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FreeBSD Based Gaming Router
Zaphoid writes "Lan Game Reviews has posted an article on how to use an old computer and FreeBSD distro m0n0wall to create a gaming router. Gaming routers allow users to use their full bandwidth for downloads and other high bandwidth apps, and low latency applications at the same time. By keeping packet queues on the router side, rather than the modem side. Users are able to achive great pings in online games, while fully using their download bandwidth. This is a great alternitive to expensive gaming routers on the market today."
"This is a great alternitive to expensive gaming routers on the market today."
:)
Yes, this is exactly what the gaming world has been waiting for. The funny thing is that when somebody tries to create a product that is designed for USERS, they complain. However, when you design something so obscure out of your own whim that might never be used by anybody else, that is considered cool. Discuss.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
So... a person that really has a need for such a 'gaming router' is just gonna pick up bunch of parts and slap a freebsd box together.
;)
:)
Yhea right!
Save themselves and their techy friends some trouble and have them go buy that router
Can't a Linksys WRT54G do the same thing.. install third-party firmware and you can do even more! .e.d.
but does it run linux?
Interesting, but I don't know how well this is going to work, given FreeBSD's crappy TCP-IP stack. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You can do this with a wrt54g and the sveasoft firmware, too. I prefer that way, so you don't have to worry about another machine that sucks a lot of power lying about. IIRC, you can get the sveasoft firmware at alternate locations, just google for it. I broke down and bought it ($20/year), and got my money's worth.
You might even be able to do it with the free wrt54g firmware, openwrt, but I've never tried it.
This little box is extemely reliable, has very low power consumption, it's cheap and it's small. Plus, it does wireless (WPA, etc).
That's an great alternitive spelling of alternative.
Such routers seem to be under $100.
& btnG=Search+Froogle
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=gaming+router
I don't see how a loud, hot old PC is necessarily better. And if you want an embedded system, those are normally quite pricey.
I'm not convinced that using an old PC is the best way to go here. Hacking a WRT* might seem more reasonable -- but a lot trickier.
I really don't like having lots of big boxes around, humming. But then I don't like games either.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Gamers aren't likely to spend time they could be gaming with installing, configuring and maintaining a router setup. It's far more sensible, in today's age of commodity broadband routers, to pick up a Linksys WRT54G or similar from a local supplier and use that instead, a simple and out-of-the box solution that should require fairly little maintainance after installation and won't require an entire machine sitting humming away in the corner just to route packets. The WRT54G specifically makes a great case for this, because it can be flashed with different open source firmware to improve its flexibility and stability.
In other situations, the dedicated machine would probably have a numerous array of other uses, making it a more useful overall package, but since this article focuses on gaming the box running FreeBSD is unlikely to be able to be used for gameplay, so its pretty much relegated to packet routing and other miscellaneous duties. That, to me, seems like a complete waste in this instance
Business Voyeur
I have played implmenting packet priortization in the same method they use on here (except on linux using dsl_qos_queue - www.sonicpsike.net).
...
It works great but there is one major disadvantage. In order to have the queue on your side work, you must lower your upstream so that there is no buffering/queueing happening on your ISP's side.
This is a problem becase it is that exact ISP buffering that allows you achieve higher upstream transfer rates. In my case (768 Kbs up), I lowered my maximum upstream from close to 80k to closer to 70k in order to reduce the ISP's sides queueing.
I still have the system in place beacause it effectively allows my to be using alot of upstream bandwdith and still have fast download (and SSH console echos!). I sure would like to get that extra 10k back though
Does anyone know where one might find a copy of exactly how the router goes about queueing the packets?
I for one run an openbsd router, and I bet many others that run pf as their router firewall would be curious to see the specific rules that are coming into play.
I have queueing somewhat set up now, but I would like to see a professionally done example.
I made a QoS Linux router two years ago; it's nothing special. Just set a bandwidth restriction via iptables on your net connection slightly lower than the max. Then use some sort of QoS scheme to prioritize certain packets in the internal queue. There are plenty of howtos and pre-rolled scripts for this; if you're operating a Linux router then you probably already have the tools (maybe you'll have to recompile a kernel if you're using an old kernel.) FYI this system made a business cable connection work in a house of 31 college students, so speed isn't a problem.
Ok, so maybe it's only interesting because I'm sitting up on a Sunday night reading
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
I don't see how a loud, hot old PC is necessarily better.
Not to mention power consumption is certainly worse.
Now now now, baby marie! Look who came in from the real world to express my enthusiasms for game routers (me). This is a story about games, so don't get so serious. I just wanna have fun with game routers...and have fun chattin' up about game routers, so don't let my tone get you all bliched up at me like it has before. Now, I don't think I can afford one of these. Sue me. I'm sorry you can't use my house for a fun zone. Get off my case, samson. Just let me go to sleep...the long sleep...the permanent sleep...in the game, I mean. I'm happy with my life, Shambler.
Guys (and the few but very welcome gals), before we all start flaming about how hard it is to set up OpenBSD/FreeBSD and a firewall for a newbie, please take a look at the m0n0wall site. m0n0wall is completely self contained and is very easy to set up. It is completely web interface driven and is managed in much the same way as a consumer broadband router is. m0n0wall is, in my humble opinion having used it for a number of years and loveing it, and excellent firewall product and is very capable. If you have not seen it, grab a copy and have a look. Cheers, Tim.
Basically it tells you to install m0n0wall, activate the shaper, and they'll post again sometime on how to make rules for specific games.
Why was this posted now, instead of in a few weeks when there's some actual content?
Part of the hacker mindset is a love of tinkering -- the fantastic knowledge that you don't need anyone's help to create, to build, to acheive, to overcome. That with that computer that was going to be in the dumpster, you can now do something cool, regardless of the fact that it might take you longer to do it.
