On-line engine blitz tourney February

[Joost Buijs]

The 'Lasker' chess server software is very poorly written, uninitialized varables and dangling pointers everywhere, since I don't want to spend a lot of time to find out what the culprit is, it's probably wise to quit with this tradition completely.
It was fun for as long as it lasted.

Joost

please don't quit Joost, I think this tradition is awesome!

a chess server is only software. so I guess it can be replaced, if not, assuming
it's open source, then it can be fixed.

I guess there are no logs so it's impossible to track what exact input caused the crash?

I only found lasker chess server source on josh shriver's github, I guess that's not it? https://github.com/jshriver/lasker

The server itself didn't save any logs, but in syslog I can see that mamer got the command "listtourneygames" and a fraction of a second later chessd caused an exeption.

The version of the server I originally used is this one: https://github.com/ddugovic/capablanca
Which is not very different from the HGM version that is on Joshua's github.

I had to make some patches in the past because the server crashed due to uninitialized local variables, after this it worked seven years without problems (I remember one crash many years back). Now it suddenly does not seem to work anymore, my feeling is that it happened after the upgrade to Linux Mint 22.3, and that it is a problem in the server software that now comes to light.

Yesterday I was a little depressed because the server crashed for the second time in a row, when I have some time to spare I will take another look at it.

[jshriver]

I only found lasker chess server source on josh shriver's github, I guess that's not it? https://github.com/jshriver/lasker

That source was a fairly early version of the codebase that HGM was running, haven't checked to see if it's been updated. I believe HGM had done some changes, namely adding variant support if memory serves. It worked for a year maybe two, back when I was running the OICS 24/7 computer server. Basically I had a couple machines running all the time and wrote a perl script to connect and control mamer to auto add any (C) account who was online. Was fun and had some activity. But it, like the torrent site, I unfortunately had to shutdown.

From my understanding the code was originally an older version of FICS pre-ICC split, hense mamer bugs that FICS had fixed but not released.

Sorry to see this go but understand. Recently connected to FICS for nostalgia reasons and the times have changed. There is always lichess as we move forward.

Joost if you would be willing to make a tar of the server and give me a copy I'd very much like to see the codebase and layout. Who knows.