"The terrarium server is experiencing temporary difficulties. This is probably why you are not receiving any animals. Please bear with us while we get the issue resolved."

Hey guys,

Would it be too hard to put a status indicator on the web site somewhere indicating the availability of the server.  Ie, a red or green light representing the server status being available or not would be a nice feature.

I for one have never got the Terrarium to connect to the server.  I always get this message "The terrarium server is experiencing temporary difficulties.  This is probably why you are not receiving any animals.  Please bear with us while we get the issue resolved."

I am running two XP boxes, with one being the gateway using ICS.  I've configured either box to tun the client and set up the firewall accordingly.  I've also tried on many occasions just shutting the firewall down etc to no avail.

Seems to me a service status page or indicator on the main page would take some of the guess work out of whether this is a local or server side issue.

Matt

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"The terrarium server is experiencing temporary difficulties. This is probably why you are not receiving any animals. Please bear with us while we get the issue resolved."

Vallari Kamble - MSFT
So i did remove and reinstall the net framework 1.1.. and also the terrarium.

It still does not work.

I introduced some creatures from the reintroduce list.

when they teleport they are just moved about in my system.

Showing one for one one gone one received.

So now I have an empty environment.

(as I deleted all previous)

and I am stumped.

I guess my next step is to create a new partition, install a new os and run just terrarium. that seems pretty silly. this happened when I installed visual studio or office.
What did they change

I hope someone can give me a clue. It is obvious that I am not alone with this problem. It actually seems to be rather common. Perhaps it needs some further investigation, or a tool to diagnose the problem.

thanks.

eli
Cliff Buckley
Don't worry about the last light being red. If you have a peer count and are receiving organisms, then you are fine. If you have a peer count and you are not receiving anything, then you need to open up port 50000 on your firewall.
SteffenK
Thanks, Justin.

I really am stumped and don't know where to go from here short of making a new partition and running another os and keeping it clean of applications.  But that kind of keeps it away from easy use  It was working well for 30 days. I did remove and reinstall the 1.1 framework before I removed and installed the terrarium, perhaps I should have removed both of them first   Anything you can offer to get this up and working would be great, I am just a new student of the .NET  and am looking forward to developing my skills in your environment.  I will be setting up and additional computer with a clean os after the first of the year.  It would be nice though to know how to solve this problem , I have seen several posts of people with the same apparent problem. I did try disabling the firewall, that didn't seem to make any difference, in fact the terrarium said that I was still behind the firewall are there any addresses I can ping to validate my connection.

I have removed and installed Terrarium several times, each time I attempt to register for the first time I got this: Problems registering: The underlying connection was closed: an unexpected error occurred on a receive.

I would click again and the window would close.  I go in and change settings and it seems to accept them,  but I wonder if somehow I failed in my registration and that is the cause of the problem

I can get animals from the reintroduce animal list the reporting and discovery web services seem to be working and I am showing peers. Peer to peer requests is also active on the send side, but not on the receive side.

other than that I am running xp pro. through a USB satellite connection. I am still wondering why it shows me behind a NAT or firewall when I disable/restart/ and start terrarium. I just checked the box in the server set up panel.

Anyway,  any suggestions, (I got a puppy for the kids for Christmas, so dog food might be in order.)

Happy Holidays to all.

Eli
grossi
Yep, this is basically what that means (I got the same report on my side).  For some reason I could not connect to your computer on port 50000.

The most likely cause is the XP ICF or Internet Connection Firewall.  This needs to be disabled.  I can't find any way to set policies for the ICF to allow connections through and it appears you can only allow services through when you have a multi-machine set-up using ICS (Internet Connection Sharing).

If ICF isn't your problem, then it is your NAT setup.  What you'll notice in a NAT environment is that your machine will have a private IP rather than an Internet routable IP.  It gets this IP from the router and a private network is established with your machine on one side, and the router/NAT device actually connected to the internet using the internet routable IP.  When connections come in to the NAT device they are directed at the internet routable IP not the IP for your machine.  This causes a problem, because the NAT device doesn't know where the data should be sent.  In this case you have to do a port mapping, different from just enabling a port through the firewall, directly to your machine.  Basically, you need to say all traffic on port 50000 needs to go to *this* ip where *this* ip is the private IP for your machine.  This is know as setting up a published service since you are publishing port 50000 to provide a mapping back to an actual machine behind the router that is going to respond to requests.

