Solidice.com / Keyclone issues resolved

[blast3r]

omfg. getting the need to recheck license and solidice.com is getting a no reply on pings.



Svpernova09 Edit:

This was the first post so now I'm hijacking it. Solidice.com is down, so keyclone is reporting your license as expired. Don't Panic! You're license isn't actually expired, if you haven't changed anything the problem will fix it self once the server comes back up. Rob is aware of the problem, no need to flood him. Rob's host is also aware of the problem so we just have to wait for the host to fix the issue.

[Mak]

Me too. Glad to hear it's not just me. I was starting to panic!

Hope it gets up soon. I feel...lost...

- Mak

[Dominian]

noes WG in 8 min :(

[Texxar]

Same here. I just bought Keyclone this weekend and started my WoW multiboxing adventures and am starting to get the addict shakes. Does the site go offline often?

[blast3r]

Same here. I just bought Keyclone this weekend and started my WoW multiboxing adventures and am starting to get the addict shakes. Does the site go offline often?

I have only been affected by this a couple of times. It doesn't happen often. I wish there was a way to verify a key with an IP addresss or something (maybe some other way) to let us continue to use keyclone if the auth server isn't available.

[Nisch]

Same here. I just bought Keyclone this weekend and started my WoW multiboxing adventures and am starting to get the addict shakes. Does the site go offline often?

I have only been affected by this a couple of times. It doesn't happen often. I wish there was a way to verify a key with an IP addresss or something (maybe some other way) to let us continue to use keyclone if the auth server isn't available.

Yeah it'd be just as effective to do a once monthly check based off a hardware address.

Of course there are ways to get around it manually, but we won't discuss that here.

[Gurblash]

Just got off the phone with Rob, he's gonna call his host and see whats up. Please stand by for technical difficulties.

[Bot]

i just leave keyclone open constantly and have never been affected by the outages :)

[Gurblash]

same :) lol

[Gurblash]

Response from Rob: The hosts servers are down. No time frame atm :(

[Mak]

Thanks for keeping us updated. I'll just keep checking every hour...half hour...five minutes...30 seconds...

- Mak

[blast3r]

Thanks for calling Rob.

[blast3r]

so does anyone that has a leaderless setup use hotkeynet? if so, mind sharing your script? :)

[bhec7715]

This BBBBLLLOOOOOWWWWWWSSS

[Havelcek]

Yes, this is not good times.

[Batato]

Any Idea how long will be down? and why is our license is expired?

[moji]

aw.... Just when I got all the kinks worked out earlier today. Well, at least for the next 5 hours I'll be at work, and it's not like I don't have solo toons to play.

If you leave it up all the time, do you ever have problems playing solo toons? I assume you have to go in and disable your round robin or dnp keys or something.

[Marathon]

OMG Keyclone has me by the Baby Fark McGee-zax I cant multibox WOW :wacko:

[Gurblash]

Any Idea how long will be down? and why is our license is expired?
Response from Rob: The hosts servers are down. No time frame atm.

The authentication server are located on the server that is currently offline.

[Xar]

Yup, this blows

[genyus]

I just bought it tonight ....Guess I got unlucky

I hope it get back on Soon ! :D

[Dominian]

First time in my 10th long carer of boxing, so i can live with it! :)

Keep up the good work!

[DIllett7799]

So....All I do for fun is box...when I cant box...what else is there t do?

[keyclone]

working on it... sorry about the hiccup (ok, more like complete brain failure...)

[daviddoran]

This is the biggest flaw of keyclone. I'm cool with developers getting paid for their software (I bought 3 copies of KC myself) but leaving such a gaping flaw requiring keyclone to "phone home" to even open is pure fail IMO. At least let the damn program run when the server goes down. I mean, I can't play without it... The reason why I started using KC, was that hotkeynet kept updating and invalidating the previous version, and a couple times the functions got changed and I had to redo everything. I just want the shit to work.