You have a point, but the problem is that it strikes at a target that doesn't really exist. The point of Slashdot isn't to advertise every new technology that comes out, but to advertise what is interesting to its readership. Given that a lot of us a predisposed to hacking and wonderful stuff like that, it makes sense that this should be posted here.
FTR, though, I don't think you're a troll.
argh reading "FreeBSD distro" sounded so, so wrong to me.
Did the $0 solution of turning off the warez while you play become some sort of lost art?
I'm going to set up a traffic shaping firewall with (OpenBSD's) "pf" on FreeBSD to prevent having to slap my kid brother when he wants to download something his MSN friends want him to download.
I'm guessing that building my own rules for pf will teach me the most.
Of course I'm going to do my own research but I think it's only smart to ask experts for advice as well.
My question, how does the traffic shaper choose which packets to prioritize? Of course UDP will be put at the front of the queue and TCP will be kicked to the back but are there any other ways of recognizing game packets besides port? Size or some other properties? Do P2P apps (eMule) use TCP or UDP? I really don't want to fuck around port numbers every time a new game comes out, aren't there better ways, like not promoting game packets but demoting all other kinds of known ping killers. Something that analyzes other qualities of packets, like content?
Also, does anybody have a link for pf rules that implement weighted fair queueing? To be clear, I mean that if 3 PC's use internet, the DSL line will be divided by 3. If only 1 PC uses it, it will get all of the bandwith.
Help a fella out would ya? If not for me, do it for my little bro.
And of course I'll read the pf manual. Thanks in advance.
- -- Truth addict for life.
I have a hard time believing that using a PC to do routing will be faster than using custom hardware.
dont use big words like firewall and network stack when you dont know what they mean.
I agree - for the majority of gamers.
But then, they probably wouldn't be reading Slashdot or have an old PC and a couple of NIC cards lying around.
Enter the slashdot geek!
Gamers who read slashdot are probably more interested in alternative OS's than the mainstream and want to learn something that helps them with their gaming hobby - plus they should have the parts already and be comfortable setting it all up from a hardware perspective. It's a good guide for those who game and have an interest in OS's other than Windows.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
To be honest with yo uI would rather just by a new router then biuld an out of date and slow router.Cool article I guess if your in needof one and dont have the cash but have the parts. Anyways was wondering what else you knew how to biuld from spare parts it still makes my stomach feel like I got butterflies in it knowing that America sent a man to the moon with less power then my xbox just always makes me think what else can be done instead of trahing the old system
Wow! Finally! Just what I always wanted! A router that can play games!
Oh, and why do they suggest a hub? That ruins the point of a good router. Get a switch.
Video Production Support
While I'm all about the FreeBSD solution here (m0n0wall is a great package), the idea of using a hub instead of a switch is just asinine. In a gaming environment, where bandwidth is critical and having delays in play can make the difference between a frag and getting fragged, having seperate collision domains is a must. A gaming network should use switches to ensure that collisions won't affect gameplay.
I got an embedded device to run m0n0wall on. A friend convinced me because the feature set was better than even Cisco's PIX firewalls, and the hardware was less than a PIX 501, even with my discount. The one thing it has that I really wanted was filtered bridging.
Ok so get the m0n0wall, set it up and it's golden... Sorta. Everything works great but every few days it crashes. Just stops passing packets and responding to input, needs a reboot. Ok so I take the web servers out from behind it until I can work it out. And it stops crashing. Hmmmmm.
I do more testing and it seems to have to do with the number of sessions it gets. I can do as much bandwidth as I like, no problem, but if I do a lot of sessions, it'll go down. P2P apps bring it down fast, the web servers slower, but still happens after a few days. New betas do nothing.
Ok, fine so it has another mode that will work, 1:1 NAT. So I set that up for my computer. Well I can get out to any system on my network, but outside the m0n0wall, but not to the Internet, nothing is being passed to the gateway. I try and try and can't solve it. So I get the guy who recommended it to come help me, maybe I'm doing something stupid. He works on it for about 2 hours, to no avail, same problem I had.
So it seems that the m0n0wall has some major bugs. Things like filtered bridging are listed as "advanced features" and "unsupported" which apparantly means "They have bugs that we can't figure out, so we are going to blame it on you."
Now, not saying it doesn't have it's uses. My friend uses it to do NAT and traffic shaping, which it seems to do very well. However don't be fooled by it's feature list, not everything works as it should.
So I'd recommend it for situations where you have one IP and want NAT + more features, but I'd recommend against it for server firewall duty. Bite the bullet and get a PIX or Netscreen. They do have less features and cost more, but all the features work as they should.
I'd do it if it would actually allow me to play online games again. I hate anything from Linksys but my latency is so horrible I can't play anything online anymore ;-(
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
...to be used by gamers!
I was wondering about using 2 USB thumbdrives instead of a cd/floppy combo. Simply put one drive in write protect, and store the config on it. The second thumbdrive could be used for logging purposes.
I also wonder what would be a low power (in Watts) video card to use. I couldn't find anything on google in a brief search.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
I don't know about "l33t" but I think it's fun doing these things, and it can save you some money if you have the extra hardware and you could really use the features that are normally found in more expensive "pre-made" solutions.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I've been using monowall for probably almost a year now, for a couple different routers. Here's why I like it. Put 3 net cards in a computer. 1 for the diesel modem, 1 for the LAN, and one for the wireless access point. Block all traffic from wireless to LAN, and then allow only VPN traffic in. You have free unencrypted wi-fi for friends and neighbors, and encryption for yourself far superior to WEP.
Remember back when Tom's Hardware pulled off the heatsink from a Pentium 4 CPU while it was running? The CPU scaled back its clock automatically. Up against the Athlon, well, the Athlon fried. Of course, there were several things wrong with using the results to judge the CPU's that were subsequently pointed out, but that's really another story.
