Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum

Tried both last night and tonight to log in using PyLotro. Patching worked fine, but when I try to log in I get "[E08] Server not found".

Here's the complete transcript:

Initialising, please wait...
Available languages checked.
Fetched details from GLS data centre.
Realm list obtained.
World queue configuration read
Checking account details...
[E08] Server not found - may be down

Any ideas?

The last line says it all... [E08] Server not found - may be down

That is typically a network related issue. I know over the weekend Turbine had some nasty weather in their area (Rhode Island) and I was getting lag issues like crazy and finally gave up. Wasn't on Monday. Was running LOTRO earlier today with no problems.

Hmm. I ask because I've reliably got that message for the last 4 days, even trying different servers.

For the fun of it, I tried entering a bad password today, and got "[E07] Authentication failure" instead. So it's successfully authenticating my account, but can't actually get the game itself running cause the server ain't talking.

Trying to figure out if this is normal, or due to some sort of setup issue (not pointing at correct servers?).

Which server? I just successfully connected to Khyber.

Nom wrote:

Hmm. I ask because I've reliably got that message for the last 4
days, even trying different servers.

For the fun of it, I tried entering a bad password today, and got
"[E07] Authentication failure" instead. So it's successfully
authenticating my account, but can't actually get the game itself
running cause the server ain't talking.

Trying to figure out if this is normal, or due to some sort of setup
issue (not pointing at correct servers?).

irsimon wrote:

Which server? I just successfully connected to Khyber.
Khyber, Sarlona, Thelanis, you name it. All of them give me an [E08]. I can patch fine, authenticate fine, but can't launch any server.

Are there some bizarre firewalling rules I need to be aware of?

I have been getting the same "[E08] Server not found - may be down" error for a week now. I've reinstalled DDO and pyLotro multiple times. I've even updated to Ubuntu 9.10 now and getting the same error. I've tried both wireless and wired at 2 different houses and I still get this error. It has to be some system wide setting / software that is not allowing the connection. Any ideas?

I've tried just about everything on the network, going as far as having my computer using a public IP address with no local firewall.

Silly thought. I'm using crossover games 7.2.2 on OS X 10.5.8. Satskar is having the same problem on Linux. Is anyone NOT having this problem, and if so, what it your system setup?

The game works fine for me:

Crossover Games 8.0
Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard

I did, however, use an installation of DDO from Windows XP. I have XP installed for Bootcamp, so I pulled my DDO folder out of Program Files right into my DDO bottle. PyLotro loaded it just fine. Are you guys remembering to patch the game though? It won't patch itself. I had to run the patcher before I could connect to a server.

Yes, patching works fine.

The other issue is the whole process is opaque. Is there any way to see what PyLotRO is actually passing to dndclient.exe? I don't even know if E08 is a PyLotRO error code or a dndclient.exe error code.

Further, I've not been able to find any documentation for dndclient.exe or PyLotRO beyond simple installation instructions.

That other people are successfully running this setup implies that the error message 'the server may be down' is in fact wrong, but I have no idea how to find the actual problem. Are there DNS issues? What ports do I need open? Where does the server list come from? How is either PyLotRO or dndclient.exe trying to find the server?

Nom wrote:

The other issue is the whole process is opaque. Is there any way to
see what PyLotRO is actually passing to dndclient.exe? I don't even
know if E08 is a PyLotRO error code or a dndclient.exe error code.

Further, I've not been able to find any documentation for
dndclient.exe or PyLotRO beyond simple installation instructions.

OK now first up remember I am not a company but an individual. I also don't play DDO but because the process is virtually identical to LotRO I have been able to include support for DDO in PyLotRO.

PyLotRO is a launcher replacement, how many other launchers show everything that is happening between themselves and the servers? How many other launchers have detailed documentation? Think before you insult the work of others.

E08 is produced by PyLotRO, it comes from the authentication process, one of 3 codes can be returned:

• E06 - no active account for the game in question (no longer checked for DDO)
• E07 - account details incorrect
• E08 - some html error status other than the one that triggers E07 was returned

Now in all my testing I only ever got those three errors and the trigger for E08 was always the server being down or some strange network blip meaning it had returned a totally blank response. So the E08 error does mean that server is playing up, so it is a perfectly accurate response. Yes the error message could be tweaked to show the html status code but I currently don't have the time to make the change and issue a new release (remember I am an individual not a company).

To answer your other questions:
DNS issues: doubt it, you can get an E07 error so you are connecting to the server
Ports: There are official forums/sites which contain that information
Server list: Part of the initialisation process downloads the server list from Turbines/Codemasters servers
Finding the server: a SOAP request to a web service published in the configuration information downloaded by the initialisation process.

