Fantasy Grounds II Network Issues - With WORKAROUND

For information about the problem, you can review the post here: Unexpected Website Downtime - 12/28/2009

We will hopefully have the issue fully resolved sometime tomorrow, but there is a manual fix for those who have a game scheduled. *Warning* This requires a little bit of technical ability and this fix should be "undone" when the issue is fully resolved. We plan on moving servers at some point in the near future, so you will not want these hard-coded values to be stored on your system long-term.

Since the problem is due to DNS, you have to map the URL domain and sub-domain names to the necessary IP address. Our host is supposed to do that for us but they did something which screwed that up. The solution is to re-map those locally on your computer by editing the local hosts file. This should work for most PC environments which do not use a proxy server. (Most non-work PCs)

1. Open notepad.exe with Administrator privileges (important for Vista and Windows 7 PCs with UAC enabled.)
2. Select File | Open | C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
3. Add the info in the box below to the file and select Save As
4. Be sure to change the dropdown that says ".txt" for the extension to "Any Files"

Contents of the file after the edit:

Code:

---

# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97    rhino.acme.com          # source server
#      38.25.63.10    x.acme.com              # x client host

# THESE ARE TEMPORARY FOR ENABLING FANTASY GROUNDS II TO WORK
# WITHOUT DNS FUNCTIONALITY
77.240.21.133        www.fantasygrounds.com
77.240.21.133        patch.fantasygrounds.com
77.240.21.133        server.fantasygrounds.com
77.240.21.133        www.smiteworks.com

---

After the file is saved, the alias retrieival, external IP retrieval and Test process should all begin working immediately. If not, please see the troubleshooting below:

TROUBLESHOOTING

1. You may need to edit the properties of the file so it is not Read Only
2. You did not launch Notepad.exe with sufficient privileges to edit the file
3. You saved the file, but notepad appended a ".txt" extension to the file
4. Your system may be set up to use a proxy, in which case it will ignore these settings
5. You can also try "pinging" each of the names in this list to ensure they are correct and that they are working as expected.

This work-around should no longer be necessary. If you want to undo these changes, simply prefix each line with a # character or delete those additional lines from your hosts file.