Developer's Blog

Great Firewall of China    Posted by admin

We have been having huge problems with spam, denial of service attacks and hack attempts originating in a variety of Asian, South American countries and Russia.

We had to block port 25 from the entire nation of China, S. Korea and Tiawan to get the spam problem under control.

Sadly, this means we can no longer receive mail from those countries. If the hack/exploit attempts continue, we may have to block access on all ports to those countries.

Deepmatrix has always been an international effort, and we would like to hear from people outside of the US. We do not want to shut you out.

Thanks

John Landry
Senior Web Lackey

View forum thread

I'm working on a PHP/MySQL
authoring system that will eventually work on multiple platforms, not just deepmatrix.

Check it out at.. http://www.lucidspace.com/phluid

View forum thread

Well it ain't subtitled "Official forum of the 1990's preservation society"
for nothing
Been dealing with issues of Netscape either crashing or not closing
properly (not responding) after leaving the Deep Matrix applet.
Most of the time the problem has been with Cosmoplayer, but
both Contact and Cortona sometimes pull the same stunt.
I think I may have the problem licked.
The basic issue seems to be memory not clearing correctly
and the solution is to "flush" Netscape's memory
by calling up a whole new VRML plugin instance without
involving the EAI applet.
After "Disconnect" is pressed and "logout" is received, the applet
first replaces the VRML scene with another ( the new VRML plugin
instance ) and then replaces the applet with a blank page.

The newly loaded world provides a choice of anchors to either
reload the applet or close the window entirely.
If the latter is chosen, window.close() is called by the top window.

I have given Netscape and Cosmoplayer some pretty good workouts
with this. Workouts that previously either end with a lockup or crashing
during window closure. All tests so far have been successfull clean closings


The test URL:
http://www.sevenemeraldtablets.net/Community/Cosmotest/clientapplet/

This applet/server combination also tests a new approach to banishing
ghosts (improperly disconnected users that still seem to have a presence
on the server). A seperate thread is run now with each ServerThread instance ( the class that holds each user's info ) This thread watches
and reverts to false a boolean changed true by the heartbeat control message. If it finds it false, the thread goes about shutting down the ServerThread.

So if the gentle reader has made it through this blog post so far,
would they be kind enough to test the above url and close the
applet window WITHOUT disconnecting to see if the server boots
them correctly.

Thanks!
Russ Kinter

View forum thread

Correction on my previous post:
The test url is:
http://www.sevenemeraldtablets.net/Community/bespace

Thanks!
Russ Kinter

View forum thread

Hi Everyone,
I am asking folks to please test
the following new DM server for "avatar ghosts" (deceased users):
http://www.sevenemeraldtablet.net/Community/bespace

There has always been a problem with the DM server in
removing users who did not disconnect properly and seem to
still be "logged in" so I am intent to resolve this issue.
So I am asking testers to NOT click the applet's disconnect
button first, but rather close the HTML browser's window
directly from the upper right corner.
Try restarting the browser after 16 seconds ( time needed
for the exorcism and re-enter bespace to see if you are
still "hanging around"
My e-mail is pyth7@verizon.net.

Thank You!
Russ Kinter

View forum thread