studiophi

I was recently banned, and was directed by el.exe to post my story here. First of all, I am only able to play EL because my connection is tunneled via an SSH connection to my Ubuntu box. I am fully aware of what terms this violates with my various ISPs, but am not currently aware of this as an infraction of any of the EL rules. Please contact me if you desire further explanation. As mentioned in the topic title & description, I was banned by Radu at 6:45 pm EST, 12/12/2005. I believe this banning to be unecessary, let alone premature. I was not given a thorough explanation of what the true reason Radu had to ban me, although I believe I deserve to have received one. My brief conversation goes as follows: As you see, I have been accused of using an "illegal client." I am absolutely sure that this is false, unless illegal clients were distributed publicly from eternal-lands.com yesterday in place of "legal" ones. I will be happy to prove, if possible, that I was using a "legal" client at the time Radu falsely accused me of not doing so. Thank you for your time. I'll see you in cyberspace.

Yes. Putty, in-fact, has a command line app, known as plink.

With all due respect, "With all due respect" is a stupid phase that basically translates to "Please excuse me for acting like I have no respect at all." Now back to the topic at hand: I play online games to relax. I don't play them because I wish to figure out the subtle nuances of packet transmission from an SSH tunnel. If there is a way around this, I'm not likely to find it here. I've had enough of a learning experience thwarting a campus firewall in order to play this game. To learn that I must find another way because my method, a method unfamiliar to the creator of the game itself, isn't good enough because it "raises red flags" is a slap in the face. I've had a strong enough heart and I've been pretty good humored so far, but my patience and good humor for this game has run out. If this is what I must go through to, as I said, relax, then it's not worth my time, patience, strong heart, energy, etc. However, I am interested in seeing if somebody else has had any similar experience, advice, instruction to share. I will continue to keep an eye on this thread for one week. Reader: If you have a stronger heart than I, or even a tunneling/routing method that doesn't result in confusing messages and the ensuing banning that I received, step forward now. - Zoltok "So long and thanks for all the fish." -Douglas Adams

If this is how you treat your users, then Adieu, Radu Privantu. I got what I paid for.

I doubt that. Reason? Case in point: My roomate has been using the same setup as mine, same ubuntu box and everything, to play WoW for weeks. He has had no problems. At this point, I'm considering joining him.

Right. Since setting openssh's log level to DEBUG3 involves shutting down ssh, the medium by which I'm able to connect to the server in the first place, I can't enable logging. If anybody else has a way by which to change my packet size/stop null packets from happening, feel free to reply. Otherwise, I feel like I'm wasting my time here. The gameplay just isn't worth investing this much time into something that I'm not even sure is broken

Hrm. Zebedee connects erratically, and doesn't seem to work well. Yes, I'd like to write my own tunneling software, and I've found a wonderful market of college students behind restrictive firewalls. Unfortunately, I am not a programmer. I am simply a freshman studying computer science at a school in the middle of a corn field in Pennsylvania. Would it be possible to see my 1,000 errors, or at least a basis of what is happening going outbound from the ubuntu box?

For putty to tunnel, open a connection, right-click the titlebar, click "Change Settings..." In the settings window, look under Connection >> SSH >> Tunnels. If you have another method of tunneling, I'd be happy to test it. I have been looking at the Zebedee software, which may perhaps be better, but I can't really test it with a banned IP, and I am unsure of how to correctly forward the port to the EL server in zebedee.

I use an SSH tunnel, through Putty, because TCP port 2000 is blocked on my campus. The tunnel forwards all traffic from TCP 2000 to TCP 1080, which is then sent to my Ubuntu box at home. The Ubuntu box acts as my go-between between the Eternal Lands server, eternal-lands.network-studio.com:2000, and my pc at school. Thus the IP you should be seeing for me is 71.240.58.206. It is dynamic, and thus will change from time to time. As I was unaware that sending encrypted traffic through a tunnel would raise the "red flags" you speak of, I didn't anticipate the confrontation with Radu or the subsequent IP banning. I am interested in what these red flags are and your methods for interpreting them as use of an illegal client is.