Zones wont work! please read this

[h37lion]

Hello, this is a subthread of 'i need help with 1 or 2 things'

I run boot5zones.win9x.bat and it does its thing, no errors..
i set up everything as correctly as i could find documentation to instruct me to do... i go into eq, and my server is LOCKED. I opened loginserver.ini and set the variable of LOCKED=false

I was told that an absence of zones will make the server stay locked.

What am I doing wrong? How do I go about fixing this... I've tried everything.

[Shawn319]

do you still have the 5 or so zone.exe boxes it opened? if you close them its the same as never opening them.

[h37lion]

yes, I've left them open all day pretty much.

The only thing that's opened/closed (a handful of times or more)
is eq.

What things should I check/do to ensure that the zone servers are up? because that is what I believe to be the problem

Update:
I've realized that the zoneservers are NOT up. I've loaded boot5zones.win9x.bat to load the zoneservers... I even once tried specifying zone names in there

start zone9x misty 127.0.0.1 .. blah blah
didn't work either, of course.. but didn't cause a different error. I'm connecting via minilogin, and connecting to gotfrags via eqw works fine (all for a little lag), so how to put up the zoneservers exactly? (I seem to not be able to figure it out.. and am babbling so I'll end it here)

[Zeitgeist]

you should just launch 5 blank zones and watch their boxes to see if they connect ok to the world. Is this happening?

[h37lion]

Actually, after hours of 'debugging' to release some cpu power, I realized that the key (in a lot of cases) is patience. If I load up the zoneservers, it just takes a minute or so for it to connect.. I didn't know this before.. but I believe it would be a valuable item added to some faq somewhere. I'm actually thinking of adding it to my website, just to help some people out who may be having the same problem.

I also discovered something else..
as noticed in my previous posts, I was attempting to achieve a local non-lan offline eqemu server connection to myself.. which before that I read was quite possible.. And after a few little tests, I realized that my zoneservers wont connect themselves to my worldserver unless I sign on (im on dialup unfortunately) to the net and let it connect itself. Then I can sign off and play for hours.

Wierd thing is, I don't see how this relates.. probably in the coding somewhere , where it looks for an online hostname or uses some type of net-based name resolution.. no idea =]

but now, I've tried 4 seperate clean installations of eqemu and i've rebuilt my database just to test out this theory... and it is what fixed the initworldserver error I was having.

I'm hoping this helps other people as well, and possibly helps the developers fine tune some features of this already highly accomplished emu.

Thanks for your help everyone

[strychn]

the zones dont take as long to load up etc. on winnt.

as to your other problem, i dont get it.
if you are using the loopback address(127.0.0.1) and you are just setting it up for yourself, you shouldn't have any probs.
if you look at the networking code, it's straight forward and does nothing special.

and using dial-up, wouldn't you have a dynamic ip and have to edit your files if you were using an internet ip?

weird...:p