If someone had an older, slower P4 lying around collecting dust, it could serve the function of a silent router with no noise at all. I don't suggest running the P4 without a heatsink; only the CPU and case fans would have to be removed or disconnected from the system for a silent PC. The only other moving part would be the hard disk, which isn't particularly loud, though the end results really depend on the drive and the case.
The advantage of a "gaming" router over such a setup would be ease of setup and probably the smaller physical size of the router. But, gamers constantly upgrade their PC's (I was one myself back some time ago), and it wouldn't be too surprising if they did have a P4 sitting around collecting dust. Then again, since gamers tend to spend in the hundreds yearly on upgrades, what's another hundred dollars?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
You do realize that firmware is just software on embedded devices? It's usually stored in some sort of non-volatile memory. This doesn't make it any faster then software stuck on a hard or floppy disk.
And That Old Pentium's 66Mhz backplane is so much more then enough to push around a cablemodem's maximum throughput.
If you actually read the article, you'd see that this is a distribution of one of the BSD's that is trimmed down and web-interfacified making it extremely easy to install and configure. Install two network cards, load up the CD, and you're pretty much good to go. I don't think installing some network cards is a big deal for a lot of gamers that build their own machines.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
For this project, I recommend no less than a 486DX2 133Mhz processor with 64 megs of ram
Because there sure is a lot wrong with asking for a 486 DX2 133MHz. Ain't no such thing exist.
First, saying that the chip is a DX2 implies that the motherboard opperated at a 66MHz bus speed, which no 486 had the blessing to experience (66MHz bus speeds didn't happen until the Pentium line). The 2 in DX2 implied that the CPU operated at a frequency twice that of the bus speed (DX2 66MHz = 33MHz bus speed). There were certainly DX4s though, where the CPU frequency was 3x that of the bus speed (why it wasn't the DX3, I don't know). DX4 75MHz (25 MHz bus) and 100MHz (33MHz bus).
Second, the only chip manufacturer ever to release a 133MHz 486 processor was AMD (a true DX4, 33MHz x 4), and by that time, but the Pentium left all 486s in their dust. There was no market for it, and it was laid out to pasture. I doubt anybody still has one running. Well, perhaps except for these guys.
Traffic shaping only affects UPSTREAM data.
There's unfortunatly no 100% effective way a simple user could get rid of the queues at the ISP side during heavy downloads. ICMP Source Quench were supposed to be an answer to this, but the potential exploits lead many admins to simply filter them out. IMHO, 'gaming firewalls' could ease a bit latency on assymetric lines (ADSL mostly), but true QoS can only be achieved if _both_ ends do shape their traffic (the above applies to IPv4).
As far as I've seen by experimenting myself, the benefit of such an assymetric setup is to prevent excessive pings (several seconds). Playing a FPS during heavy use is still a no go as it implies irregular ping, and an average of 100-150 ms. However, it's quite a nice setup if you plan to play some MMORPG or want to get connected through SSH.
Regards.
Now that I think of it, my modem/firewall generates neglible heat. The damn PC -- way too much.
My goddamn PC is too hot already. When I turn on the other ones in the same room, it gets very warm. So I put one out in the hall if I need it.
That's plain annoying. I'd love to have more hardware, but the heat it generates drives me up the wall. Even in Winter I just don't want so much heat.
If I'm going to have a machine on, I want it doing work that is proportional to the heat it generates. An ARM-based router, even if it costs money, is probably worth it in this regard.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The real issue with these kinds of routers is the fact that the cable/dsl modems themselves are not interactive once their data queue becomes filled. Sure, traffic shapers are execellent and I've read http://lartc.org/howto/ which has great information for linux. Cable/DSL connections are asymetrical, and when you send data from your pc to the actual cable modem, you send it at 10/100megbit (whatever speed the nic in your pc and cable modem agree on) Your ISP will limit you to 512kBit upload for example. The modem cannot send data to your ISP as fast as you can send it to your modem thus the data queue fills very fast and your modem has trouble keeping up. These shapers can simply slow down the rate at which your PC sends data to the modem and thus stopping the filling of the data queue in the modem which will allow it to be more interactive. That is the biggest problem you'll have with cable/dsl connections for a few users. Sure, more detailed protocol based shaping can and should be used to reserve bandwidth on a larger scale.
It seems like no "gaming router" would be complete without the ability to run an XLink Kai server.
Unfortunately, XLink Kai won't run on FreeBSD...
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Dude, chill out. It will serve you well.
Suppose I want to set BitTorrent to a lower priority, which is what I've done on my router, for obvious reasons that BitTorrent can really hose a connection.
What I want to know is simply, how does the router know it's BitTorrent?
If it determines it purely based off the port, then it's a joke. Many trackers these days refuse my connection if I use the standard ports, so I'm forced to change them. However, if it actually does it by watching the start of the protocol, it might be able to detect applications based on the magic numbers in the protocol.
I've just always wondered which it is, because they never seem to explain things like "Application Priority" in the manual.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Actually I'm still running several AMD DX4's, with various versions of FreeBSD. A DX4 133 is about the same speed as a Pentium 100 and allowed many to upgrade their CPU speed without changing their motherboard, so actually there was a decent market for them, for a while anyways. AMD made 486's that could be clocked to 40Mhz bus speeds, and so the DX4 was actually capable of 160Mhz, which generally beat out Pentium 100's for many things (except floating point). Such machines have plenty of horsepower to run simple websites.
Hubs do have a lower latency than switches. If you're familiar with the OSI model, you'll find out that a hub is a Layer 1 Device that deals with simply 0s and 1s. A switch is a Layer 2 Device that deals with hex MAC addresses. The simple fact that a hub does not have to look up a switch port address in the CAM (content addressable memory) table to decide what port to forward a frame makes it much faster than a hub. By design, hubs are technically faster than switches. At the same time, for a large number of PCs (over 25~) or so switches are faster because they will prevent network collisions due to the fact that switches seperate collision domains and hubs do not, in that respect. Seperate collision domains will drastically lower the rate at which a NIC will need to run the CSMA/CD back off algorithum when it sees that another NIC is trying to transmit data on the wire. CSMA/CD back off algorithum selects a random number of milliseconds for the NIC to attempt a retry to send its data.
