Home For Christmas?
A little meditation today on the journey of the Botfarm in its search for a perfect location. Also something of a plea for help from those with more technical nous than me – I know this blog has more readers than it has commentators, so your engagement would be welcomed. (Warning – dull semi-technical gubbins ahead!)
It all started with seeking a home for MT4 to run Expert Advisors, somewhere more reliable than the laptop and less prone to spontaneously reboot overnight. Tagadab served this first purpose admirably, was set up in ten minutes flat and never gave me a moment’s problem as to reliability or customer support. Tagadab also served perfectly well when it came to hosting some of the bots which hook into Betfair’s API, such as GreyhorseBot and Amoeba.
Problem one – the poker and casino bots replicate the actions of a player clicking buttons on the screen, either by screen-scraping or intercepting screen calls. And Tagadab didn’t want to know anything about them, abjectly failing to move chips, click buttons and so on.
Step in one of the stalwarts of the Super Roulette forum, who recommended Commercial Network Services and their Trader Workstation and mentioned that Super Roulette works just fine there, and can be left unattended if it is kicked off within a VNC session embedded within and RDP session (didn’t mean anything to me either at the time). So I happily flipped over to CNS server running in the US.
At this stage pokerbots and roulette bots could run unattended, and the EAs carried on working fine. But the next issue I hit was the US legislation concerning internet gambling, and their tendency to incarcerate CEOs of non-US gambling firms in contravention of these laws. No casino outside of the US is willing to take the risk of dealing with anyone who appears to be based there, including anyone whose ip address indicates a US location. Because of this, a crazy number of casinos wouldn’t let me log in for live gambling and the Betfair bots stopped working.
It seemed only sensible to request a move to the newly-established CNS London servers when they became available about a month ago. The reasoning went that with the ability to run casino software unattended and the liberal UK laws allowing casinos to take bets from me, everything should be able to work together in peace and harmony for the first time….
Cue even more slightly techie talk, involving the different ways in which Virtual Servers are provided. The move to London involved an incidental upgrade from Virtuozzo virtualisation to the much better, by all accounts, Hyper-V from Microsoft. It turns out that Tagadab, the first link in this chain, was implemented on Hyper-V. CNS servers in the US were based on Virtuozzo, but their newer servers in the UK use Hyper-V. From all the tests I have been able to conduct, the graphics-based bots work on Virtuozzo, but not on the more up-to-date Hyper-V architecture.
Unless someone reading this knows otherwise…
My only recourse if I can’t find a workaround for Hyper-V (and the excellent customer service guys at CNS are on the case) is to find a UK-based Virtuozzo server which doesn’t plan to migrate to Hyper-V any time soon.
Apologies for the above being a bit convoluted as well as downright dull for most people. Not sure I can even bring myself to read it again. But please, pass on any suggestions or comments you might have.
Will give an end-of-year round up shortly. The highlight of which will be the EA which has taken my balance from £17 to £117 in 2 months….
Happy Christmas everyone!
Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago on Technorati and have been reading it over the past few days.
Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help. On the whole Hyper-V is a considerably faster virtualisation platform than virtuozzo, but if things are not working properly we might be able to suggest solutions, and we have plenty of contacts at Microsoft who might also be interested in finding a solution. – steve (from Tagadab)
Rick – welcome aboard. Will likewise catch up on your blog asap.
Steve – thanks for the very quick response. I will certainly follow up, as I want a permanent solution to the bot platform issue. It is a bit of a problem to demonstrate the issue as the bot software for casinos and poker-rooms is tolerated at best and often actively discouraged (unlike forex brokers and betfair where it is encouraged), so a) the roulette/poker software providers have no interest in getting the bots up and running (and throw in frequent software upgrades to fox the bots), b)Microsoft aren’t likely to be troubled by non-performance of software of necessarily obscure provenance and c) the bot software vendors generally lock a single copy of the software to a specific computer id, whether physical or virtual, so extensive testing from different setups is made more difficult. So I need to try to find a freeware product which has similar screen-interaction attributes and see whether it can be used to test some options. Thanks again.
Found a solution to the test harness today. The super-roulette site offers the chance to download a test/demo version to check that the program will work with your setup. I don’t believe this is restricted as to number of installs, so have requested a copy to be sent (which probably seems strange since I am an existing subscriber). When it arrives I will forward it to Tagadab and CNS (who have also offered to help find a solution).