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Author	Thread Statistics \| Show CCP posts - 8 post(s)
Richecko University of Caille Gallente Federation 10	Posted - 2016.10.21 23:38:10 - [1] - Quote Thanks CCP Falcon and CCP Explorer for engaging us customers in a discussion and for your well crafted messages explaining what you knew of the cause, degree of impact, and when you learned it made the Eve Forums unavailable to some customers using alternative services. Thanks for letting us know it was an issue with one of your vendors and who the vendor was. The topic - of "Can Eve be made better when this happens? Can a repeat of this be avoided?" is worth a few words. The answer as some hints in this thread have pointed out is yes and it is worth investigating if this kind of Internet disruption becomes common rather than a one-time event. [1] One person pointed out that by using a hosts file the translation between DNS names, and IP Addresses can be done by your PC without needing to access a DNS server on the Internet for the purpose. This is a legacy technology from back before the DNS was invented and it still works. The limitations are (1) the customer needs a list of what DNS names the software from CCP needs to contact (2) the configuration of what IP addresses they correspond to can't be remotely updated and so can go out of date and create a configuration that is hard for tech support to remotely troubleshoot. It's far from an ideal solution in today's modern Internet, but it can be a quick fix that requires no code or infrastructure changes on CCPs part in case of a future DNS service outage. All CCP would have to to do is test the configuration works and then publish a block of text to paste into your hosts files with a list of the domain names the launcher uses, and the IP Addresses they want you to use. If you, the reader of this post, have hacker tendencies, you can learn more about hosts files here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/ During this outage, IP addresses corresponding to a domain name could be looked up at ipaddress.com, a site that who used a DNS service not under attack. That site may or may not be available in a future attack. http://ipaddress.com When DNS was unavailable, the launcher failed in an extremely basic way (no graphics, just a plain white window with text error messages) and that probably should be improved. During a DNS outage when CCPs other systems are working, URLs in the launcher could go to forum pages by IP address, not DNS name, thereby allowing CCP to communicate with customers using the client and their servers even if DNS is unavailable. i.e. http://87.237.34.103/.... not http://forums.eveonline.com/... [2] Another capsuleer pointed out CCP IT Operations could change their infrastructure to have contracts with multiple DNS providers and set things up to be able to switch which DNS provider they use (CCP noted that they now buy DNS service from a company named Dyn). The post alluded to some of the IT management complexity that is introduced if you design your infrastructure that way and that it results in larger operational costs. Appreciating this requires developing expertise in the IT Operations specialty area of managing DNS servers. [3] Software can communicate between any pair of IP addresses on the Internet without using the DNS. Another solution to avoiding an outage in this case is available to CCP because they use custom software for their client and server. For Eve Online, they are not dependent on a browser or other 3rd party software like a website is. The Launcher and Eve Client could be modified to include hard-coded IP addresses to try and contact for various functions as a last resort in case DNS was not working. This requires close coordination between Development and Operations to ensure that any hard-coded IP addresses correspond to currently operational and maintained servers. The Eve client is regularly updated, and updates are mandatory, so developing process to manage this is well within CCP's technical and organizational engineering capabilities. Keep up the good work CCP and thanks for all the efforts to make the software and it's supporting infrastructure better over time.

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