[Svpernova09]

This is the biggest flaw of keyclone. I'm cool with developers getting paid for their software (I bought 3 copies of KC myself) but leaving such a gaping flaw requiring keyclone to "phone home" to even open is pure fail IMO. At least let the damn program run when the server goes down. I mean, I can't play without it... The reason why I started using KC, was that hotkeynet kept updating and invalidating the previous version, and a couple times the functions got changed and I had to redo everything. I just want the shit to work.Most of the multiboxing software phones home. You can't blame a Developer for a host going down, a problem the developer has NO control over. Trust me, I'm very frustrated right now as much as anyone else. but it's unfair to blame the Dev. Blame the host.

[daviddoran]

But I'm still allowed to be pissed.

[bhec7715]

This is the biggest flaw of keyclone. I'm cool with developers getting paid for their software (I bought 3 copies of KC myself) but leaving such a gaping flaw requiring keyclone to "phone home" to even open is pure fail IMO. At least let the damn program run when the server goes down. I mean, I can't play without it... The reason why I started using KC, was that hotkeynet kept updating and invalidating the previous version, and a couple times the functions got changed and I had to redo everything. I just want the shit to work.I'm irritated too. My in-laws are babysitting the kids (this is rare) but I've been using KC 1.5 years and this is the first time I've had this problem so I think he deserves a pass.

edit: That webhost should be shot.

[Svpernova09]

But I'm still allowed to be pissed.Sure. Just remember that 99% of WoW's Tuesday Maintenance, Keyclone's servers are running fine.

[daviddoran]

But I'm still allowed to be pissed.Sure. Just remember that 99% of WoW's Tuesday Maintenance, Keyclone's servers are running fine.True. But at least I can plan around tuesday maintenance, and it usually happens when im at work :()

[Khaldan]

I've only had Keyclone a few months and this is the first problem I've seen so I can't be too annoyed. I'm sure Rob is going to have a mailbox full of inquiries and pleas for help. Unfortunately I contributed one to the pile before I thought to check here.

[DIllett7799]

Lol, same here :( But none the less Rob is a good devloper, just had some bad luck with the servers tonight.

[asonimie]

Nobody has a problem with Rob. We all agree its a wonderful piece of software and he has done a fantastic job as dev support for us.

Don't downplay the fact, however, that the phone home EVERY time could be improved.

[Khaldan]

It looks to be back up. I just pinged the site and Keyclone verified my license.

[Gaffy]

Just started working for me

[Sajuuk]

Just started working for mePraise the lord!



This is the biggest flaw of keyclone. I'm cool with developers getting paid for their software (I bought 3 copies of KC myself) but leaving such a gaping flaw requiring keyclone to "phone home" to even open is pure fail IMO. At least let the damn program run when the server goes down. I mean, I can't play without it... The reason why I started using KC, was that hotkeynet kept updating and invalidating the previous version, and a couple times the functions got changed and I had to redo everything. I just want the shit to work.So now developers should be punished for trying to protect their intellectual property? Is that REALLY what you want to say?

[genyus]

it still says license expired to me :(

[Marathon]

You Rock !!! Totally working for me now !!! :thumbsup:

[genyus]

How long usually does it take for a support email ??

My Keyclone still says expire even tho I bought it tonight.

Or maybe Im in the wrong forum ? Please Indicate me where I could ask.

I allready sent out an email to the email from the software.

[Johalak]

This may be a little late, but to anyone that might still be having problems, try closing down keyclone and restarting it. I just hit recheck button after I saw that the servers were backup, but it still did not validate. I had to restart it in order for it to validate.

[genyus]

I tried restarting my computer,Asking for a transfer(Keep getting and error saying I must contact the support(Which I did))

Help meeehhh !

[mikekim]

Just a quick thought Rob..
perhaps you could look into some sort of cache system where if the hosts are down then the program takes the last status sucsessful connection (this should have a counter so it will only do this once or twice). this way if you have a hosting issue users would be unaware of the problem. i don't know how feasable it would be to implement.

