DAmn downtime January 2008

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The correct title of this article is dAmn downtime January 2008. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical limitations.

The infamous backend failure.

This page describes the events that happened on Tuesday January 29th, 2008. Basically, dAmn went under downtime. But it was a huge downtime that rejected all new connections until the server finally shut down for a while.

1 The beginning
2 The bug

The beginning

In the beginning, users couldn't get connected to dAmn. Around noon (GMT), chix0r made this forum post about the problem. The thread didn't really explain much about the problem, but we were assured that everything would be working soon enough. Chix0r even made this journal, almost as a mini-contest to keep everyone occupied while Fella ran off with the servers.

The bug

The bug listed below is now fixed. The information is being kept for archive purposes; but the stuff it mentions about various bots "not working" is no longer valid.

The problem

It appears that certain changes had been made to deviantART's backend for dAmn. That, or the servers just decided to break. Nonetheless, when people were finally able to connect at some point, it became evident that deviants first had to visit chat.deviantart.com, and click a link to join a chatroom from that page. After doing this once, deviants were able to connect in any manner. Why this is, we have no idea as of yet.

Currently there is still no known cause for the problem. Something else to note is that the way bots were set up at the time, meant that they would not be able to connect either. That said, knowing how deviants can connect provided electricnet with a way to get Futurism connected while photofroggy was still grabbing cookies, and ManjyomeThunder was being confused.

The fix

As mentioned above, it had become apparent that users could connect by first clicking a link to a chatroom from chat.deviantart.com. To mimic this in a bot's socket connection, a header could be sent to any chatroom page, which referred back to chat.deviantart.com. Using this concept, electricnet created a working header, which is now being used as a fix.

Electricnet has provided his fix here! Go grab it if you're a PHP bot developer.

Manual fix

There is also a manual fix for users who use bots that haven't yet been fixed: Log in as your bot account in a browser, then go to the chat front page and click on one of the chatrooms (probably #Botdom!). Then close the chatroom and delete the browser cookies (should be in the browser settings somewhere) -- do NOT click the log out button. Deleting your browser cookies should log you out without changing the token.

The outcome

This basically means that dAmn has failed, again! It also means that bots will need an extra bit of code to work around this weirdness, and some bots will not be able to connect as they are no longer being developed.