Invalid authentication in the Cloud

demid

Hi!

I'm facing a strange behaviour during master server to game server switch: *sometimes* I'm getting an error

The appId this client sent is unknown on the server (Cloud). Check settings. If using the Cloud, check account.

which is caused by InvalidAuthentication error code in the NetworkingPeer class. I've added extra mAppId output just before this DebugReturn line and it says I have a correct AppId.
I'm using a custom authentication denying anonymous access and rejecting all clients if service is unavailable. When my custom authentication response returns a ResultCode different from 1 I get a corresponding error and OnCustomAuthenticationFailed is called. But when I return 1 the behaviour is non deterministic. One more thing to mention is that I'm not storing the AppId on the client - I get it from my web server at runtime. So, my Photon settings are empty.

I fully understand how difficult to hunt after such kind of bugs and I'll try to describe what I know about this bug:
• First time when I got this error message (in the Unity Editor) it was stable. Several game restarts lead to the same error all the time. Then I put the extra debug info (see above) just before this error output and the error gone!
• Next time when I met this error it was also reproduceable. This time I went to my Photon dashboard and played with checkboxes under custom authentication. After that the error gone again and did not return yet!

This is a nightmare because I'm very close to a game release and I do not know how to prevent this bug in a future from happening!

[Deleted User]

Hello demid,

we apologize for the custom authentication issues! I assume you are using Photon Cloud US - is that correct? We had a bug where Game Servers were sometimes not notified about a successful custom authentication. The issue is resolved, please try again and let us know in case you still have issues.

There is nothing that could or needs to be done on your side, it was completely our (server-side) fault (for which we are very sorry). We've been working to improve the reliability of the custom authentication features over the last days and have also applied better monitoring to prevent any issues like this in future.

One thing you might consider: you could offer your players the option to switch to a different region in case of connectivity issues - although this might result in higher latency. See available Photon Cloud regions here:
http://doc.exitgames.com/photon-cloud/R ... -reference

Let me know if you have further questions or if you still have any issues. Thanks!

demid

Hi Nicole!

I'm using EU cloud server. From the moment of writing this topic I hopefully missed this bug. It happened only twice actually up to this moment and I described these two cases in my topic. Thank you for your reply, I hope I'll never meet the bug again

And of course I'll let you know if I encounter this behaviour again.

[Deleted User]

Thanks for the update, demid. The root cause was the same as on our US servers, and it's fixed for EU as well.

goksanguner

Hello,

I am currently getting the same error:

The appId this client sent is unknown on the server (Cloud). Check settings. If using the Cloud, check account.

I have been using PUN since this June (free version, localization EU), this is happening for the first time. Is there some problem? Or do you deactivate IDs that uses free version after some time?

[Deleted User]

Sorry for the issues. We are currently affected by a major outage of Windows Azure, which we are partially using as a hosting provider for some backend services.

This leads to invalid authentication in rare cases. Unfortunately we can not do much about it -it will be resolved as soon as Azure's performance is good again.

goksanguner

Currently no problem.

[Deleted User]

Yes - should be good again now. We hope that it stays stable.

Our apologies for last nights issues.