Hi everyone,

We're aware that some players are experiencing connectivity issues to Illy at the moment.

These issues manifest themselves as broken images, missing buttons, and as broken scripts that can prevent much of the illy functionality from initialising.

Only a small subset of users are affected by this... and it will resolve itself shortly.

We use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver our "most loaded/greatest bandwidth" files to each player's web browser. These files almost entirely consist of images and script files. 

The reason why we use a CDN is that they generally can deliver these larger files to each player more reliably and speedily than our servers can, as the CDNs use servers located geographically close to each individual player.

The problem is that our (now old) CDN (Rackspace/Akamai) has had a repeat of the same issue we experienced about a month ago ( http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/display-problem-on-chrome_topic4286_post54887.html#54887" rel="nofollow - as noted here ) and apparently are unable to rectify the issue with any sense of urgency.

We've thrown our bill-paying toys out of the corporate perambulator, and have switched CDN providers so as to (hopefully) avoid this kind of problem in the future.  

This has required us to re-point our CDN content domain names - in the form of cdnX.illyriad.co.uk - from the faulty CDN provider to our new CDN provider.

Slightly exacerbating the CDN issue for some people is that, close upstream from the elgea server (based in Tampa, Florida), one of our 4 backbone internet providers (Level3 in this case) experienced a corrupt routing table at their Miami hub.

This meant that players on certain parts of the internet (notably Verizon users in the south and south-west) may have potentially experienced a brief double-whammy of technical issues.  Our ISP quickly rerouted traffic bound in that direction onto the other backbone providers, and Level3 quickly offlined the corrupted router.  But this second issue won't have helped anything.

You'll know if this issue is affecting you, as your User Interface may be partially or completely broken, with missing or broken images being the most obviously visible symptom.

Actual ongoing gameplay (completion of ongoing construction, research or military orders etc) is entirely unaffected, for all users.

The downside of this issue is that it takes the internet's Domain Name Servers (DNS) a while to catch up with the propagation of the amended record of the domain names we use for content delivery. 

Our primary, authoritative nameservers are based in the United Kingdom at the Telehouse in London's Docklands (sort of the European equivalent of Carrier Hotel in New York), so the propagation out from us has been fairly swift.

The speed of this propagation is, however, something we don't have much control over - but can take up to 48 hours, depending on how "mainstream" or "backwoods" your Internet Service Provider is. 

------

We're very sorry if you're one of those players who have experienced these issues.  

Unfortunately, neither issue was of our own making, and there's nothing we could have done (or can do now) to rectify either issue more speedily, as they're both entirely out of our control.  We can but hope that our new CDN will be more reliable.

Best wishes,

SC

Is this part of it?

Yup.  

Unfortunately the DNS A/CNAME amend wasn't a planned change this time (or rather, we had to do it pretty much immediately when our CDN borked itself) and - unbeknownst to us - our old crossdomain TTL appears to have been increased to 86400 by our nameserver hosts when they moved over to IPv6, grrr.  But I decided not to mention all that in my original post...

Yes, very much so belargyle - many apologies.  It will all work again soon on it's own.

It's possible, if you're highly-network-and-OS-literate that you could force your computer to work by looking up the new authoritative records, flushing your revolver DNS cache and by putting manual DNS and IP entries for the new records into your local system's hosts file... 

But I'm certainly not recommending anyone does any of that, or even describing how to do it, as this could be very dangerous advice in inexperienced hands!  Basically, if you know how to do it, you have probably already done it.  

If you don't know how to do it or don't know what I'm talking about, I strongly recommend you don't start googling this procedure as you will inevitably end up on a 36 hours phonecall with a technical support department in Bangladesh before throwing your now entirely useless computer out of the nearest window - and blaming me for showing you how to force your computer to do things it shouldn't be doing.  

Thanks for the heads up though.

You're part right, Luna... 

Hamsters power the servers, the intertubes are controlled by fairies.  Gremlins hide in the code.

Heh.  And you will remember, of course, to nslookup the cdnX domains over the next couple of days, and when they match the authoritative records, to remove the hosts file entries, won't you...?

EDIT: That's if, of course, you did the hosts file thing...  To those people who think I'm speaking even more gobbledigook than usual, please ignore everything except my first post in this thread.

 

Is there repeat of this issue?  I cannot get past this on traceroute:

ae-3-5.bar1.tampa1.level3.net (4.69.148.214)

...so unable to reach Illy

SB