, I changed it to port 9000 and set it up as the only server running now and it works great. So, I guess that confirms that using anything other than port 9000 as the setting for TCP/IP connections will NOT work. Good to know for future reference I guess lol. Not that it would happen often heh.

[Aramid]

Just to clarify, it was AndMetal that wrote the Wiki on installing on Debian Linux.

[trevius]

Oops, sorry about that lol! I didn't mean to mis-credit someone. Thanks for clarifying that!

[John Adams]

Happily I have stumbled upon this thread. Occasionally I get a wild hair and try and setup a World server on one box with MySQL - then I try setting up 2 Zone Servers each with dynamic/static settings. I am hunting around for a "plain english" HowTo on this, since it's apparently not straight forward.

I have a C:\EQEmu folder with all maps, quests, and perl installed in all 3 locations.

I have the eqemu_config.xml the same on all 3 boxes, with the exception of the port ranges for the 2 zone servers (7000-7100, and 8000-8100).

I have 2 launchers configured; 1 called zones, which boots 50 dynamic zones. The other called cities, which boots all the city and noobie zones statically.

I fire up World on Box A and wait for it to finish.
I fire up eqlaunch.exe zones on Box B, nothing.
I fire up eqlaunch.exe cities on Box C, nothing.

I go back to Box A, fire up eqlaunch zones and all 50 dynamic zones launch fine. /boggle

So, back to the Wiki I go - in hopes that someone wrote anything about how to configure the xml to work properly.

Any ideas?

[Aramid]

John, even when you get it to work, which you will, here's the rub. If a zone crashes, it will reboot Dynamically using the next highest port number available even if it was static before. So, if one of your cities crashes, it will reboot possibly on a different launcher and no one can access it until you reboot the system because it may now be on a port that is not redirected to it's original server. Best just to have a World Server and 1 zone server at this point.
That way all zone ports are on the one server and it won't cause as much of a problem.

[John Adams]

Egads, that's terrible. The design concept is great, and hopefully someone finds some time to fix it. Clustering/Balancing is all the rage these days.

Thanks for the info. I won't bother for now then. If the server gets busy, I'll move it to a physical box - although while I was running the Abyss, it was on a pretty tiny VM (512mb) with 20-30 players at a time. I never heard about lag, only that I nerfed something I shouldn't have.

[trevius]

If you or anyone else is curious about more details on this issue and on how to set it up in general, you can find it here:

http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=25052

This problem is a pretty major one IMO and I would love to see it corrected at some point. In most cases though, the major limiting factor in server performance is upload speed.

The main reason I would love to have multiple zone servers is to get 1 or 2 of my heaviest zones moved to their own dedicated box just for them. I think it would increase stability on both PCs and help the server overall.

Honestly, to me, I don't think this would be a very hard thing to fix. But, I am not much of a coder (not at all really), so I can't do something about it myself or I would.

The sad thing is that everything is already there for this to work! All it needs is 1 or 2 seemingly minor changes to make it actually useful. If it ever does get fixed, I would gladly write a detailed wiki on how to set it up.