Are people hacking into my server?

[SoylentGreen]

I seem to be getting "phantom people" playing my HL2DM server. For example, there will be three people playing in the game, but there seems to be a fourth person chatting. That name doesn't appear in the player list when I hit tab, and just chats and harrasses everyone. I tried to kick the player, but I just get a messege saying player doesn't exist.

This has happened twice already, and I don't know what's going on.

[SirTiger]

Maybe its a "whitespace name". I remember it was a trend to use an empty name at Instant Messengers like MSN a few years ago. To get a whtiespace name, you can type name [ALT+0160] (Press alt, then the number sequence).

Annoying, not sure if that's your problem but you can kick people by ID. Type status and you'll see if there is a person "without" name. The command kick the numeric #id of that person would do for this.

[SoylentGreen]

Thanks for the response, however I can see the person's name clearly. It appears in the chat box, but not in the tab-stats, OR when I type "status" on the server itself.

The only thing I think it could be is people who have changed their player name, and the server didn't update to the correct name. Example: Joe changes his name to Bob, but the server doesn't tell me. I get killed by "Joe", and "Bob" chats "pwned!!!" I hit tab and see no Bob anywhere, just Joe and me.

Is there something wrong with the settings on my server?

[snewo]

Are you fully patched to the latest version of the server? There was a bug in a recent patch (think about a month ago) which made the Tab display show different people/bots than were in the game. Going to console and typing "status" showed the REAL people in the game. This was fixed however in more recent patches.



Snewo