102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Sylverant is a homebrew open source server for Phantasy Star Online. Dreamcast users still play PSO online with this server even today! This is the official forum for both the online game server as well as the open source project itself. Feel free to post and get a gathering started online! We can also show you how to get connected!

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MrArcadra
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102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by MrArcadra »

Hello All,

My friend and I wanted to play PSO 1&2 pluss together and are emulating through Dolphin and connecting to the Sylverant servers, however for some reason my friend is getting the 102 error. We both have followed the exact same steps and I connect just fine, but every time he tries to connect he gets the same issue. This is after trying to connect to a different private server and running into the same issue.

Has anyone else seen this kind of issue before / know a work around? Any help would be very much appreciated <3
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by MrArcadra »

Confirmed that the router is at 1400 MTU and still receiving the same error.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by BlueCrab »

102 indicates an error on the client side of the connection, not the server side -- which would suggest it is a configuration issue. Unfortunately, I'm not really very knowledgeable about setting up Dolphin, so I can't really offer much more information than that.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by MrArcadra »

Ok that is good to know, and after all of our testing that is the conclusion we came too as well, but I just cannot for the life of me figure out what the difference is between our clients as I had him set his up exactly like mine, but there has to be something causing the issue.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by legit nyck »

Maybe this will solve your problem
https://youtu.be/nFZLpNBBShA
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by Matt S. »

I'm bumping an old thread here, but I recently did a bunch of research into this issue as people were struggling to get online with Episode III, and the reason this occurs is nothing specific with Dolphin (so it would happen with real hardware too).

What's happening is that authoritative DNS servers are hijacking the DNS redirection from the chosen DNS server when the response is making its way back to the client. The most common one from what I've seen is Amazon's Route 53. This is an issue with the user's ISP and cannot be resolved through the ISP, either.

There's two ways to get around this:

1. Connect to a local server, proxy, or DNS server which can then proxy or redirect you to your server of choice. If you have a spare second PC (or just any PC if you're on console), this is easy, but it's much harder if you don't as certain PSO clients (all?) reject DNS queries when the source/destination are the same. Choices here are Mr. DNS, a newserv instance, or the telepipe proxy, and maybe some others.

2. Use an Action Replay code to rewrite the DNS query in memory, similar to how the DC Codebreaker codes work for getting online. This means when the DNS response is hijacked by the authoritative DNS server, instead of requesting the defunct SEGA server, it requests the private server address instead, which resolves to the right location.

I took the effort to find all the address locations for the DNS query in the GameCube games (apart from the GC Trial Edition for now), and you can find a list of codes for Sylverant specifically here: https://ragol.org/sylverant (this page shouldn't ever go down but... feel free to back them up, I don't care about credit)

These are the unencrypted codes, so GC/Wii players may need to use tools to make them work.

As an aside, this would also happen with the Dreamcast versions, but since Codebreaker codes already exist, the work is already done.
Last edited by Matt S. on Sat Oct 28, 2023 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by Aleron Ives »

What's the problem? We've been using DNS redirection for years. Just change DNS 1 in the PSO settings to our IP address, and you'll connect automatically every time.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by Matt S. »

The problem is that depending on your ISP, it will communicate with authoritative DNS servers somewhere along the line as part of a security process to make sure that you are not getting a DNS attack, which technically DNS redirection can very well be.

You can see this happening if you have people affected by this capture packets, such as through Wireshark:

Code: Select all

27    8.068837    217.160.146.96    192.168.1.3    DNS    178    Standard query response 0x0000 No such name A gc01.st-pso.games.sega.net SOA ns-200.awsdns-25.com OPT
(The DNS server 217.160.146.96 is my own, which sends responses to redirect people to that IP for the PSO server, not an SOA response)

These authoritative DNS servers always get the final say, so when the response passes through them, it will resolve the address by them, and not by Sylverant's own DNS server, as the authoritative DNS server disagrees with Sylverant's response. This means the client will ultimately receive a response to say that gc01.pso-games.sega.net (or whichever server is requested by PSO) does not exist, instead of redirecting to Sylverant's IP.

Giving people an AR code has fixed this issue 100% of the time, as the authoritative DNS server will resolve sylverant.net, instead of SEGA's game server's host name.

Another reason I post this, for what it's worth, is that as DNSSEC is rolled out more amongst ISPs, it's very possible that the DNS redirection method for connecting to PSO servers will work for nobody. Error 102 despite all settings being correct has been affecting more and more people over the past couple of years.
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Re: 102 Cannot Connect to Server Error

Post by Aleron Ives »

I've never heard of anybody having such a problem; if you have DNS 1 set to our IP, you should not be consulting your ISP's DNS server at all, so this sounds like a pretty intrusive security "feature" that ISPs are forcing on people. I suppose it's just one more step along the way towards everybody having to use a proxy to connect after IPv4 gets retired completely. It would be nice if you could disable this in your router instead of resorting to client modification, but if the problem becomes more widespread, I can always release ISO patches so that people can connect directly. Thanks for the heads up.
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