It sounds like only half of your setup is working here.  Your outgoing on port 50000 is fine.  And this is normal.  Most firewall/NAT devices allow arbitrary outgoing connections.  What they aren't set up for out of the box are the mappings that point from the NAT device to your specific computer.  You'll only be able to set up one of your machines to run Terrarium, but I'm guessing you already knew that.  We were extremely short sighted in not allowing you to configure the port that Terrarium ran on.  By doing this you could map different ports on the NAT to different machines behind the NAT giving each their own unique port, etc...
Walter Sobchak
Eli, I don't have a fix for the Terrarium as it is.  I can offer that once the source release is complete, I do have a work-around that enables the client and server components to talk back and forth and do a kind of troubleshooting diagnostic that will help you fix your Terrarium.

Also, while the Terrarium functions well as a P2P application, there are some instances where a client/server model would allow more people to play.  I have some code that enables the server to act as a cache for teleports from IP'ed clients so that non IP'ed clients can grab everything in a disconnected manner (by polling the server for peers that want to communicate with you).

All of this is extremely experimental and is an attempt to drastically change the way Terrarium interacts to allow a seamless experience for all users.  It may not work, but I'm hoping some people will want to dogfood my code.
jen01902
I just downloaded and installed Terrarium last night, and I am having the same problem.

I am running one box with WinXP Pro.  I have a dsl connection on which I have the XP built in firewall turned on.  I have the checkbox in the Game Settings > Server section checked which says "Enable NAT/Firewall Support".

On the game, all the status lights are green except the last one (Version Update Web Service) which is red.  I show a peer count of 39.

I have a hunch my problem is stemming from the NAT/Firewall thing, but I have no idea how to troubleshoot it.  I've looked at the FAQ section of this site and gotten nowhere.  Could someone please give me some pointers

Thanks
Trickie_GROUP
I am now having the same problem.

Everything was just working fine until I upgraded my Microsoft software including: Office 2003 and visual Studio.NET.  I did not reinstall the net framework nor the SDK.

I stopped receiving teleports. So I removed and reinstalled terrarium to no avail.  I am considering removing the framework and reinstalling it.

This seems to point towards a serious problem for those creating and distributing .NET applications.  The run time environment seems fragile.  I there anyway to diagnose this problem

I am also behind an xp firewall, but it was working just fine previous to the above software installations.

I am looking forward to playing.....but it would be nice if my toys worked.

any suggestions

Eli
Josh Ledgard
Are you just not receiving teleportations I posted on another thread about a possible DOS attack that a creature assembly could perform underneath of the Terrarium that would block the teleport thread. However, this may not be the case for you.

There is also a network trust issue built into the Terrarium where if you are teleporting out before other peers recognize you as a peer in their *area* then they'll blacklist you for a while, but only about an hour. So I'm guessing that isn't your case either.

Without having access to your exact setup it would be hard to define what is going on.
lock
It worked: but I had to remember to name the build ConnectRemote.....

This is what it returned:

C:\Documents and Settings\Eli\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\ConnectRemote\
ConnectRemote\bin\Debug>ConnectRemote 209.189.203.158 50000 50000
Established outgoing connection to 209.189.203.158 on port 50000
Waiting for response..........
Remote Error: Could Not Establish Callback Socket

Nice utility, thanks.

Sorry to be a bother here.

I am running xp pro and am connected through USB port to a satellite modem.

Eli
cica
To hit some of your points:

1.  The Registration code simply makes a standard web service call out over port 80.  This is strange that the registration process would fail, or any web service call to the server for that matter.

2.  The settings dialog persists to disk and not to the remote server.  Really, the only way to reset this value is to remove it from the config file (remove the entry).  On reload of the Terrarium it will ask you to register again.  Simply changing the value doesn't re-register, it simply sends the new information with Watson failures.

3.  If you can get animals from the reintro, etc.., then that shows the web services are working.  Strange that the registration process doesn't work for you since it uses the same mechanism.  The fact you are getting a peers list is great.

4.  If you are behind any sort of NAT/Firewall then you need to map port 50000 for incoming traffic (receive teleports).  To send you simply need to be able to talk out through port 50000.  Setting the Enable NAT checkbox just disables some code in the Terrarium that would otherwise turn you off, it doesn't actually use a different code-path that helps to enable operation through a NAT device (unless things have changed with the V1.1 client and only Mitch can comment on that).

