Offering a monetary reward of at least L$ 5000 for the person who can help.

See this link for my problem, I have yet to get a word from the Lindens for the last 2 days since their last reply and I am completely fed up with it. The person who can provide the solution will recieve a reward from me.

/111/25/51307/1.html

Linden Default Response No. 1.01 : "It's your firewall"

It's ALWAYS your firewall.

It was my firewall when I couldnt connect.

It was my firewall when stuff disappeared from my inventory.

It was my firewall when scripts wouldnt save or compile.

It was my firewall when everything I ever created before 1.5 crashed the client if you edited it in 1.6.

I swear it's actually the only thing on the Lindens tech support script. They probably have a fucking great banner over the customer support desk saying "Remember: It's your firewall"

It was never my firewall. And like I'd run without one anyway? "Yes! I want to play SL! And yes! I want to get hacked within the next 12 seconds, please!"

LOL Kris you are amazing!

Yea, that was the first response I got from them, at the moment, I connected onto SL and got stuck on this *connecting to region* page. People see me logging on and my account is in SL, but..... my game client won't get me into the game world.

I tried with a few alts, none worked and all got stuck at the same screen. I asked a friend to log into my account and she had no problem.

Well look on the bright side, I can actually go do something else while SL is gone.

When this happened to me I just let it sit there for an hour. Eventually I was able to get in. Sorry I can't be of more help.

you mean you let your SL window *connecting* and it just popped thru after a while?

Well, they have been saying "if it gets stuck during login, don't quit or kill the process" for months now... give it a shot.

Aside from that, I know this is not what you want to hear, but it REALLY sounds like it's your firewall. I'm basing this off the fact that others see you connect, but you're not seeing yourself connect. This sounds like some packets aren't making it either from you to LL, or from LL to you. Second life opens several channels of communication between the client and the server, and it could be that one of them isn't making it through. Alternatively, maybe your computer is infested with some industrial-strength malware, so you should consider downloading and running AdAware (http://www.lavasoft.com) just in case. You should do that anyway.

The firewall response is not a brush-off, though. Let's see if we can fix it. First of all, are you running any software firewall software, like ZoneAlarm, McAffee Personal Firewall, Norton Internet Security, Sygate Personal Firewall, or anything else with a name like "Internet Security" or "Personal Firewall"? You can try closing these programs out completely before running SL, although I wouldn't suggest this as a permanent solution. If you have anything like that, though, try running SL without it, and reply here telling us what it is.

Aside from that, it could be a piece of hardware. Please explain how your connection to the internet is set up in a reply here. Are you on a laptop or a desktop? Are you connected to your home network via wireless or an ethernet cable? What's between you and the internet? Who's your ISP? Give us as much information as you know how to... if there's a router device like a Linksys home networking router, tell us what model it is. If you can, trace your ethernet cable from your computer to whatever device it connects to, and tell us what that is. If that device, in turn, connects to something else (like, say, a cable modem or a DSL modem), tell us what model that is. Any one of these steps can be dropping important packets.

Also, give some information here about when the problem started, what might have changed (say, was it right after 1.6 was released?), etc. The more information we have, the more likely we can guess what's wrong.

I don't have any personal firewalls running as I just reformatted my comp and did not install any security software (and i just said this in public, doh)

anyways, I am connected to the internet via DSL. I have an Asus P4PE motherboard with an on board LAN card. Directly plugged in is my comtrend CS-500s DSL modem and directly to my phone jack. I don't think there is any hardware firewall and I am the only computer connected to my LAN

My problems started abruptly ~3 days ago. It just..... started. I did not install any new software or did any updates, just lived my life out as usual, and suddenly, bam, I got stuck here. I have no idea what caused this problem and I used yo have IE's firewall turned on before and it worked fine. There was no changes in setting which is why this totally stumped me.

I am in Macau, China and my ISP is CTM. It is a Portuguese telecom company and I called them to make sure SL's addresses weren't blocked at HQ. Things checked out ok.

Please ask for more info about my connections and such, I know I missed some details.

I couldn't find any info on "CS-500s", but I did find a similar name, the CT-500... is that what your modem is?



