On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 10:50:38AM +0200, Kari Pahula wrote: > Restarting crossfire-server will cause any remote players to have their > connection abrubtly broken and to lose any progress that they've had since > their logon. That's not quite what I'd call a smooth upgrade.
I don't know if you are upstream yourself, or if upstream is likely to accept large patches from you, but there is a real solution to this problem. I'd say the problem really is that you cannot upgrade your maps without the players being disconnected. First of all, I point out that you will want the newly installed maps to be usable, so not restarting the server because there are still players on it is not acceptable. There are some options to really solve this: - If you can change the server so that it can use the new maps without a restart, that would obviously solve the problem. You can either do this by always looking on disk, so the new maps are found when needed, or in the way inetd does it, by rereading config files at SIGHUP. - You can also do it like ssh: every connection is forked off when established. Then when the server restarts, the connections continue to exist. If you need clients to talk to each other, then this is probably not an option. It also won't work if existing clients need the new maps. - The coolest approach IMO (but probably not the least error-prone) is to use execv's behaviour of keeping fd's open. It is a huge security design bug that this is the default, but the possibility is nice. ;-) What it means is that you can restart the server without losing your connections. You need to tell the new executable about the open file descriptors (for example via some temporary file). Then if started with a "use this temporary file for state" option, it reads the file descriptors from there and uses them. > Is it reasonable to expect users to expect this behavior on upgrading the > maps? I don't think so, but it's acceptable if fixing it is not feasable. > Would it be enough to put in crossfire-maps description that upgrading maps > will cause the server to restart? It depends on how you think the package will be used. I think in most cases it is better to do the restart, but perhaps you want to add a debconf low priority question if the user really wants this. Then the default is to restart, and people running huge servers which want to keep their clients can use dpkg-reconfigure and manually restart when it is appropriate for them. > At least I think I can safely assume that users will know to expect > that upgrading the crossfire-server package itself to cause the server > to restart. Yes, but even in that case it would be nice if the clients don't get disconnected. ;-) Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html
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