Also, switches typically use methods to check for frame errors. "Cut Through" and "Store and forward" will be typical switch forward methods. I believe there is one more, but I can't remember it off the top of my head. Store and Forward will check the CRC section of the frame for errors which slows switches down even further than hubs. Cut Through does no checking of the CRC for frame errors.
Agreed that a loud PC isn't a welcome addition to any room. However an old laptop works perfectly for things like this. You can get one for dirt cheap if you do a search for those with cracked displays.
There were certainly DX4s though, where the CPU frequency was 3x that of the bus speed (why it wasn't the DX3, I don't know).Two possible reasons:
- "DX3" was already granted a worldwide copyright.
- Intel had just lost a trademark lawsuit against AMD, where AMD was saying you couldn't trademark an "obvious" number such as 486. Therefore they chose DX-*4* for a clock-*tripled* chip, as it was non-obvious.
More info at Google Groups.
If you don't want a loud, hot old PC around, simply run m0n0wall on an embedded platform. I feel that's really what it was designed for. Grab a WRAP board with a power supply and case for under $200US. Write the version of m0n0wall specifically developed for the WRAP board onto an old 16MB compactflash card, plug it in, and you've got a commercial-grade router that will support two subnets that does things a $100 "gaming router" can't touch. Completely silent, smaller than any Linksys. If you must use generic PC parts, buy an $8 compactflash-to-ide adapter to boot the system off of and skip the CD-ROM and floppy ordeal. The whole configuration saves as a single XML file so if hardware ever breaks you can boot m0n0wall off another pile of generic parts, upload the XML file, and you're back up. Yeah, its more expensive, but a true geek will appreciate all the extra features. m0n0wall can do some really cool stuff for it's size and friendlyness. I've dumped Cisco for all my small-to-medium sized network setups in favor of m0n0wall and haven't looked back.
I'm a bone arsed lazy WRT54G owner. Can you show me where to get firmware to do this? :-)
By keeping packet queues on the router side, rather than the modem side. Users are able to achive great pings in online games, while fully using their download bandwidth.
By reading Slashdot, rather than other news sites. People are able to achive great knowledge in English, while fully surrendering their higher brain functions.
Cmon, a sentence fragment AND a spelling error? What on earth is an achive?
Derive Politics
" I recommend no less than a 486DX2 133Mhz processor with 64 megs of ram"
:(
486dx2 is 50-66 mhz, dx3 up to 80 and dx4 up to 120.
133 is a pentium 1 class. therefore, if 133mhz is min i highly recomend you do NOT use a 486 anything for this project.
sorry, i live in karma hell
Well, that'd be a pretty short contest.
threadeds blog
Absolutely right. when I needed to build a router to allow me to download and play games online, I found 2 cheap Sun boxes and installed OpenBSD and utilized carp.
Gamers installing FreeBSD on a router, thats just crazy.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It's important, because although FreeBSD does have SOME of ALTQ, and SOME of KAME, it does not have the most recent code and (certainly in the case of KAME) not even all of the older code.
Some people mentioned crashes with sessions, in other posts. I couldn't prove these were due to things like ALTQ or KAME, but it is entirely plausible that it is due to something of that sort. The *BSD folk have some of the most complete, not to mention some of the most powerful, networking code out there. The problems arise when it remains out there and doesn't get merged in.
(Linux isn't much better. USAGI - an alternative IPv6 stack - is not included. SGI's STP was never really looked at. GAMMA - an excellent network layer for clusters, a common use for Linux, is barely known outside of a cult following. Same for ABISS. Web100 - a neat instrumentation layer for Linux' network code - also hasn't gone very far.)
In this day and age, there is really no excuse for poor networking code. The patches exist. The validators and instrumentation exist. The extensions and refinements all exist.
I'm one of the first to take issue with Windows folks who don't patch their systems - whether for security or for capability - and damnit, I'm not going to be any slower just because I happen to like both Linux and the *BSDs. If anything, I'm going to be faster on the draw, precisely because I do care and want these systems to really show what they're capable of.
Why do you think I ran the FOLK project for the 2.4 kernels? Because I like pain? No, it's because of the sheer volume of unknown and neglected code that could make a huge difference. The FOLK patch was getting close to the size of the kernel itself! And that was just extensions, I had very few of the maintenance patches included - some of the -ac stuff, but almost nothing from the -aa series.
If there was a chance in hell of being paid for it, I'd be happy to invest the time and effort to get either the Linux or the *BSD network code absolutely right. Someone needs to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Skip the router. I'm fully confident in my WinXP box on the net with Microsoft Firewa__________
Wow, I can't wait to port this to DragonFlyBSD. It'll be even more awesome then!
You don't need to use a full blown PC and consume heaps of power.
I bought a Soekris net4801 close to 2 years ago now specifically to run m0n0wall on. Best computer decision I ever made. The power consumption is somewhere around 20W.
On my 1526/256kbps connection it works an absolute treat. I have 1 machine that is used solely to play games. All traffic from this machine is fed into a seperate queue from the rest of the LAN. Downloading at 140K whilst playing Battlefield 1942 with no lag is a blast and I never have to give a thought as to what might be downloading (or uploading) on the network. Prior to using m0n0wall and despite my best attempts with Smoothwall, CC and Mandrake with some scripts - the best I could do was around 60KB/s download before lag became an issue.
