Ninjaman

Gagi2 the big question is what you call "working". If you name a program which looks like it works but just do nothing as "working" then you are right as it still does this. But I call a program only working when it also does what it is supposed to do. And this is no longer the case as PB does not detect today what it used to detect in the past. It got simply designed to be crippled when EvenBalance stops thier support (turning off thier "backend"). * i call (your) cracked servers not (never) working see: http://www.pbbans.com/forums/cod4-cracked-servers-and-their-pb-issues-t179579.html * if you did not mention yet: we never gave any support to cracked servers, their operators are not welcome here. As you are at least slow - well, dead - on the uptake: Finally flagged as spammer *

We don't run pb since their master servers are offline. This was already at the 25 November.

Just to add this: Well in earlier times unavailable masterservers at EvenBalance had the effect, that your server became crippled in cheat detection only when you have restarted your server. This time this event was far different. All CoD4 servers suddenly stopped at the same time with detection. So obviously this time on 25th of November 2013 to all GameServers a remote PB-Shutdown command was sent. You will maybe wonder why I know so exactly if EvenBalance masterservers are working or not. Now I can tell as it won't harm anymore anyway as this feature won't gets removed as well. PunkBuster had still inside a working functionality to issue an "Global PunkBuster Hardware GUID Ban". The hashed hardware id strings of every player could be read from the PBSV.SO process memory. We have used this strings to authorize players onto an cracked server. This gave us Non-cracked server equivalent security. However this does not work as soon as the PunkBuster masterservers were not available on server startup. This time this authorization system did stop on 80 CoD4 servers suddenly on the same time! This was on 25th of November 2013 at ~7.30 o'clock GMT+1. Then I did check with some cheats to have something to argue with EvenBalance and on GGC-Stream and this site about this issue.

#1 Bye bye PunkBuster - It will never return! #2 Make sure next time to which publisher you spend your money. #3 This case is now for me finally closed...

So I will post some of our ticket links. Here you can see a typical ticket getting rather ignored than answering on it. http://www.evenbalance.com/troubleticket/update_ticket.php?ticketnumber=EB9065000719868&password=c3d9aa6acdba8afc654cbaa44f32ec Their usual response is now to copy and paste you the text about PBSetup. They tell you even about PBSetup if you have asked them something quite different. http://www.evenbalance.com/troubleticket/update_ticket.php?ticketnumber=EB3858000721149&password=6967cb16dc9e45946003cac5b0e0a8 The DNS server is for some days now online again. But it provides wrong IPs / unreachable CoD4 masters. I had assumed this one will be ignored as well. but I was wrong... Now they finally admit that their software is not working. But still nobody is going to repair that :S I don't know anymore what I have to think. http://www.evenbalance.com/troubleticket/update_ticket.php?ticketnumber=EB9655000722330&password=823c89fbfbe3dab627ecf7e057996f No logfiles. How can they even get them ??? http://www.evenbalance.com/troubleticket/update_ticket.php?ticketnumber=EB7304000723179&password=b97c733d7d228a00ce4c79c59f759a Anyway I'm very sure EvenBalance know about this fault and I'm 100% sure there is a fault. You can check it by running a CoD4 server on your computer and running Wireshark. Filter for "udp.port == 28962 || icmp". You will see all requests to the PB-Masterservers getting answered with the ICMP Port unreachable message. So I'm fed up now. I have deactivated PunkBuster for CoD4 on my servers now as it is now self punk. If it ever returns to normal operation I will active it again but like it is now: nope.

I have discovered the whole thing breaks when you did run pb_sv_update and got a response from COD41.EVENBALANCE.COM you receive a list of new IP addresses. All the new hosts sending Connection Refused as answers. However even the old COD41.EVENBALANCE.COM does not send the files 1828.pat and 1828.pbq. Cod4 pb servers asks for. You can examine it with Wireshark. Anyway finally EB admit that they have a problem. Creating a ban appeal of an recent EB Violation makes it clear that there is a problem. Because they have no log files ^^

Quote Haha. This does not require a master server to show up. But where is: "Master Security Informations Received" ? Anyway the real story seems the old master server is still alive but they have broken their PunkBuster DNS.

Just saying I got the answer that CoD4 is still supported by EvenBalance. What I still can't understand why are EB-Masterservers for CoD4 offline ?

The sad thing is: This has happened 2 weeks and 2 days ago already. I don't understand why they have still not removed this game from their website. All masterservers are already terminated for 2 weeks. Unofficially support for CoD4 has dropped as well. Still they did not made it official. I can not understand why. EvenBalance's customer support behaves very strange in this manner. Unfortunately PunkBuster's cheat detection and detection of modified gamefiles is crippled without the masterserver. Maybe this is on purpose ? No idea.