I personally use a status website that tells me quickly whether the session and other minecraft servers are up. http://xpaw.ru/mcstatus/ Now, a quick note of use: **NOT ALL SERVERS MUST BE UP TO RUN!** However, there are two little status dots you should pay attention to. The LOGIN status, and the SESSION status, if either or both of those are down, then you will not be able to consistently log on to any minecraft server. This is not to say that the ocassional try will not get through, but 29 times out of 30, you will get an error message, or some other weird message. I hope this helps you guys .
We can also use http://help.mojang.com but for some reason it's not working right now. :/ EDIT: Right link now, lol.
When the Minecraft session server goes down, why does EMC still authenticate? Anyone that's joined EMC and run through the tutorial has obviously validated against the Minecraft servers at least once so it seems reasonable to think we could allow anyone on EMC's whitelist to login without authentication against Mojang's servers. There are a lot of websites that show Minecraft server status so I'm sure some sort of monitoring service could be scripted relatively easily and it wouldn't have to be done manually. When the MC Session server goes down, EMC's servers could switch their authentication mode then continue to monitor the servers until they become stable again then switch back. Seems like this happens once a month. It's happened a few times on weekends and during prime time where I live. I doubt if Mojang would have any room to complain since they are the cause of the problem. Although it's not EMC's fault, not everyone understands that.
That's not safe. When the login server is offline, anyone could impersonate you, in theory. I could set my username to Pab10S, and if EMC doesn't validate that against the Minecraft server with a password, then how would it be able to tell an impostor from the real user? I have an idea for how EMC could have its own fallback authentication mechanism, but my idea is so obvious that I think it would've been implemented already, had it been something they wanted. As for the session server problem, (as opposed to login server problems) I'm not sure EMC can do something when that happens... I think the Minecraft client is doing that work without the server's intervention.
You never know, Aikar and Justin have been so busy they might not have thought of it so I would try suggesting it.
