The Mud Pager Service

[Skorpian]

I have created a web site that mud owners can post their muds on, not as an
advertisement, but as a way for players to inform the admins if their mud
has crashed, eg. I go to the site, post my mud. One day my mud crashes, and
I am at the movies. My players log online to the web site, and click on a
few buttons that will send either an SMS message, email, ICQ, MSN, or AIM to
the admin so they know the mud has crashed and to attend to is ASAP.

The owners are able to specify what they would like the alert sent to
(SMS, email, ICQ, MSN, or AIM) when they sign up. As my intentions are not
to start up something like TMC, the mud's address and port will NOT be
posted on the web site. There will also be a feature very soon to check if
the mud is
just down for the specific player (a router could be down etc.), or for
everyone.

The address for this web site is http://themps.cjb.net/

If you would like to help, please email me.

[Everett Feldt]

Once again restating an earlier post, a cron job would be much more
efficient at getting the mud restarted.

"Skorpian" <nexu...@subdimension.com> wrote in message
news:xp7_7.645$9u6....@news-server.bigpond.net.au...

[Skorpian]

It isnt - I've had it happen before where it keeps starting up processes and
cant connect to those so it starts more.

"Everett Feldt" <eve...@aikido.cx> wrote in message
news:Onv_7.43875$K36.15...@news1.rdc1.va.home.com...

[Acius]

Everett Feldt wrote:
> Once again restating an earlier post, a cron job would be much more
> efficient at getting the mud restarted.

<snip>

That's true *if* the cron job works every time. It doesn't always;
sometimes you have a bug in your code that prevents the MUD from
starting a second time. Even harder to detect in a cron job are bugs
which prevent players from getting past the login screen (i.e. a logic
error in the connect code in player.c for an LP-Mud). Sometimes it'll
work for old players, but not for new players (e.g. when a feature has
been added and you forgot to initialize variables for the new players --
again, this can happen in LP), so the admin's might think everything's
Ok, but no one new can sign on.

A cron job (or similar method) to auto-restart the MUD covers controlled
shutdowns or unstable code that crashes on its own, and for these it is
a good idea to have one. However, it is far from being a catch-all. If
you have a MUD so stable that it never crashes except when you tell it
to, feel free not to use his page. But for the rest of us, this might work.

-- Acius

[Everett Feldt]

ok first of all you seem to be confusing terminology, there is a big
difference between a mud crash, and a mud that has bugs that allow players
to not login. If the mud crashes do to mud instability, system instability,
or power hiccups not caught by an ups, then a cron job will do fine for
bringing your mud back online. This page might be helpful for players
alerting you of a bug, but is , imo useless for the purpose he described.

[Tom Whiting]

Even for those who've got stable muds it might not be a bad idea.
Not all servers allow crontab entries. I know that betterbox doesn't, and I'm
sure there's a few others that don't as well. That's both a good and a bad
thing, as the average mudder doesn't have a clue as to how to write a
bash/perl script to check if their mud is up or not.