TalkChess.com

D Sceviour wrote:I have never tried it. What is necessary? Is there a special addition called zippy? Is a password necessary? What is the best interface or is Winboard prerequisite? Is there a debug chat window?

There was a time when Zippy was a separate program, but for at least 15 years it has been fully integrated in WinBoard. (XBoard can still be compiled with the Zippy code disabled, however.)

WinBoard/XBoard is the best interface if you want to have a GUI. For running in the background there is icsDrone. I never used that, though.

You would need a registered account at the server to have the tournament-manager bot recognize you. Just PM me an e-mail address and I can create an account for you. Playing test games would already work as guest.

Not sure what you mean by a debug chat window. When connecting to an ICS WinBoard will pop up a window where you can communicate with the ICS.

Henk wrote:

hgm wrote:Yes, the Swiss system tries to pair against opponents with equal points, so that except for the first few games that need to create the initial differences you will meet opponents of near-equal strength. But for that to work well needs many participants. If we have 9 rounds and only 18 participants, it cannot be avoided that the number last also has to play against an opponnet from the top half.

Isn't it possible or easy to (very fast) simulate the first games or set the initial differences to rating differences. Of course if a top engine has a bad bug this will fail too.

Yes, you can do that so you play someone your own strength in the first round, but you still end up where somebody like Isa beats Abbess and POS and is 2.0, and Crafty beats Phalanx and Critter and is 2.0, so Crafty and Isa get matched in round 3. Not exactly a fair fight, but engines with a lot of points have to play each other eventually to sort out the rankings.

hgm wrote: Playing test games would already work as guest.

Does that mean an account is not necessary to test whether the engine is ICS compatible? I tried logging on as a "guest" once before but was unable to make a connection.

If the engine is WinBoard compatible then there should be no problem using it on an ICS through WinBoard. There is nothing special needed in an engine to make it suitable for that; in fact the engine would hardly know it is playing on an ICS. (It could know that from the 'ics' command it gets when it did not disable that.)

You could have been unlucky that the ICS was not running; connecting is what you do before you log in, and that should always work, because at that stage it would not know whether you will be using it as a guest or not. When you get the ICS welcome screen and a "login:" prompt, you should be able to type just any name and an empty line to get in.

I verified that the ICS is currently up and running.

Error: Could not connect to host winboard.nl, port 5000. The system cannot find the file specified.

brtzsnr wrote:Is there any client that can run in text-mode only and doesn't require a GUI?

Most programs on FICS and ICC use Michel's excellent icsdrone 0.28 for that. I also use it for the HGM tournaments. It works fine, both in console mode and "blind".

PS: I don't know if there is another distribution now that sourceforge has gone rogue.

D Sceviour wrote:Error: Could not connect to host winboard.nl, port 5000. The system cannot find the file specified.

Hmm, it could be that your provider is blocking access to port 5000.

I think that FICS provides port 23(?) as an alternative. I used to do that too, when I was still running the ICS on a small laptop in my LAN. But then I could have my router map the externalport 23 on port 5000 of the local network. Now that I am running from a VPS there are no routers involved, so I don't know how to do that.

Is there a way in Linux to map one port onto another on the host itself?

hgm wrote: Hmm, it could be that your provider is blocking access to port 5000.

Thank you. It is logged on now. Still trying to iron out the bugs.

hgm wrote:

D Sceviour wrote:Error: Could not connect to host winboard.nl, port 5000. The system cannot find the file specified.

Hmm, it could be that your provider is blocking access to port 5000.

I think that FICS provides port 23(?) as an alternative. I used to do that too, when I was still running the ICS on a small laptop in my LAN. But then I could have my router map the externalport 23 on port 5000 of the local network. Now that I am running from a VPS there are no routers involved, so I don't know how to do that.

Is there a way in Linux to map one port onto another on the host itself?

Yes most definately.

Try entering this, as root:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 23 -j REDIRECT --to-port 5000

The path to iptables may be different.
I have not tested it.

As usual, I would like to participate but will be unable to manually join Myrddin to the tournament at start time. Can you do that for me, H.G.?

Thanks very much and good luck to all!

jm