A lot of people have trouble setting up the Terrarium.  There are a number of options in the form of tools that could at least help users define that they have a problem.  Namely, a small client utility that runs on port 50000 to test sending and receiving data to some server bot that is set up on port 50000 as well to send information back and forth to make things are working going both directions.  If, and this is a big if, I have the time I'll code up such a server and leave it run on my connection and give a download for the troubleshooting client.  While I wanted this code to be embedded in the Terrarium, it should work just as well as a standalone tool that you run and gives you instructions on how you might improve your situation.  The tool is fairly complete, but I need documentation now that details all of the basic error conditions.
Ake
Try compiling and running this.  The command line you should use would be:

ConnectRemote 209.189.203.158 50000 50000

What this will do is establish an outgoing connection on 50000 to a special server I have running.  This server will accept the information you pass and then attempt to call you back to make sure communications is working in both directions.  If any of the processes fail you should get a decent error message or at least be able to toss me your output.  This will help ENSURE that something isn't fishy with the XP Firewall, router/NAT configuration, or whatever else might be the problem.  The next step I guess is to write a small piece of code to investigate your XP firewall settings, but I'm assuming you've already simply turned the thing off.

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Threading;

public class ConnectRemote {
    private static void Main(string[] args) {
        IPAddress remoteIP = IPAddress.Parse(args[0]);
        int remotePort = int.Parse(args[1]);
        int callbackPort = int.Parse(args[2]);

        // Get ready for return communications
        TcpListener listener = new TcpListener(callbackPort);
        listener.Start();

        Socket client = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
        client.Connect(new IPEndPoint(remoteIP, remotePort));
        if ( client.Connected ) {
            Console.WriteLine("Established outgoing connection to {0} on port {1}", remoteIP, remotePort);
            client.Send(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(callbackPort.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)));

            Console.Write("Waiting for response");
            while(true) {
                if ( listener.Pending() ) {
                    Socket peer = listener.AcceptSocket();

                    byte[] b = new byte[peer.Available];
                    peer.Receive(b);

                    Console.WriteLine();
                    Console.WriteLine("Remote Response: {0}", Encoding.ASCII.GetString(b));

                    peer.Close();

                    break;
                } else if ( client.Available > 0 ) {
                    byte[] b = new byte[client.Available];
                    client.Receive(b);

                    Console.WriteLine();
                    Console.WriteLine("Remote Error: {0}", Encoding.ASCII.GetString(b));

                    break;
                } else {
                    Console.Write(".");
                    Thread.Sleep(500);
                }
            }

            client.Close();
        } else {
            Console.WriteLine("Can't establish an outgoing connection to {0} on port {1}", remoteIP, remotePort);
        }

        listener.Stop();
    }
}
teneriffebogan
I mapped port 50000:
netstats shows:
TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
TCP    0.0.0.0:50000          0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

TCP    whitebird:3089         terrariumgame.net:http  ESTABLISHED

I have removed the program
Deleted the xml config file entry
Reinstalled, after rebooting, rebooted again,

upon clicking the ok button in the registration/settings window got:
Problems registering: The underlying connection was closed: an unexpected error occurred on a receive.

clicked ok

game started... showed active peers

then said there was a problem with the server........

I reintroduced some  animals as the server did populate the list.

they teleported out.....then showed up as a teleported in....with the peer to peer request showing red. after it was yellow.

web update is also red, but the rest show green, with a number of requests.

do I have to do somthing to direct terrarium towards the port

A bigger hammer....

More christmas rum.....

Forget it and play with the kid's new puppy.

still stumped,

Eli
EvanHennis
are you behind a server or something

if so, try to run your terrarium On the SERVER.
(make sure u have the right version of the .net framework and terrarium, and also firewall set up correctly)

--------------
usually, the Terrarium Web server works fine. i had the same problem like u, but when i moved my terrarium onto My server, everything goes fine.

hope this helps
m3rch
I forgot to mention in my previous post that my trace window stoped posting any information also, it should have been showing the errors in the essa population. So perhaps this points to where the problem lies.
"The terrarium server is experiencing temporary difficulties. This is probably why you are not receiving any animals. Please bear with us while we get the issue resolved."

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