From The Air Combat Wiki

Contents 1 Fighter Ace ® Firewall Settings 1.1 General Information 1.1.1 Automatic and Manual Updates 1.1.2 Additional related reading 1.2 Windows XP Firewall users (NOT SP2) 1.3 Windows XP SP2 Firewall users 1.4 FAUpdate still fails 1.5 Windows Live One Care Users 1.6 AOL Users 1.7 MS SQL Users 1.8 rsync.exe halts 1.9 McAffee Firewall Users 1.10 Norton Firewall Users 1.11 Zone Alarm Users 1.12 Generic File Permission Problems 1.13 Can't Login/FAStart Disappeares

Fighter Ace ® Firewall Settings

General Information

All Fighter Ace ® network traffic is initiated from the client computer (your computer) and should not need extra configuration. Most routers will remember traffic IP and port pairing and will work out of the box. In the advent where things are NOT working please let firewalls, home router filters and proxies enable traffic TO (Server computers, Our server complex) AND FROM (Client computer, Your computer) these IPs and ports (inclusive)

Web Service and Authenitcation:
IP         : 204.15.37.98
TO Port    : 443
FROM Port  : Unspecified
Protocol   : TCP

Fighter Ace ® Update:
IP         : 66.135.38.41, 72.51.34.71,  64.34.170.168
TO Port    : 873
FROM Port  : Unspecified
Protocol   : TCP/UDP

Fighter Ace ® Game Traffic:
IPs        : 204.15.37.103 - 204.15.37.126
TO Ports   : 1024 - 65535
FROM Ports : 50000 - 51024
Protocol   : UDP

You should configure your firewall to allow FA.exe and any other FA##$.exe, FAStart.exe, FAUpdate.exe, wget.exe, and rsync.exe full access to the internet. If you still have connection problems after this then try switching off the firewall, router filter or proxy. Remember that the service needs to be completely disabled if running on the Game computer with Win2K or above. Don't forget to enable the firewall after you've played FA after such a session!!! We encourage people to use one firewall, more than one is generally not protecting things better but adds to game traffic latency. Users with Vista should read Fighter Ace & Windows Vista instructions.

Automatic and Manual Updates

Whenever re-installing from FAInstaller##.exe or when we release new software it may be necessary to re-enable the FA.exe and any other FA##$.exe, FAStart.exe, FAUpdate.exe, wget.exe, and rsync.exe full access to the internet due to the security software triggering the components as new software and not identical to previous and allowed release.

Additional related reading

Please read more on the How to Get Started in Fighter Ace ® page about how to get Fighter Ace installed on your system.

Windows XP Firewall users (NOT SP2)

• Click on "Start"
• Select "Control Panel"
• Click on "Network Connections" icon on the new window
• In "Network Tasks" (top left) select "change Windows firewall settings"
• Select "Exceptions" tab
  • Add the following (default paths used, may be different from your install)

C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FA.exe (and all other FA##$.exe files, ## is number and $ is a character)
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FAStart.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\rsync.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\wget.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FAUpdate.exe

Windows XP SP2 Firewall users

Indepth Microsoft article Understanding Windows Firewall

• Click on "START"
• Select "Control Panel"
• Click on the "Security Center" icon in the new window
• Click on "Windows Firewall" below the "Manage security settings for:"
• Select "Exceptions" tab
  • Add the following (default paths used, may be different from your install)

C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FA.exe (and all other FA##$.exe files, ## is number and $ is a character)
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FAStart.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\rsync.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\wget.exe
C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FAUpdate.exe

FAUpdate still fails

This is for people that have remnant firewall, antivirus, pop-up blocker and spyware removal configurations looming in the background and can not disable and reconfigure them by simple means. You may be unaware of the fact that you have any of these running because some may not show up in the task list. Generally this solution should really not be necessary.

• Reboot computer if it is running
• Press F8 right after the initial BIOS boot is finished. Just when windows is loading.
• Select Safe Mode with Networking
• Locate FAUpdate.exe (Default path is C:\Program Files\Fighter Ace\FAUpdate.exe)
• Start FAUpdate.exe (You may test FAStart.exe and a simple lobby connection with the game but do NOT play the game like this)
• Once finished, reboot the machine and start windows normaly

Windows Live One Care Users

Users experiencing "Win32 error 998" in the DownloadLog.txt may have WLOC prohibiting normal operation of our update process. Even in Safe mode w/networking, something may still block rsync.exe in various stages while in sync phase.

• Reboot into safe mode w/networking.
• Run FAUpdate manually (it will fail)
• Once again run FAUpdate manually (it should not get to the sync phase)
• Reboot normaly

AOL Users

Please read through these two help pages from AOL About Program Permissions in AOL Firewall and About Inbound Events in AOL Firewall. Configure it according to the information in the first section on this page.

MS SQL Users

Users experiencing "Win32 error 998" in the DownloadLog.txt may have MS SQL installed and running on their system. When many processes run on your computer (for example, more than 50), behaviors that were not expected may occur.

Please read through ther following Microsoft KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824422

rsync.exe halts

If your DownloadLog.txt ends with "generate_files phase=1" and nothing happens for a very long time you may have severe TCP stack problems. Please revert all TCP tweaker or download accelerator settings.

Continuing problems may be resolved by resetting the winsock2 subsystem:

Resetting winsock2: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259

Continuing problems may be resolved by resetting the TCP subsystem:

Resetting tcp stack: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357

Continuing problems may be resolved by reinstalling the OS.

McAffee Firewall Users

McAffee Firewall Users that have problems and have no idea how to configure it correctly please uninstall it and use the Microsoft supplied firewall.

Please follow instructions here: McAffee Firewall Removal

Norton Firewall Users

Norton Firewall Users that have problems and have no idea how to configure it correctly please uninstall it and use the Microsoft supplied firewall.

Please follow instructions here: Norton Firewall Removal

Zone Alarm Users

Zone Alarm Users that have problems and have no idea how to configure it correctly please uninstall it and use the Microsoft supplied firewall.

Please follow instructions from one of the following:

ZA Removal Search

Generic File Permission Problems

Sometimes Windows will insist on file permissions that prohibit replacement of already installed components. In these cases please remove the following files in the Fighter Ace directory (some may not exist) and re-run FAInstaller##.exe and over install components:

• md5sum.exe
• rsync.exe
• wget.exe
• cygcrypto-0.9.8.dll
• cygiconv-2.dll
• cygintl-8.dll
• cygpopt-0.dll
• cygssl-0.9.8.dll
• cygwin1.dll
  • Any other dll's starting with cyg not in above list
• FAStart.ini

Can't Login/FAStart Disappeares

A few users may still have a bad installer from a couple of releases ago. Please download the latest FAInstaller fully to your hard drive and run it afterwards.