[keyclone]

I tried restarting my computer,Asking for a transfer(Keep getting and error saying I must contact the support(Which I did))
Help meeehhh !G'evening genyus!

your transaction was most likely back logged. please send me your email via PM (or email it to me ... keyclone@solidice.com) and i'll check into the issue immediately.

and yea.. there are a few emails (which i didn't see... until server up. oh boy). no worries.. i'll answer them all.

i've chewed on the hosting people as much as you can... since they are not the noc personnel, just phone drones, there isn't much they can really say. mostly, i made suggestions that they should pass up the chain that should improve reliability (good luck with that).

personally, there is no excuse for server down time like that. the drives are mirrored, so the problem wasn't drive related. therefore, the techs should have yanked the crapped out server, transferred the drives to an identical rackmount waiting for just such an occassion... then booted it. down time should be under 15 minutes. 4-5 hours? just unacceptable. (and no, i have no information whether or not it was hardware related... just that there was a 'flurry of disk activity for a while then the server was unavailable')

edit:
i have received info that it was hardware failure. the time it took to come back up was related to checking the drives.
they did what they could with the situation they had.

[Duese]

The only way around this is redundant authentication servers. One goes down, it can check in with a different one for authentication. Of course, this ain't cheap and is a bit of a pita keeping both servers updated.

[Moorea]

This is the biggest flaw of keyclone. I'm cool with developers getting paid for their software (I bought 3 copies of KC myself) but leaving such a gaping flaw requiring keyclone to "phone home" to even open is pure fail IMO. At least let the damn program run when the server goes down. I mean, I can't play without it... The reason why I started using KC, was that hotkeynet kept updating and invalidating the previous version, and a couple times the functions got changed and I had to redo everything. I just want the shit to work.Most of the multiboxing software phones home. You can't blame a Developer for a host going down, a problem the developer has NO control over. Trust me, I'm very frustrated right now as much as anyone else. but it's unfair to blame the Dev. Blame the host.

Yes you can blame a developer for designing a system which has a single point of failure.

[Gurblash]

Yes you can blame a developer for design a system which has a single point of failure. That single point of failure is to prevent many openings for hackers to steal free copies of his software. All he is doing is protecting his property.

[Moorea]

Yes you can blame a developer for designing a system which has a single point of failure. That single point of failure is to prevent many openings for hackers to steal free copies of his software. All he is doing is protecting his property.

Hackers probably already hacked away the phone home - only legitimate paying users are affected - but that wasn't my point: my point is that if you have to have a lame phone home feature; you can make it resilient to single failure and have at least 2 hosts in 2 different providers to phone home to.

[blast3r]

There is a lot of software (most software) that doesn't have to phone home to ensure license purity. The software is only $20 and I doubt very seriously that there are a million people just waiting for a weakness so they can steal the software. :) This software is for a niche group of people and I doubt there is such a huge risk of theft.

[Havelcek]

To be fair to Rob, this is the first outage I've noticed in a year of using keyclone. Hell of a lot better than WoW's track record =P

[Lokked]

Note: I don't use Keyclone and I realize this isn't the purpose of this thread, but some comments here are absurd.

Have those sharing negative remarks about the creator really managed to live a life not knowing failure in situations where others depend on you? I detect a severe lack of empathy.

[Ridere]

I think if this is the first time most have experienced trouble with Keyclone, then that's pretty good. I don't use it personally, but it does seem like a pretty solid piece of software.



That being said... Software key replication is a pretty important part to boxing. While I don't agree that you need to have a redundant server for validating keys, I think there should be a backup of some sort. Maybe have a heartbeat check in the program. Every hour, or two, it'll go out to check for the license. If it can't connect to the server, it won't return a "failure" of the check, but the hourly check will ensure that if you haven't paid for it, and the servers are running fine, you won't be able to use the software.



That would remove the frustration seen by legitimate customers, and limit "free" time to the so-called hackers to merely Down time + up to 1 hour of free Keyclone.



