While you could get complex and have PHP directly connected into your game, the easiest and perhaps best in terms of stability would be to simply have a file like "serverstatus.php" which is updated every 60 seconds by your game server.

Something like:

<?$LastUpdate = A timestamp of when this file was last written by the game server$Population = blah//Other game statsfunction IsServerUp(){  return ( time()-120 < $LastUpdate );}?> 

Then in your website scripts you can just include_once("serverstatus.php");

quote:Original post by RonHiler
That's interesting! Yes, I like the idea.

However, I think there is a snag. My game server sits in my office, and my web server is somewhere on the east coast

How would I have my game server write to a file that is on my web server?

If they are on machines connected only by an unprotected wan (like the Internet) then I would suggest not trying to write a file remotely (you could do it a secure manner, but it would require that you write a lot of stuff into your game, like a complete HTTPS client from scratch).

Instead I would suggest that you have a php script on your webserver that either writes the file, or writes the details to a database like MySQL (the database approach would allow you to do interesting things like have uptime reports and such) using parameters provided by a form (you don't need to have the form anywhere, only know what the value names are).

A very simple way to make it secure would be this:

Make a mini HTTP client on your game server (it doesn't need to understand much, just how to send a GET command which includes form parameters, not very hard over TCP) and have it send the various details (server status and such) as form data. For (easy to impliment, fairly strong) security two more details should be used. The first is the game server time (this is compared to the reported game server time of the last update. If it is equal or less the information sent is rejected). The second piece of information is the MD5 hash of all the previous information (server stats and server time) plus an additional, secret value (a key of whatever length you choose). When recieved by the php script it attempts to recreate this hash value itself (by combining the server stats and key and using the MD5() function on the resulting string). If the hash provided by the client and the hash generated by the php script don't match the information is rejected as false. For added security you could also have it check the IP address of the client and compare it to the known IP address of the game server.


[edited by - michalson on November 26, 2003 7:26:47 PM]

Why not use the socket functions built into PHP to connect to the game server every time a user requests the page, and if the server responds then that means the server is up?

http://jamesthornton.com/php/english/ref.sockets.html (the php site is down right now)

[edited by - Firewalker on November 26, 2003 7:37:57 PM]