Clients get disconnected And need to change username before they can reconnect

[damned]

it absolutely could be other things.

the error is almost certainly coming from your end though as it affects multiple players.
are you using wifi? if you ping google.com -n 1000 how many dropouts do you get?
what is your campaign name? does it have any extended characters (German letters or special characters) in the name?
are you running any software firewall?
what other firewall options do you have in your router?
does this occur if only one player connects and you dont connect another player until the first players desktop has loaded?

if this were a general software issue with FG there would generally be other corroborating reports so its far more likely that it is something specific to your setup - be it network, computer, naming convention or something else or some combination of things...

[DWeiers]

I'm quite sure it comes from my end. Otherwise, as you stated, there would be more people having the issue and I most probably would have found some thread about it on the forums.

So far it's just strange. after all we could live with it. We know how to work around the issue and it shouldn't occur too often after everyone has downloaded the ruleset. I just would like to know what it is or, even better, how to fix it.

- I'm not using WiFi, my computer is connected via LAN cable. I kept pinging google.com while I wrote this post (for about 5-10 mins) and had 5.5% packet loss.
- the campaign names do not include any special characters. Only standard characters and spaces.
- I'm not running any software firewall
- I don't have any firewall settings in my router. It just says that there is some protection in that devices behind the router are not visible from outside my network unless I explicitly open up some port. This basically is just a very basic description of NAT labeled as firewall. I have port-forwarding activated for ports 1802 and 1803 (TCP and UDP), though, and the connection test within FG return success.
- it occurs with only one player connecting and it occurred with two players connecting. So far I only once had two players connecting at all, so I'll have to test this out in more detail.

As I write this I come upon a question. If a player own the ruleset we are using in a campaign, will his FG download it from the host? Or will he use the version thats already installed in his FG? So if we can't get the problem solved and my players get too annoyed by it would buying the ruleset in question prevent their machines from trying to download it from me?

[damned]

5.5% packet loss while you are typing on a forum is massive. packet loss on a healthy network should be under 1%. at those packet loss levels this could also be responsible for your issues. it is quite unusual to have such high packet loss on a cabled network - Id investigate that for sure.
you only need tcp 1802 and no udp ports forwarded but this will not actually be causing you any issues.
i believe that it does still work that way - locally owned modules do not need to get downloaded... id have to confirm that but Im sure it is the case.

[LordEntrails]

Try switching out your cables for new/different ones and see what your packet loss is (you can also try a different connection port). If it's still high you may want to check with your ISP to see if they can trouble shoot it. Myself, other than switching cables/hardware I don't know how to trouble shoot packet loss.

[damned]

the first step in troubleshooting the packet loss is to have two cmd/dos windows open and have one doing a continuous ping to google or another highly available website/server and the other to be continuously pinging your router.
if both have packet loss the issue is on your LAN - cable, network card, router etc but if the loss only occurs on the internet host then you need to discuss with your ISP.

[DWeiers]

Okay I just did a long time test.

As damned suggested I started two terminal windows. One pinging my router, the other pinging google (since I live in germany i used google.de for that). I just kept both windows running in the background for the last about 10 hours.

the local ping (pinging my router) had 0.0 % packet loss (not a single packet was lost during the whole test)
the ping to google.de had 3.9 % packet loss.

Since the tasks were running the whole day and our network usage during the day (internally as well as externally) was as normal this test
1st hopefully gives a good representation of the overall network situation and
2nd gives me the impression that if there is a network problem it's most probably not in house.

looks like I'll have to have a chat with my ISP. Reason for the packet loss could be the kind of my connection. We only have a rather limited connection here (16 mbps down, 2 mbps up). So I'm using a special Hybrid connection offered by my ISP. Its actually a combination of DSL and LTE. The two channels are bundled within my router and on the network side by the ISP. This boosts our connection considerably (60 mbps down, 30 mbps up). Maybe it's that special connection thats responsible for some of the packet losses.

On the other hand I never had any trouble with my connection so far. Sometimes it's a little bit quicker, sometimes it takes a little longer, but overall I'm rather quite happy with it. I never (for example) had problems with interrupted or broken downloads, VOIP calls, Videochats or the like. I don't do online-gaming though (apart from FantasyGrounds which seems to run quite stable once everything is running).

What do you think, might the packet loss be responsible for my problem (the clients machines crashing after downloading the rulesets)?

[Andraax]

LTE is a form of WiFi, and is therefore subject to high packet loss. Is there any way to turn off the LTE portion while hosting a game?

[DWeiers]

Well, I just checked the settings of my router and yes. I can turn LTE off. In fact there is a quite granular control of LTE usage possible. I can turn it off for specific devices on my network as well as for traffic running through specific ports or traffic to/from specific domains. I set up a rule to route traffic to google.de via DSL only and did a 5min ping test … 0.0% packet loss.

I will check with my players. maybe we can do some testing while routing FGs traffic (traffic on port 1802) through DSL only. We'll see if that solves the issue.

[Andraax]

You'll want to have your players clear their caches as well, to force fresh downloads. They might still have corrupted data in their cache...

[damned]

Although clearing cache will force a fresh download of everything... so one player at a time.
Its also possible that this type of service just doesnt do ping very well but is reliable for TCP connections... interested to see the results...