Tutorial Upbeat Giraffe - FAQ

for windows auto crash restart: google programs such as: 'Restarter', 'Restart on Crash', 'Application Manager', etc ( I cant provides links atm)

After some testing Ive discovered some things about dungeon id.
Most importantly, its broken into 2 parts.
655 which is the spawn planet id
32-35 which are sections of the world within the planet 655

32 is any player placed tiles (includes dirt if you replace it, and empty spaces eg removed tiles) - building mode
33 is the spawn point - spawn protection
34 is ??
35 is the open world or untouched player tiles (anything without a background tile such as grass, dirt, trees, open caves etc) - world protection

so for building protection it would be 65532, etc

Im sure this isnt 100% accurate but its as close as i can get.

 

I'm currently trying my third time to host a server and, despite the stable update and all the changes, I'm not really finding it any easier. I tried multiplay first, that was awful. They are severely under educated on how Starbound works and could not help me at all, their tools are barebones and they overcharge for poor performance and customer support. Now I'm trying to figure out how to use the /settileprotection command. It worked at first then started feeding me an error randomly that it 'Failed' to protect the tiles. It works some times, doesn't others and nothing seems to cause it or help it. We got a stable update and still, no real means to protect our servers?... It's been over a year, right? September 2014, if I'm not mistaken. That's a hell of a long time to ignore the online portion's issues with hackers and server maintenance.

I can expand on settile, iamhats. 65532 is player placed blocks. 65535 is non-player placed blocks. The command affects whatever world you're on when you use it and does not protect wall tiles. That is, tiles that are in the backdrop. I turned protection on right before it stopped working randomly and I was still able to break the backdrop.

 

I've tried every which way in order to get my upbeat Giraffe server working. I checked my forwarded ports on my router again(and again). I added an exception to my windows firewall to every program on any type of connection to freely use starbound's default port, I've disabled upnp, I tried both 32 and 64 bit applications, I even made the server specify the static local ip manually. Nothing seems to work. I think there is something wrong with the server executable because I was talking to a friend who was having the same issue. Only a few weeks ago I was running the unstable version of the server just dandy. I'm not quite sure what it is, Some run the server just fine (Relatively, still a lot of crashes) and others can't seem to get it to communicate with clients. If anyone has any suggestions i'm willing to hear them.

 

Stop assuming that the executable is bug, try only on 32 or 64bits version, reset your config fileand try 1 modification at a time, search for what you did wrong.

 

Going to go on a mild tirade because I see far too many posts and threads regarding "server broken omg ports forwarded".

Nothing has really changed in the way Starbound handles connections as far as I can tell. If it was working before and now it isn't, it's likely due to your network not being configured the way it should be for how you expect it to work, some fat fingering in configuration files/commands run, or just overlooking mistakes because you perceive that nothing could have gone wrong in a relatively straight forward process. There's also a multitude of changes you may or may not have made to your network devices and machines since the last update which you forgot about and may or may not need to go through again. Nobody but you can say for sure; every server and network configuration is a little different.

Mistakes like this happen all the time and unless you can provide solid evidence (packet captures, detailed bug reports, error/exception messages etc.) that you didn't make a mistake and the problem must lie in the game code, no developer or technical resource is going to take your vague request for help seriously. Starbound devs already have your money and are barely supporting multiplayer. Any server administrators here are just volunteering their time and would likely rather spend it helping someone that can be helped rather than banging their head against the desk trying to help someone that can't help themself.

If you don't consider yourself a technical person, don't expect providing a service (game hosting) to be simple or expect help from people who are.
If you're easily frustrated and don't consider this a learning opportunity, for your own sanity, delete any files called starbound_server from you computer.

I'm not defending the state of the server functionality in Starbound. It's a hot mess and incredibly frustrating to maintain and run, but there's pretty clearly no wide spread major issue causing people to time out while connecting to your server.

If you're looking for a more stable multiplayer sandbox experience, go check out Terraria (insanely solid game client since release) or Minecraft.

 

I've already done all of those things. It's not as much as a wild assumption as you might think.[DOUBLEPOST=1423173489][/DOUBLEPOST]

I work as an IT guy. I configure networks for a living. I by far have never had as much of an issue now as I am having with starbound. The whole system is sloppily executed. For example, the file hierarchy is unnecessarily convoluted, the file "Starbound_server.config" isn't the actual file that's used to declare server parameters. The main client and the server share the same configuration file for some arbitrary reason. The list goes on about faultiness of the server files in general. Currently, i'm going to test ruining it on one of my linux servers to see if that resolves the issue. If it doesn't work there, then I give up. I definitely can't recommend this game in it's current state, even after a year of supposedly constant updates, it's still got a whole slew of bugs that are unrectifiable.

 

It's got to be a software issue.

 

There is no "Starbound_server.config" anymore... It sounds like you have a mix of the old and new server clients.

Completely delete your Starbound folder and reinstall, then try again.

 

all i get when i start the server is Error: UniverseClient: Join failed! Error connecting to 'my ip:21025 '(NetworkException) cannot connect to [ipv4]my ip:21025: The operation completed successfully.ant then the server command closes

 

Nope that didn't work. I just ended up putting my hosting computer in the DMZ and now it's working fine. There is some odd issue with the server software that's not wanting to recognize that my ports are open. Every other diagnostic test I run, internal and external says the my ports are forward and that my firewall has an exception. Hopefully what ever the error may be, gets patched soon. Running a server in DMZ isn't most secure thing in the world.