Alan Jackson wrote:

yLotRO is a launcher replacement, how many other launchers show
everything that is happening between themselves and the servers? How
many other launchers have detailed documentation? Think before you
insult the work of others.
No insult was intended. I'm very impressed at the work that you and SNy have done decoding and duplicating the login process.

However, it is opaque. From reading SNy's script, I got a pretty good idea of the various HTML and otherwise transactions that were occurring. So I hoped that PyLotRO might dump a transcript, or have source, or something so I could figure out at which point the thing was breaking. For example, downloading the launch parameters for PyLotRO or after attempting to launch the client.

Your tool is very cool. Any insult above is just frustration of being unable to get further in diagnosis than several days of 'step 3 didn't work'. It's not even frustration at you; just at feeling blocked.

Alan Jackson wrote:

Ports: There are official forums/sites which contain that
information
I spent about 3 hours last night trawling google and the DDO knowledge base and forums trying to find this, and failed. Most port related stuff seemed to be about Windows firewall, which obviously isn't relevant :)

From your feedback above, it seems that the issues are related to HTML transactions before we even launch the client. I'm going to try running SNy's script and see if that can pinpoint the failure.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Nom wrote:

No insult was intended. I'm very impressed at the work that you and
SNy have done decoding and duplicating the login process.

No worries, I came upon this post after a rather abusive e-mail about PyLotRO, so I probably over-reacted.

Nom wrote:

However, it is opaque. From reading SNy's script, I got a pretty
good idea of the various HTML and otherwise transactions that were
occurring. So I hoped that PyLotRO might dump a transcript, or have
source, or something so I could figure out at which point the thing
was breaking. For example, downloading the launch parameters for
PyLotRO or after attempting to launch the client.

The source for PyLotRO is available at http://www.lotrolinux.com I will alter PyLotRO so that it stores the responses it gets from the various servers and amend the E08 to contain the status code.

Nom wrote:

Alan Jackson wrote:

Ports: There are official forums/sites which contain
that information
I spent about 3 hours last night trawling
google and the DDO knowledge base and forums trying to find this,
and failed. Most port related stuff seemed to be about Windows
firewall, which obviously isn't relevant :)

The same ports need to be opened no matter what the OS, of course the challenge is sifting the good information from the crud about Windows Firewall.

Nom wrote:

From your feedback above, it seems that the issues are related to
HTML transactions before we even launch the client. I'm going to
try running SNy's script and see if that can pinpoint the failure.

If you get SNys script working the contents of the file it saves .launcher/GLSAuthServer.config could hold the key, as that is the response the authentication server is giving you, since you can get the username/password error you are getting some sort of response from that server.

Well, I figured it out.

Two quotes from the turbine 'change password' web site, sitting within 30 pixels of each other:

"Must be between 6 and 16 characters in length, of mixed alpha-numeric characters only"

"Because this password protects access to your game subscriptions and billing information, you should use a combination of letters, numbers, and punctuation for maximum security."

Turns out that a "combination of letters, numbers and punctuation" messes up the PyLotRO server setup process (I expect it was the '&' that did it). Changing the password to something without punctuation got me past the E08 error and got something launching. OK, I got a BIG white rectangle and a mouse cursor on an otherwise black screen and had to CTRL-OPT-ESC out, but that's progress. :)

Thanks for the help.

Nom wrote:

Turns out that a "combination of letters, numbers and punctuation"
messes up the PyLotRO server setup process (I expect it was the '&'
that did it). Changing the password to something without
punctuation got me past the E08 error and got something launching.

I remember that error from when PyLotROs predecessor LotROLinux was still in it's infancy. It was more foreign letters (ie those with umlauts, etc). I guess there are still some characters that don't get sent right.

If you ever have reason to revisit the code, it strikes me that a 'verbose' mode would be really useful. Basically, dump a summary and content of every transaction to something like "/tmp/pylotro-<pid>.log". In the above case, I suspect we'd see a request for something that doesn't quite look like my password during one of the final https transactions. I did try tcpdumping, but that didn't work as well once it switched to https. :)

I ran into the exact same problem, everything seemed to work fine, but then I got the error "[E08] Server not found - may be down". Turns out the problem wasn't that the server wasn't there, the problem was that the server couldn't authenticate me because it choked on the password - it's delivered via soap and if you use characters like '&' the soap xml becomes invalid, causing the server to return an invalid request error.

Luckily the solution is simple: log into your DDO account and change the password (or name for that matter :) to something that doesn't cause problems in xml. Not sure, but it might be possible to use CDATA in the launcher to prevent these kind of errors.

Take care