After seeing my setup a mate didn't want to fork over the cash for a net4801 but wanted to do the same thing. He uses a fanless 486 with 8MB RAM which boots from a CDROM and loads the config from the FDD. Once the machine boots the only moving part is the PSU fan. That's about the 2nd lowest amount of power you could consume for this kind of set up. Images for the net4801/4501, CDROM, WRAP boards etc are all available from the m0n0wall website. Battlefield 1942 for example needs 4 rules. 3 outgoing and 1 incoming.
If you want to route specific gaming traffic from your PC, just start the game, ALT+TAB and run netstat -a to find out what is going where. For Windows users, I found TinyPersonalFirewall v2 to be very helpful. It will show you specifically which apps are using which protocal and to which port is came from and/or is going to.
As a bonus, m0n0wall supports a bunch of wifi cards, VPNing, SNMP, Captive Portals, DMZs and multiple NICS. My net4801 for example has 3 onboard ethernet interfaces (modem, lan & dmz for web server), 2 addon ethernet ports. 1 for my local wifi lan & 1 for an AP on the roof to a local mesh network. Both use VPN. To help with this it also has a TypeIII Mini-PCI hardware accelerator to offload work from the CPU for VPN encryption. Best free router OS ever!
Look online for a neat little script called Wondershaper. It configures the Linux QoS for you based on the shell variables you set at the beginning of the script.
This is useful because coming up with a good configuration from scratch is a real pain.
I couldn't find the article I read that did a comprehensive comparison of these gaming routers but here's something I found with a quick google:
http://www.gamingillustrated.com/dgl4300.php
quote:
Specifically, with the network heavily populated, the latency in and around 650-750ms without GameFuel turned on. Once the technology was active, the latency was reduced to around 440-500ms
So it went from totally unplayable to too shit to even consider playing.
I haven't read the article yet but I hope they show some benchmarks cause I was looking into getting a gaming router for games and voip, and all the ones I read on totally fail. I've read this can be done much better with a dedicated box. I've read it's tricky though, maybe someone will link to a nice guide, maybe for linux as well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
remember when routers cost real money.
I had a freebsd box running as a router at my house.
And one at my dads and one at my sisters.(sigh)
The best thing in my life was personal router prices fell it was run not walk to get one for all 3 places. In at least 4 years of my dad having a router i had only one helpme call. ugrade firmware and boom back in business. If the firmware didnt help next step was buy a new one at 39 bucks.
Lets not go back to fully dedicated boxes for routers.
theres even more sites online that i would have to get working through the box.
If anyone asks me about this new great thing about a gaming router im gonna just start sneezing and looking around for somewhere to wipe my hand,that will send em away.
So lets say you happen to have an old PC laying around unused and two NICs to stick in it. Let's then say you downclock the FSB and CPU to conserve power so that the machine only uses about 100W average. And let's say that the reason you need this type of router is to have good throughput on gaming and websurfing and still maximize your throughput on P2P apps that are flooding your connextion.
So you're running a PC at 100W 24/7. At 8 cents per kwh, that comes to $5.76/month. Of course, your power probably costs 12-15 cents per kwh, and your old PC probably takes 150-200W power, so you're probably using more like $8+/month. Also add in extra air conditioning costs in the summer to offset heat from the extra PC you have running.
I built a PC based router back when basic standalone units cost $250. Once they hit the $50 mark (two years ago, I probably paid more like $30 AR), I decided I was long overdue to buy one. I recouped my entire cost in less than 6 months. Unless there's something a $50 (now) Linksys WRT54g can't be modified to do, you shouldn't be bothering with a PC based solution.
The only way the PC router solution makes any sense is if you also happen to be using it as a print and file server, or a PC jukebox or running ftp/http services.
I was looking to get a gaming router, and I can't find the reviews right now, but there was a good roundup on anandtech or one of those sites.
They did their benchmarks using various p2p apps and games. They'd launch the games when the p2p apps were maxing the bandwidth.
Basically the benchmarks went like this for all of them:
Without 'super duper bandwidth adjuster thingie' average game ping 600
With super thingie: 450
So they all went from totally unplayable to totally unplayable.
I want to set up a box for gaming and voip, a linux box can be dedicated for this but I've read it's tricky to get it all working. But in the end it actually works unlike every gaming router I've read about.
If your personal experience is different, please post, but I've read the reviews for about 6 of em, and none of them were up to the job. Sure they knocked off 100 milliseconds, but not near enough to make it actually worth it to get a gaming router.
Want to drive yourself nuts? Put a pair of Sveasoft-hacked Linksys WiFi units between a PC and a server, and try to do something intensive like a CVS checkout. The thing works OK when it's not the bottleneck, which is the case when you're talking over some low-bandwidth link to the outside world. But when the WiFi link is the bottleneck, something breaks in queuing.
Yeah, we tried Sveasoft support. They're in denial about the problem, and we don't have time to debug it for them.
I've recently been tinkering with a FreeBSD server where I work, but what I'd really like is an insanely stripped down version of BSD that will run SSH and Apache ONLY, both on arbitrary ports up in the 1xxxxx range, and flat out ignore any communication to any other port. IE, a stealth server (Ninja please!).
At first glance this looks like it would fit the bill, just install this and run on the wan port alone while disabling the DHCP server aspect of it, but before I nuke the install I spent last night setting up in favor of m0n0bsd I'd like a second opinion. Any thoughts?
bend like the reed
Wow, you must be a hit at parties.
it's wonderful that they've finally implemented traffic shaping in BSD and put it in a crap firewall distro but this is nothing new. it's also not a "gaming router", it's a fucking router that has a few traffic shaping rules for ports games use. every linux distribution has support for this and lartc.org has it documented.
This article seems to say that you need to go get a particular piece of software to achieve the result for gamers. WTF? QoS (Quality of Service) is present in HEAPS of consumer devices; there's no need to go building your own router to do this. In reality, there should have been merely an article titled "How to use QoS/Traffic Shaping to maintain online gaming speed". There's going to be a bunch of people burning a lot of time on this solution when it may already be right in front of them on the router they already own.
