Microsoft - Classic Hearts   

I have been locked out of Classic Hearts for two days. After having 
played over 9,000 games, I am having severe withdrawal pains.

What's going on?

Jerome R.

PS from Jerome's grandson: I did some checking, and this seems to be a 
very odd error.. I noticed that the sign in for the Zone seems to go 
through a new domain (Live.com), after a redirect. This is where it 
fails. I tried emptying the cache in IE to no avail, as well as making 
sure nothing that was being accessed was banned by my anti-spyware software.

I finally figured that the packets seem to be getting dropped somewhere 
outside of my home network. A ping timed out (although I realize this 
could be due to firewall restrictions on their end), and the last 
identifiable hop on a traceroute was a cox.net domain name.

Could the server (or maybe its servicing routers) have kicked the 
bucket, perhaps due to a huge load on that Windows Live thing, or a DDoS 
attack? Or could it be this machine?

date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 16:03:47 -0700   author:   Jerome R.

Re: Microsoft - Classic Hearts   

Jerome R. wrote:
> I have been locked out of Classic Hearts for two days. After having 
> played over 9,000 games, I am having severe withdrawal pains.
> 
> What's going on?
> 
> Jerome R.

You might look here for help:

http://mvps.org/nibblesnbits/EnterRooms.html

> PS from Jerome's grandson: I did some checking, and this seems to be a 
> very odd error.. I noticed that the sign in for the Zone seems to go 
> through a new domain (Live.com), after a redirect. This is where it 
> fails. I tried emptying the cache in IE to no avail, as well as making 
> sure nothing that was being accessed was banned by my anti-spyware 
> software.
> 
> I finally figured that the packets seem to be getting dropped somewhere 
> outside of my home network. A ping timed out (although I realize this 
> could be due to firewall restrictions on their end), and the last 
> identifiable hop on a traceroute was a cox.net domain name.

Those packets are blocked by the Zone servers.

> Could the server (or maybe its servicing routers) have kicked the 
> bucket, perhaps due to a huge load on that Windows Live thing, or a DDoS 
> attack? Or could it be this machine?

It seems to be working fine.  There has been some trouble with updated 
files recently, but I believe that has been corrected.

-- 
+Elmo_Tech

date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:28:38 -0400   author:   +Elmo_Tech lid

Re: Microsoft - Classic Hearts   

+Elmo_Tech,

Thank you very much for the webpage you pointed to - everything's 
working fine now.

Jerome R.

+Elmo_Tech wrote:
> Jerome R. wrote:
>> I have been locked out of Classic Hearts for two days. After having 
>> played over 9,000 games, I am having severe withdrawal pains.
>>
>> What's going on?
>>
>> Jerome R.
> 
> You might look here for help:
> 
> http://mvps.org/nibblesnbits/EnterRooms.html
> 
>> PS from Jerome's grandson: I did some checking, and this seems to be a 
>> very odd error.. I noticed that the sign in for the Zone seems to go 
>> through a new domain (Live.com), after a redirect. This is where it 
>> fails. I tried emptying the cache in IE to no avail, as well as making 
>> sure nothing that was being accessed was banned by my anti-spyware 
>> software.
>>
>> I finally figured that the packets seem to be getting dropped 
>> somewhere outside of my home network. A ping timed out (although I 
>> realize this could be due to firewall restrictions on their end), and 
>> the last identifiable hop on a traceroute was a cox.net domain name.
> 
> Those packets are blocked by the Zone servers.
> 
>> Could the server (or maybe its servicing routers) have kicked the 
>> bucket, perhaps due to a huge load on that Windows Live thing, or a 
>> DDoS attack? Or could it be this machine?
> 
> It seems to be working fine.  There has been some trouble with updated 
> files recently, but I believe that has been corrected.
>

date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 20:37:37 -0700   author:   Jerome R.