Comments by FergusDuniho
Grand Apothecary Chess-Classic. Very large Board variant obtained trough tinkering with known games.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The labels w and W are using paths that do not exist. The value for $dir should be an absolute relative path, not one whose value depends on another path value already being set. The value "/graphics.dir/alfaerie/" specifies a specific directory, but "../graphics.dir/alfaerie/" does not, or it specifies the wrong one, such as "/play/graphics.dir/alfaerie/". While "../" should not be used in $dir, it may be used in the location of a specific piece, because this will be relative to the absolute value in $dir. For example, w may be "../alfaeriemisc/compounds/%zebrawazir.gif".
the idea behind the Play-Test Applet is that it would make things as easy as riding a bicycle, where otherwise they are as complex as assembling your own car from parts, and learning how to drive it.
That's not quite correct. The alternative to using the Play-Test Applet will often just involve copying a preset that already works, writing FEN code for the board, assigning piece labels and notation to the correct pieces, and saving. As long as a game uses pieces already programmed in the fairychess include file, has a fixed setup, and mainly follows the rules of Chess, it should be easy enough to create a programmed preset for it without knowing how to program.
The server never crashed. I was simply unable to boot it back up after attempting a reboot. For those who don't know, this is because the host's website was down, which left me without the ability to access the control panel for the VPS. The host is now back online, and I now have a second VPS with a different company, which has been assigned to the chessvariants.org domain. I will now work on backing up my websites to the other server.
Please back it up ASAP!
I copied a backup of the files and the database to the backup server. When I extracted the tar file, it overwrote the .htaccess file, which caused chessvariants.org to go to chessvariants.com. I will have to rewrite the .htaccess file so that the same file can work properly on both servers. Then I'll be able to test that the database and pages are working correctly over there.
I can't access my game that was interrupted. I hope that timed-out games (due to the site being down) will be playable soon.
It appears that the problem with your game affects only Chu Shogi, and it has nothing to do with the game being interrupted, as I encountered the same problem when I tried to simply move pieces in Chu Shogi. What happens is that the page stops displaying partway through the menu, and it doesn't give me any clear indication of what is wrong. It looks like this is going to be a problem for Adam DeWitt to solve, as it stems from his chu settings file.
The new server is running PHP 8. So, I have updated some scripts over there to work with PHP 8, and I have copied the updated versions to the main server. These include the following:
- 404.php
- footer.php
- ads/adlocale.php
- index/commentsinc.php
- index/database-funcs.php
- index/displayusersubmission.php
- index/fpd-indexing-funcs.php
- login/header.php
- play/pbm/play.php
One change is that {curly brackets} may no longer be used to specify characters within a string. [Square brackets] must be used instead, as they are already used for array elements. The other is that parentheses must now be used to specify the order of evaluation for nested ?: statements.
I will check more pages later to see if any more scripts need updating.
I have made additional changes to the following scripts on both servers:
- footer.php
- index/database-funcs.php
- index/drawemail.php
- index/editcomment.php
- index/listcomments.php
- index/login-funcs.php
- index/randgame.php
- play/pbm/drawdiagram.php
- play/pbm/logs.php
- play/pbm/play.php
I still see time on the clocks, and I already gave additional time to all interrupted timed games. I'll do some testing later if he still hasn't moved.
McCooey's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board, made out of hexes. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]My opponent sent an email to me saying he cannot move in the following log:
He's in check and has few legal moves. Also, the ASCII diagram he is using will not display legal moves or allow moving with the mouse. I was able to get as far as previewing a move after changing the rendering method. Not being him, I couldn't go any further.
UPDATE: Upon further testing, I found no problem with being able to move. I created a test log that just changed userids, and I successfully moved. Since the log had no time controls, the time the site spent offline had no effect on anything.
I made a test copy of one of these games, and I successfully moved in it. If Oisin had around two days left, that's consistent with him having less than a day now, because the site has been back online for a few days already. Tell him to move before his time runs out.
Testing whether posting here meets same error as posting on new server.
I have set up some cron jobs to do backups with rsync. On this server, rsync will create hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups. These are in case it's important to revert a change to a script or page. Editors with access to the server can find these in /home/chessvariants/backups/.
The new server has a cron job to make a daily backup of the public_html directory on this server. I set up an SSH key pair to allow it to do this without a password. This will copy the /public_html/ for chessvariants.com to that for chessvariants.org. This is expected to happen at midnight EST. To be sure of what time it does it, I'll check the timestamp on the /public_html/ directory tomorrow, since I also made the script use the touch command on it when it is done updating. I still have not added commands for backing up the database. It will be important to do both together to keep their backups in sync.
