After being depressed at the state of non-Jiggly NS, I investigated the issues some more. I talked to Asmodee, leader of EvolveNS who is pretty knowledgeable about these things. Here's the conversation:
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Hey Asmodee, you might remember me, I pugged with Evolve just a couple times a summer or two ago. Anyway I've been kinda inactive lately, but my home server "Jigglypuff's NS Jigglyroom" is having these strange issues wherein clients get kicked after playing for just a few minutes. In between the times I played on it working and not working was the big "NS Classic mode getting broken" fiasco. Anyway, I was wondering if you have heard of random kicking as an issue and any fixes you may have.
Thanks!
Long Live NS!
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Asmodee:
A couple of days ago steam was having issues for a few hours that were affecting all HL1 mods, which may be what you're referring to. People would just randomly get disconnected after 5-10 minutes. I forget what the error message was, but it was clearly a steam error.
I'm not aware of any currently running problems and I have no problems on myserver, so that leads to server specific issues.
I never really played on jiggly due to my ping (I'm east coast). Do you happen to know what message appears in console? If it's an svc_bad was the last message an AmmoPickup msg? This seems to be a common problem which can be increased due to plugins, which if I recall, Jiggly doesn't really run any.
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Me:
I get disconnected with a popup box:
You have been disconnected from the server.
Reason: Error verifying STEAM UserID Ticket(server was
unable to contact the authentication server).
So, the last time I played, everyone was reporting getting the boot after playing for 4-5 minutes, as I just tested today.
The last couple lines from my console:
 | | |
| Code: Error verifying STEAM UserID Ticket(server was unable to contact the authentication server). Host_EndGame: Server disconnected | |
| | |
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Asmodee:
This (while is probably obvious from the message) is due to a connection issue between the game server and steam. This is often just a (temporary) steam error. But the internet as a whole has many many networks comprising it with many many different routes and it is possible that random network issues between the server and steam (of which neither the server's network nor steam's network is to blame) will cause the problem.
If this persists over the course of a day, happens at certain times of the day over several days, then I would look to the network the game server is on. I do not believe this is a problem with the game server itself, unless the machine the game server is hosted on has some sort of firewall or other packet filtering that may be interferring.
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Me:
Thanks for the help. But, yes, this has been going on for a few months now. But your suspicions point towards the network the server is on?
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Asmodee:
It is one of the following:
1) network the server is directly connected to
2) a network between the server and steam (but not steam specifically)
3) the actual computer the game server software is running on
It is possible that if there is any firewall, antivirus, or any sort of black listing software running that it may be inadvertently affecting the connection to steam. I'd actually start with looking at 3 as that's the easiest. Is Jiggly Puff a rented server from a game host, or does the owner of Jiggly Puff have complete control of the server? If it's from a game host then it's unlikely that there is antivirus or firewalls on there that would interfere with steam as they'd have problems with other customers, however if it's not a game server rental, but instead a complete server rental, then that may be the case.
