Miscellaneous: Error 1018 conditions are possibly not implemented correctly

[Lyra]

Originally Posted by Handull [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

assuming that we each have a doppelganger, and that our doppelganger also experiences a 1018 error when we are logged on, i wonder if we could somehow gather a bunch of people who experience 1018 together and systematically determine who is each others doppelganger.

Account creation is free.

We can trouble shoot this by creating new accounts with similar names.

I will help in the evening if anyone else would like to.

Give me an account name I should make and tell me what time after 7pm central you would like to attempt. I have a vent server available if you would like to discuss while we try.

My troubled account was Lyra_40.

[xCry0x]

The biggest problem is there does not seem to be any visibility into what has been looked into and what hasn't been.

Everyone that has the problem keeps posting "omg i get 1018 i cannot log in" then that is the end of it... they never really follow through with anything more. The reason I attached to this thread was because the OP seemed more involved in the issue than just crying about it once and moving on.

GM/Dev responses seem absent outside of the response I got from Sirken saying "we are working on it".

On a page back I am basically posting my experience of when I can and cannot log in over the past week and it has so far been that if I try to log in during prime time i get blocked, if I log in early AM I get on fine. I took that another step and left a char logged in all day, was able to then log off prime time and log back on freely until I logged off for a few hours at which point I was then unable to log in.

That behavior, while a small sample size, heavily leads me to believe someone is out there who plays between 4pm pst 10PM (or later pst) and is blocking me from logging in.

I have EQ installed on a computer at work that I can RDP into so I am more or less going to leave that account logged in all weekend except when I want to actually use it at which point I can log out and then log in from home. If I can do this freely all weekend I think it further points to the whole doppleganger thing being a reality in which case the real smoking gun would be if two people could manage to link up and find out that they block eachother. (Oh, and this is a friging far cry from multi boxing... I can barely log into EQ through a RDP session let alone move or do anything).

If other people tried this also we could at least gather a wider data set ..

-edit-

Oh and if you want to help track when you can and cannot get in, please try times that are widely separated IE if you cannot log in at 8pm try at 8AM. Saying, I cannot log in at 8.. 8:01..8:02..8:03... doesnt prove a lot. Saying you can log in every single day at 8AM but NEVER at 8PM would be more helpful to this hypothesis.

I feel like the reason people are able to blow this off as something that happens 'infrequently' is that they are the lucky one who gets on first while some other unlucky guy always gets on 2nd and is 9/10 times blocked and eventually re-rolls a new account at which point their counter-part goes "oh its fixed!" I know my schedule is pretty static where I am always getting on around 4-5pm and getting off around 9-10pm.. so if someone else always logs in at 3:50pm and logs off at 11:00 pm they would never see the issue unless i got home early while I am blocked constantly... which is why I plan to leave the account logged in Friday-Sunday to see if I can get someone to come screaming =P

[xCry0x]

Bump

[xCry0x]

I dont think it is the account name, I think it is an account ID associated with your account or something similar. IE the login server recognizes your logging into p1999 as user 123456789 and somehow someone else got assigned the same 123456789 user name OR in some process it truncates the id to 6 characters so while you are 123456789 and someone else is 123456123 you both show up as 123456 to the system.

Given I have no idea how this actually works this is all guessing.

The idea that it is simply login names would be interesting though.

I know the account that has the issue for me has a very long login name that is 17 characters long.

I will test that myself tonight =P


Still would love some feedback from Dev please!

[Lyra]

Originally Posted by xCry0x [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I dont think it is the account name, I think it is an account ID associated with your account or something similar. IE the login server recognizes your logging into p1999 as user 123456789 and somehow someone else got assigned the same 123456789 user name OR in some process it truncates the id to 6 characters so while you are 123456789 and someone else is 123456123 you both show up as 123456 to the system.

OH

Well that makes more sense and nothing we can check.

[Lyra]

Originally Posted by xCry0x [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think it is an account ID associated with your account or something similar. IE the login server recognizes your logging into p1999 as user 123456789 and somehow someone else got assigned the same 123456789 user name OR in some process it truncates the id to 6 characters so while you are 123456789 and someone else is 123456123 you both show up as 123456 to the system.

I think this is a well calculated guess.

Looking at my EQEMU information, my log in name Lyra_40 is attached to this account number: 256331

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6 digits. I noticed on another account where I made one account then immediately made another the numbers are consecutive numerical order.

[Handull]

I agree with xCry0x that your actual username has nothing to do with it.

If devs could just take a look at how the server handles account IDs they could probably narrow this down quickly. Here is my best guess as to why/how there is this truncation error: everyone and their mother has multiple EMU Accounts and LS Accounts. Going off the fact that EQ is notorious for being stingy with data usage for integers (max stats 255, max mob hp 32k, 8 toons per account, etc), I wouldn't be shocked if the integer for Account ID is small (under 20 bits?) and that between all the users playing on EQEmu, all available Account IDs have been used up. This forces new IDs to appear the same as previous ones. Due to the fact that so many account sit dormant due to being used for other servers, logged rarely as mules, inactive accounts, etc, this error is fairly rare.

How does it work? Lets say we have a 3 bit number, call it A. A can be 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,or7. In binary these are
000,001,010,011,100,101,110,and111.
So what comes after 7? The next number in binary is 1000, but since A only holds 3 bits of data, A is now equal to 000. (in 3-bit binary 7+1=0)
Now, maybe A is a 32 bit number, and can hold more accounts than we can imagine, but A has to be passed along from your client to the server and checked against already active accounts. If at any point the code is written to only deal with a limited number of bits, A will be cut off (not quite truncated) and appear equal to another account.

How to fix/test this? Trace the code that retrieves an Account ID from the moment the client hits Log In and Join Server to the moment it returns an output of error1018 to the client. My guess is somewhere along the way the Account ID is reduced to some small bit integer in an attempt to reduce ping. Would you expect people to make over a million accounts over all the emu servers when you first programmed this box? Sounds like a reasonable way for someone starting a server to try and reduce overhead and keep lag down on a small and free sandbox emulator. If this is the problem, it should be a simple fix.

Since this is more of an Emu problem, looks like we need Rogean to weigh in on this one.

[xCry0x]

^^^ what he said.

A response would be great given that if this is really the case this issue could explode when velious hits and large amounts of inactive accounts come back.

I would be happy to let a dev go nuts with my screwy account if they want to test it.

[Lyra]

Originally Posted by xCry0x [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I would be happy to let a dev go nuts with my screwy account if they want to test it.

They can have mine too.

[xCry0x]

Client crashed on computer at work, tried to log in now and get 1018 =P so the trend continues.

Cannot log in during prime time unless previously logged in.

-edit-

Was able to log in on work computer.. then tried to switch over to home pc and was getting 1018 error even though on my other screen I could see myself logged in from work computer.. then logged out fully from work computer and still 1018. Usually that would have just booted me from one and logged me in with other.

-edit2-

Was able to log in, sat in for a few mins then logged out and tried to get back in and was 1018 error-ed again so unless I am missing something that is now not lining up to the whole multiple people blocking eachother thing because I highly doubt someone was able to click in the min i logged out.