 

If it works when you put your local IP on the DMZ then there's something wrong with your network configuration, not the application.

Like I said, I'm not defending the state of the game but your complaints regarding it in your previous post have little if anything to do with people not being able to connect to your server.

Rather than telling us you're an IT guy, which is basically like saying you're a doctor, giving nobody any insight as to what you know besides maybe basic human anatomy, write out in detail why it is you believe there's something up with the server binary that would cause it to block incoming connections.

The fact that you see port 21025 open on a tool is less than half the picture. I'm glad you got it working, but yes you're right having your local machine on a DMZ is not best practice.

I'm not saying it's impossible there's an issue with the game handling network connections or taking a condescending tone towards you, which depending on your personality you may be interpreting this post as while reading it. I'm just saying at this point, you've only given bits and pieces of information about an issue that I personally wouldn't spend time investigating or attempting to reproduce. And that all is not directed solely at you, but to anyone here trying to get help but not providing the necessary information to get it. It's like calling 911 and then not giving the dispatcher your address.[DOUBLEPOST=1423220307][/DOUBLEPOST]

You appear to be reading from the wrong log or the wrong section of the log. That looks like output from the client failing to join a server.

 

While it's nothing groundbreaking, I added a small guide on how I have a jazzed up starting area on my server.

 

Added some more questions.

 

I like where things are going in terms of admin commands and powers, but unfortunately it is still very limited for us server owners. I'm trying to use the incredibly awkward tile protection system to create a "builder" group of people, which unfortunately means they would also need to have admin powers. You noted a way for people to bypass the protection - is there any way for admins to do this other than turning off the protection altogether? The biggest piece of the puzzle is allowing only certain people to build in the sanctioned worlds.

 

Hello,

For settileprotection, it seems to cover almost the whole planet? Anyway around that?

Never mind it appears that one is for player bricks and one is for spawned bricks

Even if you protect what you build though.. they can build around it in the empty spaces. I made a small spawn house.. they cant break it, but they can wrap it in blocks

 

Heya there,
"Shutting down world CelestialWorld" while normal, at times turns of one of the biggest issues with multiplayer at the moment, that is the server unloading worlds with players still inside (causing them to crash and the server networking to go mad end up on crash / hang up process). This is sadly still present on unstable and devs only say "you'll need to keep waiting" when it comes to fixes.

The only thing i can confirm they fixed on unstable is the ban command and now some sort of "accounting" on the config file to allow user/pass logins, the password setting for guests/admin is gone, you can now create admins account and still allow guests, or create one admin and guest account and share those details.

More info on problems (specially on linux servers):

• Players with high-tier customized ships are unable to join a server at times, such save files are around 5MB (when you join a server you actually upload your shipworld to it), that's the reason of networking problems as well, sometimes you are just unable to join because the server will timeout while trying to upload your shipworld, other times while you can enter, the server networking gets messy (this is more common with more players, as there is flood of data).
• Beware of Dungeons and the Outpost! While testing the server with less than 5 players, everything was fine, till we started to party up and go do quests on outpost and missions, when we did that, server started crashing. This is one idea of other server owners as well that the instancing present on Outpost and Missions is not being well handled by the server at times, resulting on crashes.
• Dangerous lua can bypass /admin! This will be one of the biggest security exploits people who run servers with more players will have to face, players can create custom lua to bypass server admin commands, one of the biggest examples is the /settileprotection, things like a switch, or just one interactable object on the world can be exploited to remove its protection, or just bug it out, for example remove gravity of the planet, corrupt the world (making players face a black screen when beam down, most of the times a restart fixes this but we already faced a corrupt world that we had to manually replace backups), etc... Let's hope it's not possible for them to find a way to exploit things like /ban/kick this way.

Please be aware this issues are very, very random and hard to reproduce, they do happen, the own starbound developers are highly frustrated at the same fact of how broken it is, specially when server crashes with no error details (at times one Segfault or just no single error logged at all), thing they said to be fixed on unstable (far the blog post states), however i could still reproduce crashes with no logs on it.

The biggest challenge i face is really the timeout issues, server can last hours and hours of "join failed, timeout while joining" with the process running non-responsive, this is incredibly frustrating and even harder to one auto-restarter to detect this. If someone have a script capable of query the server, would save my life of kill the process dozens of times a day.

 

Updated the question on how to get admin privileges setup on your server. Links to metadept's blog post because why re-word a good answer.

 

Hey Nordan,

Wont grievers be able to lay bricks around the world and make it impossible to get below the surface since 65532 is true? Iva had trouble with that on the spawn planet. Any way to fix it?

 

My starting planet on server 1 and 3 are set to revert anytime the server reboots, which happens at minimum twice a day. As far as I know, people are able to for the most part with some minor annoyances. Tile protection is a little dumb at the moment. But yes, people can put up new blocks but the restart deals with that.

 

Is this done by one of your scripts in the first post?

My provider is NOC (USA) is it possible to use the scripts with them?