Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

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delinquent
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Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by delinquent »

http://wiki.armagetronad.org/index.php? ... enge_Board

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGyOaCXr8Lw

Welcome to any epic.LAN players who are joining us for the first time. Good luck!
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delinquent
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by delinquent »

I've been thinking about resources.

We've been building resources based on ladle iteration for a while, but a number of servers never seem to get updated. Would it not be more efficient to rename each ladle server "Ladle - (owners location)" and rename the resources to "ladle_authorities_current.cfg"?

This approach allows server owners to disappear temporarily without significant consequences to the community. If a server owner doesn't get to update their machine in time, that server remains available to the competition regardless.
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aP|Nelg
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by aP|Nelg »

delinquent wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2020 12:18 am We've been building resources based on ladle iteration for a while, but a number of servers never seem to get updated. Would it not be more efficient to rename each ladle server "Ladle - (owners location)" and rename the resources to "ladle_authorities_current.cfg"?
Are you suggesting not to change file names ? RINCLUDE caches configuration files, so that won't work.

Off topic but personally, I find it a bit silly to update the ladle server before the new ladle authorities is up. You end up in a situation where you have the current server name but if the server owner forgets to update their server later, it would use the old authorities (or perhaps none at all).
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delinquent
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by delinquent »

Does the server hold the config in memory whilst being used, or does it consult the file each time a player logs in? If the former, we could potentially solve that issue by creating an inaccessible file in place of the authority file, forcing the server to fetch a copy every round. It's just a few kb, so it's not like we're hammering the resource host. Bit of a hack, but if it works...?
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by Z-Man »

I think the system first downloads the file to disk, then reads it from there. So if the file is not writable, nothing will work.

What would work is wrapping the server in a script with a loop (everybody does that already, yeah?) and deleting the automatic resource directory every time.

Or, better, in case something with the resource servers goes wrong, just moving the automatic resource directory contents to some other place, and in the configuration, first load the resources from there, then again from the repository. So

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

while true; do
    cp -rlf resource/automatic config/oldautomatic
    rm -rf resource/automatic/volatile

    ./armagetronad-dedicated
done
(I'm running my servers directly from the build directory, so the resource and config folders are right there with them.)

and in the config

Code: Select all

INCLUDE oldautomatic/Desolate/ladle/authorities.cfg
RINCLUDE Desolate/ladle/authorities.cfg(http://resource.armagetronad.net/resource/Desolate/ladle/authorities.cfg)
Combine that with a lowish DEDICATED_IDLE so the files in oldautomatic aren't too stale.

I think I'm going to start to use this scheme even with numbered authorities, that makes the time window for setting the servers up larger. Maybe I'll put all the files treated that way into a 'volatile' subfolder of the automatic resources and only delete that.
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by delinquent »

I like this idea better. In fact, it might be appropriate to just write an external script to download the new authorities, say every ten minutes. A ten minute propagation time for new perms seems admissible, I think.
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by aP|Nelg »

delinquent wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2020 2:07 pm I like this idea better. In fact, it might be appropriate to just write an external script to download the new authorities, say every ten minutes. A ten minute propagation time for new perms seems admissible, I think.
10 minutes seems a bit low to me, I was under the impression that it's better to post authorities before the day of the tournament.

Anyway, a slight problem is, how about old authorities? Say you take an authority off the config for some reason, it will still retain the previous access level because it was not overwritten and it remains in RAM if you don't restart the server or handle it otherwise.
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by syllabear »

We have basically had the exact same discussion about authorities for pickup games on the discord about 1-2 months ago. I think the consensus was to use some kind of external script to force new downloads of the auth files.
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delinquent
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by delinquent »

aP|Nelg wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2020 7:04 pm Anyway, a slight problem is, how about old authorities?
Handle that in-script. Compare new authorities, and any that exist in the old file but not in the new, explicitly reset their access level to 15.
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Re: Ladle 119 (1st November 2020)

Post by blondie »

gz txa, ggs everyone!
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