It depends on a feature of MariaDB 10, but when I restored the server earlier this year, MariaDB 10 was frequently losing the connection to the database, and MariaDB 5 proved more reliable. So, I switched to MariaDB 5 and manually removed the details that required 10. On the new server, I have installed Rocky Linux 8, PHP 8, and MariaDB 10. Since it also has reverse DNS, which should make email more likely to be delivered, I have plans to make it the main server when everything is working correctly on it. For now, I have to update scripts to work with PHP 8. The new server has less storage space, but it has more than enough for the site. It has less RAM, but this server usually doesn't use even half the available RAM. Both sites have 4 cores, and the new VPS uses faster CPUs. Although the new server is on chessvariants.org, it will not support comment search until I add support for this back into the database. To start with, I will look into updating to MariaDB 10 on this server.
The touch command was used on the new server's /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory at 12:00:14 AM EST. So, the automated daily backup worked when it was expected to. I'll look into including a backup of the database into the same script today. But since there are some different files in the folders for the database on each server, I want to fix that by making them both use the same version of MariaDB.
My attempt to update chessvariants.com to MariaDB 10 has not been successful, and I have been unable to revert to MariaDB 5.5 without errors. So, chessvariants.com is currently without a working database. At least I made a backup and copied it to chessvariants.org. If the problem on chessvariants.com continues, I might not continue with HostSlayer. As long as I have things backed up on RackNerd, I may try reinstalling the OS on HostSlayer. But for now, I have floaters in my eyes, and I need to have lunch.
Since I haven't gotten MariaDB to work on the original server, I switched the domains of the servers. However, there are still things to fix, and I still have to deal with the original server.
There appears to be some kind of corruption from the MariaDB 10 installation that is preventing a reinstallation of MariaDB 5.5 from working. When I check its status after reinstalling version 5.5, it says "Failed to start MariaDB 10.6.4 database server." I expect I will have to reinstall CentOS, but I don't want to get it started right now, because it is late. Unfortunately, the new VPS also seems to be having issues with MariaDB 10. It frequently loses connection with the MySQL server, and I have to refresh a page a few times before it connects.
Are there any plans to restore this functionality?
I tried to yesterday and failed. I have not been able to get MariaDB 10 to work reliably on either server, HostSlayer or RackNerd. It used to work before I tried updating the HostSlayer VPS to Rocky Linux via updating to CentOS 8 first. So, maybe there is some setting that has to be corrected. For now, chessvariants.com runs on HostSlayer with CentOS 7, PHP 7, and MariaDB 5.5, while chessvariants.org runs on RackNerd with Rocky Linux 8, PHP 8, and MariaDB 10. Until I can get things working correctly on the new RackNerd VPS, I will continue to use MariaDB 5.5, and comment searching will remain disabled.
Pandemonium (Surajang修羅場). Capablanca chess + Crazyhouse.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Try using only alphanumeric and punctuation characters found in ASCII in your file names. Korean letters may not be recognized by all software.
On my iPad, Safari's Reader mode is skipping the whole Pieces section. Without Reader mode, things look fine in both Safari and Chrome. I also tried Firefox's Reader mode on my Likebook Mars. It did not skip the Pieces section, though it did mess up your ASCII diagram.
It might be. It looks like Safari's Reader mode makes inappropriate decisions about what to exclude. In another page I looked at, it showed the Pieces section but skipped the Rules section. My advice would be to not use its Reader mode on this site. It should be unnecessary anyway, since mobile pages here leave out sidebar ads.
I fixed the problem by no longer enclosing each section in SECTION tags.
Okay, I closed the A tags, and now the text is no longer red in regular mode, and it's no longer blue in Reader mode.
I now have a script set up that runs from the backup server to make daily backups of both the /home/chessvariants/public_html/ directory and the chessvariants database every midnight at Eastern Standard Time. The script looks like this, but with the actual database password. It doesn't need the server password, because it is using an SSH key pair to connect.
#1/bin/bash
mv /root/chessvariants.sql /root/chessvariant-backup.sql
ssh [email protected] mysqldump --opt --user=root --password=XXXXXX chessvariants > /root/chessvariants.sql
/usr/bin/rsync -ae ssh --delete [email protected]:/home/chessvariants/public_html/ /home/chessvariants/public_html/
touch /home/chessvariants/public_html/
mysql --password=XXXXXX chessvariants < /root/chessvariants.sql25 comments displayed
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I haven't used it that way since I had Windows 95. When I did, I arranged with another person regarding the time and game we would play together, and I believe I was in communication with him while setting up the connection for Zillions-of-Games. But I do not remember the steps we went through to do that. Also, back then, I had a dial-up internet account. I now have broadband, which works differently, and I don't know if that will make a difference.