And like Blast3r and a few others mentioned. If people can write cracks to hack microsoft, adobe, and any other big piece of software, I highly doubt Keyclone is safe. So the inconvenience does tend to affect the paying, legitimate customers.



But I think my idea would actually prove to be rather useful.



I've been thinking about picking up Keyclone for awhile, but I still use hotkeynet for now. haha

[Nisch]

I highly doubt Keyclone is safe.

It's not safe at all. Getting past the repeated check is easy. I think it's ridiculous to have that cause all the paying customers to be without.

It doesn't affect my gameplay as I am hardware, but it does affect my wife would DID purchase Keyclone. That is why I found a way around that repeated authentication for her.

The fact is, if it's software, it is not safe. That's a fact you must face as a developer.

[keyclone]

if your problem is that the server went down and you should be able to continue... then the simple 'hack' would be to have windows block keyclone from getting to the internet. no internet == no server response == should play anyhow? lol.

leaving anything on the local machine wouldn't work, as that would just get copied to all other machines.

as for cracks... sure, you can get a crack... please do. and please, do some banking on your machine as well. i'm sure those pesky keyloggers won't other you.

oh.. and where are the complaints about the call-home in wow? it calls home constantly.

[Nisch]

I agree that one shouldn't trust others and their cracks. This is why I just do it myself.

As for the network blocking, that wouldn't work as your program would receive the "0,0,0"

An alternate would be to use pcap to intercept the web call (you could use LMHOSTS, but you use a direct IP addressing, leaving you down when that IP is down, and not able to reroute with DNS).

The other option is to just reroute the conditional at the time of the license check.

WoW does call home all the time, but it doesn't leave you without being able to play.

[Maxion]

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to play wow if wow was unable to contact the server.

[Moorea]

The point is that blizzard invested a tiny bit in redundancy of servers and you don't want to compound their downtime with keyclone's

[keyclone]

ok.. let's see. in the last 3 years, wow has been down for 8 hours every tuesday. that would be about 1200 hrs of downtime.

during the same 3 years, keyclone might have been down for 10 hours (i don't even think its that high). if anything, blizzard is crushing keyclone time (just kidding :D)

[Nisch]

ok.. let's see. in the last 3 years, wow has been down for 8 hours every tuesday. that would be about 1200 hrs of downtime.

during the same 3 years, keyclone might have been down for 10 hours (i don't even think its that high). if anything, blizzard is crushing keyclone time (just kidding :D)

That's scheduled downtime. Yours comes without warning and leaves people unable to multibox, which is the whole point of their gaming.

If your downtime just happaned to fall on WoW's.......this probably wouldn't be an issue.

[Moorea]

That's scheduled downtime. Yours comes without warning and leaves people unable to multibox, which is the whole point of their gaming.

If your downtime just happaned to fall on WoW's.......this probably wouldn't be an issue.
^ This and



I just don't agree that someone has bought a stand alone application that can't operate without the author first saying its ok to use it. Each.and.every.time.

^ This

[Svpernova09]

That's scheduled downtime. Yours comes without warning and leaves people unable to multibox, which is the whole point of their gaming.

If your downtime just happaned to fall on WoW's.......this probably wouldn't be an issue.
^ This and



I just don't agree that someone has bought a stand alone application that can't operate without the author first saying its ok to use it. Each.and.every.time.

^ This
Offer something intelligent to the discussion or don't even bother posting. QFT type posts are pointless and a waste of database space.

As for an application calling home? I don't mind because I'm a legitimate customer. I was affected by this last downtime, but I didn't mind because it's a solid product with solid support and I understand shit happens. If you don't understand that shit happens that is outside of 1 single person's control, then you've got far more to worry about than not being able to multibox. The original issue that caused this thread is long fixed and over, if you have ANY issues or concerns with Keyclone, please take them up in the Software section, or If you just want to QQ about it phoning home, please feel free to Contact the developer directly.

Thread closed,

Thanks.