Feedback on regularCheck use in latest OA/CO by server admins needed

Pretext

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Some bed time reading before-hand, if needed:

server.cfg and Server Side Scripting

In short basically regularCheck checks the users addons every once in a while

during a mission.

If you want to get more context, search with the keyword 'regularCheck' and

check the last two pages of the search hits.

The problem

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Back in a1 days when introduced, regularCheck caused some people to time

out and getting kicked from the server.

Maybe it also had an impact on the server performance - especially with new

players joining (JIP) and large number of players.

This lead to most server admins disable the check by:

regularCheck = "{}";// aka add some nonsense to make it not work

Now as it turns out to open a way for people to cheat on the server.

While it is obvious in theory, there are known ways to abuse this too nowadays.

The problem - part 2

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The above reason, as well as many people and dedicated server guides have

suggested to use 'regularCheck = "{}";' lead to most servers having this

setting active now - in other words they have regularCheck disabled.

The solution?

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The question is now, if people can activate regularCheck again, without the timeout

issues from back in the day or other negative impacts on the server/players.

Feedback

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If you want to make the game less cheat prone, please participate in testing

and sharing your experience with regularCheck active.

ToDo: open the server.cfg and set:

regularCheck = "";

To have it working you also need to have the sig system active:

verifySignatures = 1;

Please gather feedback from players, if you can see any negative impact

or a rise in people getting kicked (with sig check timeout).

Important note

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Unfortunately it appears the client gets only the unspecific message:

"You were kicked off the game."

And the server console.log only shows:

"Player Test disconnected."

So in other words it is rather hard to gather statistics on the number of

people kicked with timeout.

What will be default behaviour if you don't have a regularCheck statement in your server.cfg? Would that be the same as having regularCheck = ""; ?

I think so.

regularCheck = ""; or no definition should be the same.

So no one cares about server security and protection from cheats?

We've been using signature verification from the start, without any regularCheck statement (i.e. with regularCheck active), and only on rare occasions we get people kicked from the server during games. Reliability of the client-server connection seems to be the only reason for signature verification to be of impact.

With having it disabled, we got no kicks at all.

So far from testing it some days, people get kicked regularly during the mission.

Doesn't matter if OA/CO, without or without addons, 1.57 or 1.58.

It seems tabbing out of the game increases the changes to get dropped as well.

What should I do to activate regular checking in v1.59 with version 2 signatures.

checkfiles[]={"dta\bin.pbo","a10\config.bin"}; Outdated - replaced by

or

regularCheck="{0 checkFile _this}";

So I don't need to change settings and regular checking is turned on by default?

regularCheck = ""; or not having it defined at all makes it active.

+

verifySignatures = 2;//for v2 sigs only permitted