Disconnect Problem On LindenLabs Side Of The Connection!!

This is driving me nuts. I cant do anything in SL because i keep getting disconnected by a message that pops up saying i have been disconnected because of mangled network data. I asked Dan Linden about this and he said it was probably my linksys router. i bypassed the router and connected my comp directly to my modem and i still got this message. i cant change out my modem and i shouldnt need to its working fine. so my only conclusion is that the problem is on the Linden Labs side of the connection. I have come to this conclusion after many tests on my network and after many errors and disconnects while trying to dload the SL program from the SL website. I never get any of these problems from anyother website and how could it be a problem with my network if the problems are showing up while dloading SL from the website? if it realy was my network i would have the same problems with every website i visit and dload from. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG?

By your own argument.. if the problem was with Linden servers, then surely everyone else would be suffering the same? More likely your ISP...

press alt+1 and see whether you are getting packet loss.

I don't think Panther is even getting far enough to use Alt+1

I'm no networking pro, but shouldn't you be able to go to the command line, and try pinging Lindenlabs network? I believe you would be told if any data was being lost during the ping.. not sure how you would go about obtaining an IP to ping though..


Also, are you using a cable or dsl modem?

Update:
"With UDP (Unreliable Datagram Protocol), used by many online games and streaming media applications, it is impossible to use any system tools to assess whether UDP packets are being lost: only the applications themselves have any knowledge of their network usage. The games or applications might tell you whether they consider they are losing packets."


Looks like if packet loss is the problem, there aren't many (if any) tests you could run from your side..


Update again:
Just found this in the Second Life FAQs

Question
have a firewall on my network. Which ports do I need to open to access Second Life?

Answer
The ports that need to be opened are 12020 - 13050. If that range seems to be large, you can limit it to 12020 - 12050 and 13000 - 13050.

The best solution is to allow full connections to the entire Second Life server farm. Each server has its own IP address, and Second Life owns the entire 63.211.139.* IP range in order to add more servers in the future, so your best bet is opening 63.211.139.1 - 254 for future compatibility.


Disregard the port info, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to try pinging one of the IP addresses mentioned above and see what the packet statistics are.


Jimmylee

I have noticed an excessive number of disconnects as well in the new version - I normally get disconnected pretty regularly, something that has never occured in a year of playing SL. In my case there is no message, I am suddenly just frozen, though oddly I still get sign on and off messages and IMs. I defintely think something is up with this particular upgrade.

Cristiano

Cristiano,

I'm having the same exact problem you've documented with the advent of 1.3. I've posted in Technical Issues, and submitted bug reports. Still no response yet.

-Bone

As an FYI, there are usually a couple of different kind of network problems that users seem to occasionally have when connecting to Second Life:

The first class of problem is that a connection to a server mysteriously drops - this is the sort of thing that Christiano sees. This is usually because some routers have a limited number of NAT connections that they can keep between your computer and different servers. When they run out, what they do is drop one of the older connections. Since Second Life makes a connection to each individual simulator, plus the server that processes IMs and sign ons, what probably happened is that the router decided to drop the NAT connection to that server.

This problem can often be exacerbated by running peer-to-peer file sharing software, such as Bittorrent or Kazaa - these make connections to dozens of machines simultaneously. If things were working fine for you, and suddenly you are having problems, you might want to see if you're running anything that's keeping network connections open.

There's a good tool called TCPView that can help you track these down, although you have to know what you're doing to understand it.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/tcpview.shtml


The second class of problem is the kind that Panther Farber is encountering - in this particular case, what is happening is that the data that is being sent down from our servers to you is being scrambled somehow. If we detect that this is the case, we pop up a dialog that tries to explain what's going on.

We have not fully tracked down the source of these problems. It seems to happen to specific individuals only. At least a couple of instances of this problem have been tracked down to hardware-related issues - cheaper off-brand routers have been known to cause this problem. It's also possible that various faulty network hardware, or buggy software (maybe a buggy software firewall) could also cause this problem.

If you do experience this problem, the only thing that I could suggest for now is:
a) Reboot as much of your network hardware between you and your ISP as possible.

b) Experiment with temporarily removing any routers/firewalls to see if it makes a difference.

c) Wait a few minutes before trying to log back in. It may be possible that whatever is causing the problem could stop once the connection has timed out, and a device clears its internal state.

- Doug

I have to say I've been having this problem as well, a lot. Oddly enough there are two things that seemed to fix it for me.

One was rewiring my home network to use a software-based firewall distribution of Linux on a spare PC I had kicking around. This works just fine. Not a problem since setting it up.

The second was to use a build of 1.2.12 that I had been given by Doug Linden. He said there was nothing that should have fixed these problems, as it was simply intended to report more information back to LL and allow a debugging of the problem, but I never got a version for 1.3.1/2. I had gone back to my router (A compUSA branded cheapo) and had been fine, but once 1.3.x came around, I was back to in excess of 30 crashes per night trying to connect. Sometimes. Not always. Just... sometimes.

I don't know why the debug build worked, but it just -did-. And it worked well, even if a little more slowly than the standard software. Most people aren't going to have the resources I did to dedicate an entire computer or the expense of $50 or more on a router/gateway that may or may not solve the problem, so I really hope that LL focuses a little more on just what changed in that debug build of 1.2.12 that made things work for me. In general they've been good about responding to problems, but this one can get absolutely maddening when you're affected by it.

All of the code that went into that debug build was rolled into 1.3.0 - it's the basis for the current bad network detection code.

My only current hypothesis on why it reduced your crash count is simply that the fact that running slower because of the logging was keeping bad things from happening (reducing upstream/downstream network traffic or packet rate?).

In any case, you may want to try running with network message logging on, which is what made that debug build slower. Add the '-log' option to your Second Life shortcut to turn it on. The log data should get shipped up in crash reports, too.

- Doug

this is getting realy annoing i cant do anything in SL because of this problem. Sometimes i log in ok only to have this message pop up a minute later. one would think that SL would be able to handle this problem and keep going instead of getting disconnected and having to log in again. Why doesnt SL just ignore the "mangled" data and keep going? if the data is vital why doesnt SL just request it agian? why cant it be more redudant so it doesnt get this problem every single time?!!!
why do we have to quit SL to log in agian? one would think that getting disconneted would take you back to the login screen!! why doesnt SL do this?