Be warned, I liked the sveasoft firmware to begin with. Until, of course, both routers I used it on failed to function anymore after using their firmware for a couple months. I tried all of their reset procedures but only one came back to life, for a couple weeks. After that, I actually got one of them to smoke.
I broke down and just got an Airport Extreme Base Station. It's fairly nice, and a little expensive. What was appealing to me is that it's covered under my laptops warranty if it dies. I'm tired of buying a new router every year because of the shoddy manufacturing of them.
I love monowall, but the interface for doing traffic shaping/QoS is, well, non existent. Their GUI (at least for this function) is less than intuitive.
Anyone know of any docs? Or perhaps might post a mini-how-to here?
jh
I agree it is fun to do these kind of things, I have 6 extra computers that I use on projects such as this but I really don't know if money is saved. Sure I don't have to put out money initially since I am either re-using parts from my old computers or from computers I got for free, but in this situation it is being compared to a pre-built router. A router does not have near the number of parts a whole computer has, and I am pretty sure it uses a lot less power. So yes, I believe it is fun to reuse old parts, but I am not so sure money is saved when you consider the time it takes to configure everything properly and also the extra power usage.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
OK, but how much is it with an enclosure and powersupply, and whatever other crap you need?
A board, by itself, isn't equivalent to what you get when you buy something at a store.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
You can do lots of things to cool those PCs down though. Sleep (Suspend to RAM) or Hiberation (Suspend to Disk) are always good options if you aren't using the computer when it's not around. Personally, I use my computer 24/7 to do something, but you can still negate a lot of heat:
- If you are using an Athlon 64, use the Cool'n'Quiet tech to dynamically clock your system down to as little as 800Mhz -- it sips power at that speed. To be fair, Pentium 4 Prescott owners also have a similar feature, but it can only clock the system down to 2800Mhz (or whatever the 14x multiplier would net you, if you are overclocking or underclocking your bus).
- Take advantage of the automatic turning off of disks and displays available on any modern ACPI PC.
- You can always underclock parts of your system, even dynamically. For instance, any modern nVidia GPU can be dynamically clocked down when running in 2D mode and then throttle back up when 3D apps need the power. I'm sure there are similar features for ATI GPUs.
- For the more adventurous, you can buy water cooling kits, and place the radiator outside, or in a window blowing exhaust air out. Make sure your pump can move the water over the delta in height, though!
My system has six disks in it (1x80GB system, 1x200GB "misc", and 4x300GB in a RAID-5), as well as 2 19" LCDs, so the hard disk and monitor features really help me out. I unforunately don't have a processor capable of dynamic clocking yet (I'm still on an Athlon XP), but I do dynamically adjust the bus down 25Mhz or so when I'm not using the computer heavily. For my laptop though, you can't beat suspend-to-disk: it takes about 14 seconds to boot in to Windows, exactly the same way as I left it. I've also offloaded all my critical services to an old, passively cooled PII/266 so that the desktop can be shut off as often as possible (e.g. when Remote Desktop and FTP aren't required).
In the winter close the vents in your computer room. The problem you are having is you are getting the amount of heat that is required to keep the room/hall with the thermostat in it warm; you have computers producing heat so you don't need it. Likewise in the warm months close your other vents slightly and leave the vent in that room wide open.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
It would be great if someone came up with a spelling and grammar router for the Slashdot editors...
Error: incomplete sentence. Please correct before approving submission.Error: misspelled word. Please correct before approving submission.
Error: misspelled word. Please correct before approving submission.
You need to install an RTFM interface.
I've often thought that shaving 50ms off a ping time probably doesn't make that much difference especially if you're actually trying to shape non ICMP traffic. Unless of course the "pings" are traces of packet time for actual ingame packets over UDP or TCP, in which case I'd appreciate knowing a bit more about that.
Note : a quicker ICMP response from a given host may indicate that the same host will be quicker at replying generally, of course. But really these routers just seem to make sure that the home network works properly. If you're losing 100ms of latency on your home network, you probably have too much shit running on your PC in the first place.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Just because you asked... the reason the DX4 is a DX4 and not DX3 (since it, as you pointed out, only triples the bus speed) was because of the enhanced amount of cache which according to intel allowed it the same level of performance as quadrupling the bus speed while not actually doing so - hence DX4. :)
Very well, so these guys claim to have a working traffic shaping router that will keep your latency down over ADSL under any condition.
Now let me tell you in brief what they, too, will have missed in their solution:
Since ADSL modems usually use ATM as their low-level protocol over the actual modem line, you get additional overhead when transmitting small packages. The problem is that this overhead is not accounted for by the kernel in question, since the kernel cannot know about the actual encoding used behind the network interface of the router in question (usually an ethernet device).
The size of an ATM frame is 40 bytes. This is less than the size of the smallest TCP package you can generate (due to the size of the TCP header). In turn, this leads to, say, all ACK packets being split up into two ATM frames with about 25% of additional overhead that is not accounted for by the kernel if you are using the built-in traffic control facilities.
Now have a download running and you will already be generating loads of ACK packets. You would have to severely cut down the permitted upload rate to keep the modem queue empty under this circumstance. Furthermore, the maximum to be allowed upload rate will differ depending on what you are doing with your line at a given moment.
Dan Singletary has written a user space traffic control daemon for Linux that is taking this very fact into account. You can download this here.
Even with such a solution in place, you still won't be able to get your guaranteed latency below a certain theoretical minimum while your line is fully saturated. This minimum depends on your base latency and upstream capacity.
Latency sensitive games will suffer, regardless what you do, and in many cases the typical hard-core gamer will not be satisfied.
Of course traffic shaping still really helps with interactive applications (SSH and the like) and even web browsing.
--Frank
NetCraft confirms, BSD is.... oh forget it.
