The Bug Fix Chronicles - Port is Closed

I am violently upset right now and the reason was 100% avoidable. Early morning on the 18th, the 20 server went entirely offline. Except it didn’t. I could still access 20, in fact I didn’t realize something was wrong for a while, because I was playing on 20. Well, after confirming that the 20 DCS server was in fact inaccessible to everyone but me, I started digging into where the loss in communication was. The DCS website could see the server, so I had originally assumed ED was to blame as they often are, and we hunted that avenue for a while. Except I had missed a crucial symptom. SRS wasn’t working either. That particular issue could only have popped up had the port forward failed. So upon doing some more testing, we discovered that literally every port on the network except for the defaults was closed.

20’s ISP since day 1 (and I mean literally day 1. We used it in the barracks back in the ancient times) has been Xfinity. We’ll probably continue to use them, because on a contract level they’re fantastic. High speeds, good prices, and they have yet to screw me on contracts or hidden fees, anything like that. But their hardware is dogshit. Their included router is frequently buggy. Their customer support is practically nonexistent, and that’s the part that really fucked us today. When we identified the port forward issue, we attempted to contact Xfinity support, except that we couldn’t. There entire technical support team seems to be replaced with a crappy chatbot.

This was just way too much for me to tolerate. Having a day long outage because of bad firmware and just having to sit and wait for a fix is absolutely unacceptable. ESPECIALLY, when there are people actively trying to play the server. I have no idea, why this is supposed to be acceptable to Xfinity but I’m fucking done with it. Still not dropping the ISP because there’s just no better option, but we are taking Xfinity hardware out of the equation. Parts have already been ordered, they’ll arrive by the 20th. We are replacing the entirety of Marge’s network infrastructure to an entirely in house solution. It’ll be our own routers, our own modems. Now when our systems go down we’ll actually be able to fix it.

Not that I’m expecting many more outages. New hardware has some damn good reliability ratings.

… Fuck I’m pissed off right now.