Uh oh. The fact that you're in China means all bets are off. They block lots of stuff just because they don't like it, on a country-wide level. I don't have much experience or knowledge about the blocks, but do you think this could be what's going on? As far as I understand it, things are added to the block list on a daily basis... lots of web pages, of course, but also SMS, IM services, and other protocols. Blocking can be inconsistent because it takes time to get all of China's backbone routers to add a new block. I don't mean to just push you off, but it could be that your country has decided to block SL's protocol entirely.

ah yes, sorry about that it is CT-500s.

well today I was able to log into SL for 6 hours before problems started again, so now, i am sure it is not my ISP blocking traffic, but more of a localized problem. I am unable to log in after my connection to SL lagged out after a while.

As for more info, check the link above.

Try replacing your network card. It sounds to me the onboard nic is failing or getting flakey. They are cheap and it's always handy to have an extra one if it isn't the problem. When you replace it, be sure to disable the onboard nic in the bios to test.

Your symptoms are classic firewall, you can send out but you can't recieve. If you have no firewalls installed then you have to look at hardware.

Since 1999, Macau has been a SAR of the People's Republic of China, which means Special Administrative Region. Under the terms of the 1987 treaty where Portugal agreed to return Macau to China, the region has a high degree of autonomy except in areas of defense and diplomacy.

Amnesty International, University of Melbourne's Internet International, and Dynamic Internet Technology, Inc. report that site blocking practices do not extend to Macau or to another SAR, Hong Kong.

Dontcha love it when troubleshooting and politics are one and the same?

Macau is one of those special autonomus regions like Hong Kong, it was a Portugise colony that was reverted back to China in 1999 and is basically independant (at least on paper) for the next 45 years.

You need to contact your ISP and ask them specifically if bans from China affect you. Although you have a Portugise company as an ISP, their feed may be affected by blocks in the pipe comming into them. Its unlikely but a possibility.

hehe, one note to that, with all the las vegas casinos opening here, i think my ISP will find themselves in a LOT of legal troubles if they blocked sites or services.

oh... and one filed by me if that ever does occur

anyways, i will try to get a new networking card. any suggestion on which one to get? or does any 10/100 ethernet card will work?

Get something with a Realtek or 3com chip -- that way, you shouldn't have to worry about losing drivers in the future. (Realtek is cheaper, like $4 for a NIC.)

I can't really offer any specific recommendations myself as I haven't ever had a problem with a nic card be it a $5 special or a $30 branded one. Someone else may be able to recommend one card over another. All the ones I use nowdays are onboard ones.

alright, i got a realtek lan card and just installed it, however SL still has the same problem. As i am not behind a router, what went wrong?

i love 3com's nic's, have a dirt old one on my other machine , and it still works flawless.

My onboard lan on other is pretty bizarre , it litterally hiccupps sometime, downloading 1500kb/s hicc... 1kb/s (for 1-2 sec) ... hic 1500kb/s again, tried another nic problem go away ( i dont like onboard lan/soundcards that much ^^)

I was able to ping that region.

However I am 100% sure, even 110% sure it is not my ISP as I was able to patch through yesterday for 6 hours. If my ISP banned SL, theres no way that could have been done.

Also, it is illegal here for my ISP to block ANY sites.

Nifty, thanks for setting me straight here. I'm glad we can rule this one out.

I've had nothing but problems with those cheapie Realtek cards. You get what you pay for.

i reinstalled SL, the problem still persists.

I don't have another comp that can run SL atm, the closest alternative is to test it out at my friend's place.

However, I do remember what I did yesterday to make SL work. I repeated the process EXACTLY but nothing happend this time

Basically what I did was that I reinstalled my LAN card's drivers, restarted and selected *use last working configuration* at started, and booted up SL. However, this, didn't work today.

hmm this might not be directly related to the problem. but i have win xp pro and whenever i try to enter xp normally, my comp always freezes when i try to access network connections.

i can't get into *systems* from my control panel either, whats wrong? and could this be a factor in my log in problem?

Do you have any yellow warnings in your device manager? (Start --> Control Panel --> System --> Hardware --> Device Manager) Yellow flags indicate a hardware or software
incompatablity, failure or problem. Did the home networking wizard encounter any problems when you set up your network?