They noticed the ATM overhead, but did not recognize it.
Somewhere it gives the example of a 128 up 512 down ADSL connection, says these rates are in kbps and need to be entered in the configuration (in kbits, not kbytes per second) and then suggest you to subtract 50 from the figures as a first try.
This will cater for the ATM overhead (at these low rates).
Usually, ADSL providers are cheating in that they specify the ATM rate, not the expected IP bitrate, in their advertisements. But when you set your shaper to 10-15% lower it should work OK on the average.
Of course the effect you mention exists as well, but as a first approximation a fixed cutback of the real linespeed will help.
The 486DX2 certainly existed. I owned one (HP Vectra).
t ml
http://www.mic-d.com/gallery/chips/intel486dx2a.h
You are (probably) right about the mhz thing being off. Hell, the pentiums that came out after my DX2 started off at 60mhz. There was some monkey business with other CPU manufacturers (Cyrix, AMD, etc) so they may have made something with that clockspeed.
Not as low power as you think.
I have a linux distribution "shurdix" (used to be called Route Hat), which among other things features traffic control for situations like this. It is 100% open source. For measurements check out here:
5 00.html
;-).
http://mailman.ds9a.nl/pipermail/lartc/2005q2/016
Excerpt: 500 active users, 16MBit line, over 90% bandwidth utilisation, 20ms ping to next hop, downloading kernel with over 200kB/s.
I am also selling boxes with shurdix preinstalled / preconfigured and am planning on expanding. If you want some, contact me
Yours sincerely,
Peter Surda, www.shurdix.org
If you're interested in m0n0wall take a look at pfsense (http://www.pfsense.com/), it's a m0n0wall derived os, on freeBSD 6.x with quite some more features than m0n0... ^_^
& file=article&sid=250
also look at this:
http://www.routerdesign.com/modules.php?name=News
http://www.openwrt.org/
It's the most open of the alternativesd, last I looked. Not necessarily great for the lazy, though, since it will want some hand-configuring.
My pet peeve is "ping". What the hell is a "great ping"? Is it a new implementation that allows more control over what packets are sent? Nope, apparently they are referring to "low latency".
Another one is "router". When the gamers refers toa router, they really mean either a "firewall" or something that provides a NAT service, and usually both.
I've given up on pointing out the mistakes when I read gaming forums, but this is Slashdot so I'm allowed to rant.
Actually, no they haven't. They've posted the FIRST PART of an article on how to do this. Right now, it's just how to setup a basic router with m0n0wall.
From the article:
When you are ready to really squeeze the best performance from your router, you will want to add your own traffic shaping rules to the configuration. Next week will bring the Lan Game Reviews tutorial on how to set these up for the most popular games, so check back often!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The main advantage of a old PC over special router hardware is the harddrive. Once you get used to it it can be extremly convenient to start all huge downloads on the router-PC instead of your PC and then just letting them run overnight. In addition to that it can also function as a simple fileserver in your LAN and do basically whatever you want 24/7. With special router hardware on the other side you still have to do all the downloading part on your PC, which can be a bit annoying when it comes to game demos, patches and other stuff that can get quite large, neither can it serve files or do anything other 'intelligent'.
If there would be a small silent router with a harddisk I would switch pretty much instantly, but until those are available I prefer to stay with an old PC in the basement, since its simply more flexible for me.
I recently bought a DLINK DGL-4300, and while it is definitely not as cool as this, it does work well. For someone who gets to the 'burn the ISO' part of the article and starts to get nervous, this would be a safer bet. Starting price is around $140
Well, maybe you could just use one of these:
http://www.soekris.com/net4511.htm
Works great, I'm using one right now, and m0n0wall reportedly works just as well on it.
Not all ADSL providers use ATM, but most do.
My ISP does not.
I have a 2300/256 connection (gross numbers), or 2100/210kbit after overhead.
Using wondershaper, setting the bandwith limits to 1900/150kbit, I can get by with 40msec (from 13msec) latency to first hop when I use bittorrent with 100kbit up and 500-1100kbit down.
I have to shape p2p down to ~40-50kbit in order to get usable ping for two players in battlefield 2.
Using both bittorrent and FTP to create a bandwith usage of around 1900kbit down and 150kbit up, latency to first hop will rise to around 200msec. I have not been able to improve those numbers without limiting the bandwith more than what is practical.
So the conclusion stands; you cannot both use all your bandwith and then expect games to work flawlessly when doing so, atleast not with ADSL.
PLEASE everyone, scrap words that are .. the end-consumer. all
stratigically bad for us end-consumers.
STOP using words like "SHARED BANDWIDTH" 'cause
some marketing idiots will grab that up and easy
make you pay more if you use more then one
computer on your "shared" bandwidth. i have seen
it! if you have a NAT router, your house is
"internet aware"! no more talk about "shared
bandwidth" okay?
STOP using words like "WAR DRIVING"; end-consumer
friendly alternative would be "wifi scouting".
there are many more internet/computer related
terms that play directly into the hands of mega
corporations and their brain dead marketing
devisions.
words and the feelings they induce make the world
look-and-feel how it does. so if you're a smart
consumer and make comparisons before you buy and
the like, start-up that handy brain area that
is responsible for propaganda and start using
neutral words -or- consumer friendly words.
don't forget, some countries are 90% marketing
and it is in your power to make the world look-
and-feel better for you
this with a more carefull choice of words!!!
this is a yellow ribbon campaign!
Wondershaper http://lartc.org/wondershaper/
Got known of it when it was included in the development branch of floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ - A Linux-based router software package that fits on a floppy disk (yes, those 3.5" diskettes).
And to answer someone above questioning the performance of using a PC to route packets instead of dedicated hardware, it depends on what dedicated hardware you're talking about. For once I believe many of the $50 boxes out there are indeed quite poor in performance when compared to a reasonablty antique (say 486DX2-66) PC running a *nix router package.
