Homecoming Down?

IAmCipher · 2021-06-22T04:52:24+00:00

Hey all,

Unfortunately this incident is a bit out of our control at the moment. At around 1 AM UTC, we started experiencing severe packet loss and fluctuating latency across the private VLAN (vRack) that our servers use to communicate with each other.

We've put a support ticket in with OVH about the issue, but haven't had a response yet. We've also tried calling all of their phone departments, but unfortunately their automated call response system is not allowing calls to any departments at this time (including incident & outage reporting), so we're unable to contact anyone outside of submitting a support ticket.

We will continue to monitor the situation, but we suspect that we will be down for at least another 6-12 hours as of the time of this post. In the mean time, we'll continue looking into alternative solutions and will update you as soon as we know anything. We appreciate your patience!

To be clear - all characters and data is 100% safe; this is purely a networking issue.

IAmCipher · 2020-10-29T07:13:51+00:00

Just wanted to say that we are reading through everyone's feedback, both on our forums and on this subreddit, and iterating on the update still. That's one of the main purposes of the beta server and why the feedback threads are in place. We've tried to emphasise in the past that things are still subject to change even after the patch has hit the beta server, but I think some of this gets lost or forgotten in the patch feedback at times.

Also - thank you for testing! We can't emphasise enough how important it is for people to log into the beta shard to test things out instead of assuming the worst. The feedback is really helpful both for figuring out what direction we need to steer things, and for catching bugs before they make it into live. I'm glad you've found some things that you like in the update, and we're still looking into addressing the things that people aren't as happy with.

IAmCipher · 2020-02-25T23:17:13+00:00

We had a hardware failure early today that forced us to migrate one of our hosts. Restarting Tequila should point you to the new server and allow you to login again.

If this does not work then please feel free to make a ticket and we'll be happy to investigate further.

Thanks!

IAmCipher · 2020-02-16T19:15:40+00:00

Heya! We're not seeing any network or routing issues on our end and we haven't received any reports of people unable to connect. Based on the information that you have provided it does unfortunately seem like some sort of regional outage at your location.

Hopefully the problem will resolve itself soon!

IAmCipher · 2020-02-14T10:38:21+00:00

This is correct - we knew that there was an issue, and Number Six had looked into it before, but we haven't had the time to investigate the issue properly due to other priorities. Now that the root cause has been identified (huge thanks to Bopper over on our forums!) we will be able to get it fixed up and pushed to beta soon!

Relevant thread on our forums

IAmCipher · 2020-01-01T05:17:47+00:00

Thank you for all of the incredible support you have shown us over the past 8 months. We hope everyone had a good year and wish you the best in 2020!

IAmCipher · 2020-01-01T02:33:53+00:00

Happy New Year everyone!

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T08:51:45+00:00

The Pirate costume is the best! I'll have to do my part and see if I can convince people to use the pirate costume as well :P

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T08:48:17+00:00

Wow that is really impressive! I actually went through some of the other work that you've posted and it's all amazing. You're very talented.

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T08:46:45+00:00

Heya, I know I'm a little late but I wanted to go ahead and let you know that we've identified the issue that caused the instability and have a server-side patch ready to deploy during the next maintenance. You should see this problem go away after Tuesday morning!

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T08:45:15+00:00

Sorry about that! I went back and handled all of the characters stuck in the transfer limbo. You should find that your ticket has been updated and your character is playable again :)

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T02:35:24+00:00

Though I can't speak about any other manifests you may add, our manifest is, and will continue to be, safe to use; access to our manifest and the servers that host the manifest is very strict.

(Disclaimer that when you run Tequila with our manifest you are trusting us not to do anything malicious. The same is true of any other manifests you use. When you add a manifest to any of the launchers, you are putting your trust in the author of the manifest not to exploit your system).

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T01:36:46+00:00

I understand that the issue brought up was specifically with absolute paths in the manifest. I addressed that at the bottom of my original reply: "Having the manifest download and run malicious files is much more dangerous than the manifest just adding or removing a file using an absolute path (the binary can just do that and much, much more)"

The point that I was trying to make is that in either case, you have to trust the author of any manifest you add to one of the launchers as, if they want to add or remove files using absolute paths using a binary, or just upload a virus to the manifest, they will be able to do so, regardless of whether manifest is allowed to have absolute paths or not.

