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### Requisitioning

You can ask to requisition a server instance to run a particular activity. That is, you can ask Syntensity to find an available server instance, and to make it run that activity.
First, find the activity, on the Activities page. It might be convenient to check "Show only mine" in order to see only your activities. Then, click on the activity to see its details, and click 'Requisition a server instance to run this activity.'

- You should see a notice regarding success or failure of the requisition process. It may fail if there are no free servers.
- This message only indicates that a server began to start up - if a problem occurs, like an error in the map script or an issue with an asset, then the server will shut down. You will not get immediate feedback about this. What will happen is that there won't be a new server requisitioned by you in the list of server instances (neither on your account page, nor on the main list of server instances). Or, you may briefly see the server appear, in 'Preparing' status, only to disappear or become 'Inactive' (if you log into it at that stage, you will get a message of "Error: Instance is not running a map," because it isn't done loading the map yet).

- To figure out the cause of the problem, you can view the server log. In your account page, click on 'View last error log from requisitioned server'. This will show you the last server log from an instance you requisitioned that failed for any reason.

## Connecting to a requisitioned server

Right after successfully requisitioning a server, you will be taken to your account page, where you can see your list of requisitioned servers, including the one just requisitioned.

- Press 'Select' to select that server (it might already be selected, in which case you will see the text 'Selected' and no button to press)
- Run the client program, login to the master, and then press 'connect to selected...'

You can also select the server from the main list of server instances (the 'Server Instances' tab on the tracker website).
Alternatively, you can do 'manual connect...' in the client program, and enter the IP address of the server and the port, instead of selecting a server.

## The lifecycle of a requisitioned server

After a server instance gets a requisition command (from the master server, in response to a user request), the server does the following:

- Run the requested map, and wait patiently for people to connect
- After one person connects, run the map for as long as the server has people in it

That means that, after someone enters the server, it will shut down if that person leaves (and if someone else hasn't entered meanwhile). The reason for this is to free up the server for other things, like running other maps requested by other users.
In particular, this means that if you requisition a server, either manually or using the map creation wizard, if you leave that server and try to connect to it later, you may find that your map is not still running there. Instead, the server may be running no map at all (in which case you will get an error when trying to connect, "Server is not running a map") or it may be running some other map (if meanwhile it was requisitioned to do so by someone else).
In such a case, just do another requisition request, as detailed at the top of this page, and another server will be found to run your map.
Note that you can also set up a 'permanent' server that always runs your map. Such servers are independent of the requisitioning process, that is, they can't be requisitioned to run maps, and they don't shut down when they become empty. For more on that, see here.

Updated on Oct 16, 2009 by Alon Zakai (Version 15)