But if you mean the $5000 layer 2 router, then I don't know.
Exactly. Some people just get their kicks out of using old hardware and doing something worthwhile with it. I recently saved an old box (AMD K6 200, 64 MB RAM) from an inglorious death at the landfill - luckily the previous owner, a good friend of mine remembered my fondness of computer-related junk and i happily went and picked it up.
... whatever else I might find amusing. It also has an old ISA radio card; I'm hoping to get it working so anyone could listen to FM radio over LAN (via ESD). Can't do that with your average soapbox-router.
Now it has NetBSD installed (a superb OS btw), currently only NATing an ADSL connection and running apache and sshd - but possibilities are endless. I'm planning to add trafficshaping / firewall (pf), PHP module to apache, a plethora of P2P clients (amule, bittorrent, soulseek, etc), samba
Many posts have asked why bother with gaming routers under $100. The answer is control. With any of the firewall packages on FreeBSD, you have complete customization and tuning of the rules and bandwidth managment. It's also "open source" so you know exactly how the rules are set up.
This is not for everyone. If you can't deal with man pages, firewall rule logic, and editing flat file configurations with vi, then by all means get the router.
That said, I've had an old 486-66 running FreeBSD 4.x, ipfw, and dummynet, for a few years now, doing just this. Not for gaming, but to keep my public web server from sucking up all the uplink.
I've been doing this with tc on Linux for several years now, and never knew it was something so grandiose as a "gaming router".
Gamers aren't likely to spend time they could be gaming with installing, configuring and maintaining a router setup
Guess you don't know many gamers then. Tweaks are where its at just to get any extra advantage on the field. Who else but a gamer would want the latest and greatest 3000 dpi mouse? A specially configured keyboard? Extra-large mousemat - sorry "gaming surface". The list goes on...
A friend of mine built one of these a few months ago on a space pentium 2 and also built a firewall with another, so is this really that breaking news?
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
I don't know where in the Linux kernels it was introduced, but you can control traffic with very fine grained rules using tc and it's associated qdiscs' and filters.
Additionally, there are all several filters that can be layered into the qdiscs to provide fairness between the various data streams moving thru a single qdisc.
The sweet part of the tc setup is bandwidth borrowing.
For instance, say a 1 mbit link. You can have tc partition 500kbit to http traffic, 300 kbit to smtp/pop traffic and 200 to all other traffic.
Add in some rules about BW caps and priorities and the "all other" traffic can borrow any set amount of the http and smtp/pop BW if those qdiscs are not using it.
Setting up tc on the WAN interface of your firewall/router can let you use your entire up and down bw concurrently and things like ping times do not suffer. The trick is taking the que away from the modem and controlling it in the router.
Anyway, there are some good sites that explain setting up tc and how to maximize your traffic flow. As far as how well it works? Awesome!
My current link is 8mbit/768kbit. I can use all available upstream for something like gnutella and the downstream does not suffer during surfing/mail/download/whatever. It can be step up extremely fine grained or just throw in a couple of ques for simple setup.
I've been using m0n0wall for about 2 years and it is easy to set up the traffic shaper, you can set it all up your self (manually creating shaping rules), or just use the wizard. I use the wizard and it works amazingly well. I just put in my max upstream and max downstream for my connection and hit "Save" and that's pretty much it, it does it all for you.
My roomate runs exeem full blast all day. I was getting pings of over 600ms on Battlefield 2 before and now get pings of around 40 to 70ms. My download speeds are back to normal as well. All this was resolved in m0n0wall by a few simple mouse clicks.
Requires CBQ or HTB. I personally think it works better with HTB. See http://lartc.org/wondershaper/
I had to reset a FreeBSD router I set-up at an office in 2001 once in 2004 when the log files used up all the free disk space. Your talking about devices that run headless, in a closet, near your hub/switch anyway. And by old, circa 1996 Pentium 120's (which people have trouble _giving_ away run fine). Although it's time for an upgrade, I run a FreeBSD p-80 w/ a whopping 250mb hdd at home for playing games (but not hosting due to bandwidth and lazyness learning ipfw commands).
t -airlions, etc., then your going to build your own router.
So, once you've got your FreeBSD router running, you've got the option to run a top of the line web server, FTP host, Junkbuster, http proxy, e-mail server, yadda yadda. Plus, ya got trafshow and all kinds of networking intrusion/detecting tools. Plus, lets say they do come up with a hack or exploit for your generic store bought router (running last years' technology, btw), then your, pardon the gamer language, scr3w3d.
Finally, your recycling. Your helping to redistribute economic value to labor and service rather than planet destructive resource extraction. If your going to eat meat all the time, go buy a router. If your going to cut back on GMO's and factory farmed animals, hang out with more than one member of the opposite sex at the same time, feel good about yourself, and always be amongst teh first to kill-the-dragon/unlock-leet-weap-kits/land-withou
Sorry in advance to most of you unconverted heathen meat eating non-gamer slashdot nerds.
-- unaloony LoonyBomber on www.bluesnews.com
Not yet, but I'm working on it.
http://router.4th.be/
heh ironic. i've been using freebsd for my network gateway for about 4 months. I didnt think about the gaming implications. But i definately havn't noticed any lag while downloading two large files and playing Counter-Strike. However the average counter-strike (or gaming in general) players are idiots so setting up freebsd will be damn near impossible for them :). I can just see the "Wheres the start menu at" questions :)
I just so happens that I've been experiencing ping issues when gaming because of the girlfriend browsing/mail downloading/etc, and I just so happens to have an old pc (celeron 400, 64megs, cdrom, stiffy, no HDD & two old network cards) lying around.
:)
Now gaming routers are damn near impossible to find here, and they costly enough that I'd never bother buying one.
Its times like this that I remember why I read slashdot.
East Coast Brewers
You keep using that word...