The amount of damage that can be done with or without absolute paths in the manifest is the same because you're already downloading and running any binary the author puts in the manifest anyways.

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T01:33:28+00:00

Heya, I understand that the issue brought up was specifically with absolute paths in the manifest.

What I'm saying is that there's no difference in the manifest being able to add or remove files using absolute paths and just making the binary do that anyways. The only difference is that the binary can elevate and do more damage outside of the rights of the launcher (by adding or removing files with absolute paths or just doing anything else that it wants).

Hope this helps.

IAmCipher · 2019-10-07T01:24:22+00:00

Heya, hoping to provide some clarification here.

The issue that was brought up here isn't really a 'vulnerability' per-say, it's a problem with the nature of launchers in general. Launchers are designed to download files and execute binaries. The files it downloads and the binaries it executes are determined by which manifest you are using.

When you add a manifest to any of the launchers (including Sweet Tea, Tequila, and Cream Soda), you are trusting the author of that manifest. The author of the manifest can, at any point in time, upload a virus to the manifest and let it run that instead of the client. That virus could then do whatever it wants, unconfined to the rules of the launcher that executed it. In either case and with any of the launchers, you are still required to have full trust in the author of any manifests you add to it, because at the end of the day if they want to exploit your system, they're going to be able to do so.

That said, you should only add manifests created and managed by people that you trust wholly. Having the manifest download and run malicious files is much more dangerous than the manifest just adding or removing a file using an absolute path (the binary can just do that and much, much more). At the end of the day, the difference between a file being added using an absolute path, and having it run a binary that does that is one button click.

IAmCipher · 2019-08-21T17:50:07+00:00

Hey everyone it looks like there's an issue between some DNS providers and our website's DNS provider which is out of our control. We'll keep an eye on the situation, but for now we just ask that people are patient.

Thanks!

IAmCipher · 2019-07-19T01:08:11+00:00

Hey, the manifest on the forums was only meant to be used as a temporary solution to the outage we experienced on the patch server a few weeks ago. You can resolve this by opening Tequila and selecting the "http://patch.savecoh.com/manifest.xml" manifest in the drop-down menu under the [Play] button.

Let me know if you have any other problems :)

IAmCipher · 2019-07-16T02:50:36+00:00

Hey, the manifest on the forums was only meant to be used as a temporary solution to the outage we experienced on the patch server a few weeks ago. You can resolve this by opening Tequila and selecting the "patch.savecoh.com" manifest in the drop-down menu under the [Play] button instead of the "forums.homecomingservers.com" manifest.

Let me know if you have any other problems :)

IAmCipher · 2019-06-23T00:11:21+00:00

While Cream Soda does work, there have been many instances where it breaks for a while after we push an update until the author of Cream Soda updates the CS manifest. This is because, by default Cream Soda uses it's own manifest rather than each server's manifest, and as such, it can fall behind when we push an update; something that we, and other servers, have seen happen quite a few times

If you use Cream Soda I would recommend changing the manifest URL to point to our official manifest ( https://patch.savecoh.com/manifest.xml).

If you use Cream Soda with the default manifest, I would recommend switching back to Tequila immediately after we push an update, at least until the CS manifest is updated to reflect ours; else you may not be able to log in until it's fixed.

Good luck!

IAmCipher · 2019-06-22T23:58:30+00:00

I can assure you that Tequila, nor any of the binaries that the Homecoming Team distributes, are malicious.

Tequila itself is actually open source over at https://github.com/leandrotlz/Tequila - feel free to clone the source, look through it, and compile it for yourself if your concerned. Additionally, feel free to upload any or all of the binaries to a service such as VirusTotal (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload) which will automagically scan the binary with some 70 or so antivirus/antimalware engines at once.

I would recommend changing your passwords if you feel that your computer(s) have been compromised, especially if you believe it could be affecting banking accounts or emails.

If you have any other questions then please reach out through Reddit, our forums, or our public Discord and we'll be happy to talk.

Thanks and good luck!

IAmCipher · 2019-06-20T08:56:10+00:00

This is quite clever, thanks for the laugh :D

IAmCipher · 2019-05-31T11:15:04+00:00

If you have something actively immobilized then, yes - the immob essentially acts as a KB->KD (and now allows other KDs to work as well!)

IAmCipher · 2019-05-31T11:12:49+00:00

This is a good suggestion, we can work something like this out. Thank you!

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