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Halo 3 Causing Network Issues
Recently at my university where I'm a student and a sys admin, we have been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peak gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the 25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but university students attempting to access network resources such as our UNIX clusters were satisfied.
I'd like to see more proof before I go and blame Halo 3 for this.
Niels
...but at least now I have the excuse that there is no FA.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What a remarkably useless story.
FFS. PEAK.
Poorly configured firewall and packet shapers - reconfigured them and now stuff works better?
This passes for a story at slashdot now?
So, poor network design caused the network to become saturated. QoS rules were applied to UDP, as they should have been, and the problem has gone away.
Where's the story?
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
Guy had a network problem. Network admins found the source of the network problem. People who caused the network problem complained, everyone else was happy. This wasn't even a technology problem, it was an oversight in the configuration of the routers/switches.
How exactly is this worthy of a front page article on slashdot?
Hey, guess what. The other day I had a process that stopped working. Thinking quickly, I figured out what was wrong and fixed it. Everyone was happy. Do I get a front page article too?
Sheesh. Congrats for doing your job, subby.
(I know this was a journal entry and subby had nothing to do with it getting greenlighted, but seriously, wtf?)
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Way to piss of gamers. Porn and gaming made the internet. Now you are sucking the very life out of it. All that will be left is eggheads like you who get off on power tripping.
You know, I don't think I have any sympathy for the upset gamers on campus networks.
Also, are you seriously trying to tell me that /. couldn't find something more interesting to post?
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
You insensitive bastard!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
must be...
I fail to see a story here, your network was setup wrong and is now fixed. Case closed.
Has the world finally succumb to this madness!?! When will the injustice to gamers be put to an end!?!
and wow, I am increasingly glad I've never created an account on slashdot in the last 2 years
Get a better network! Online gaming isn't that bandwidth intensive!
hah?
U Don't Play packets
Someone tag this kdawson... In other words, what kind of network are those people using that a game crashes it? With hubs and bridged computers...
You're degrading time-critical but relatively low-bandwidth traffic intentionally in order to improve responsiveness for some ssh connections?
Granted, Halo 3 is less important than Prof. Smith's Monte Carlo, but the fact that you have to do this at all means that you need more capacity. Plus it's damn rude to the students: "Oh, they're doing something new that we don't degrade! Ah, well, just degrade student UDP traffic too, that'll fix it!"
I'm not saying that transfer limits are a bad idea -- someone downloading 100GB/month and saturating a line needs to be told off, certainly -- but if a bunch of low-bandwidth gaming traffic from the dorms kills the network...
Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network.
If I knew what uni you were at I'd seriously consider adding my (meager) 256kbps upstream to the load by writing a script to refresh your homepage over and over.
It had a satisfying sweet smell and was flecked with little seeds from my multigrain healthy bread.
UPDATES TO FOLLOW AS EVENTS WARRANT STAY TUNED
How hard is it to run a tcpdump (or IOS's equivalent) on a core router to see what type of traffic is saturating the network? And why the fuck is there a need to post this on /. like it's a big deal?
I have a similar situation at my school. Based on my signal strength in most areas, I think they only have 1 ap per building.
I can't believe the number of people defending the student's desire to play Halo and clipling the network. Sure, the network might be improperly configured, but they are using someone else resource at the expense of others. Personally, I would have closed the ports used by the game.
My computer was acting a little slowly. I didn't want to figure out what exactly was causing the problem, so I rebooted it. It's back to normal speed now.
Your 45mb pipe, even shared between 2000 users is a lot more than people had a few years ago... Consider dialups, and the college where i studied had 2mb shared between around 2000 students.
But you need to consider the usage patterns, most ISPs will put way more than 2000 users on a single 45mb pipe, because the average user uses very little bandwidth. Your school clearly has a higher proportion of heavy users, and so it's bandwidth is more saturated.
Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games. They really have no obligation to support any use of the internet other than legitimate educational purposes.
They could quite easily filter everything except HTTP, and require that you make and justify a request, via a teacher, for anything else.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The part I don't understand is how it's a choice between real-time apps and other traffic. Somehow, on my university's network, we're able to play first-person shooters without causing any performance issues for other users or feeling more limited than if we were on a home connection. Do we have more bandwidth than the submitter's university? We've got a gigabit/s connection between buildings, and 10 megabit/s per switch port (which I despise, as it means I can't get 100 mb/s speed within the campus network, but it makes their QoS easier).
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Well if it's a dorm room, get a high gain antenna and hang it out the window, or find where the AP is located and point a directional antenna at it...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Wait a minute, you limited network usage for gamers in favor of academic users? Sounds like a pretty shitty school if you ask me. Everyone knows that school networks are for three things:
1) Downloading music and movies illegally.
2) Downloading pr0n.
3) Playing games, even crappy ones like Halo 3.
As you can clearly see homework and research are not on the list...
Haiku for you!
No film at 11.
Good grief! What a ridiculous article.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm sot sure what's going on here - who's peeking at your gaming hours?
"Halo 3" should be arrested immediately, brought to justice and then executed. And his bastard parrents too, for naming their kid "Halo 3" in the first place, I mean come on!
wait a min..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Way back in the day, Doom's first implementation of multiplayer used broadcast packets to communicate amongst client machines. The university I attended was, at the time, home to the world's largest unswitched Ethernet. Doom's popularity led to the swift collapse of the entire network on a regular basis, since a broadcast packet would result in a response from every other machine on the network.
id shortly thereafter patched the game not to use broadcast packets anymore. Once the cause of the network failures became apparent, playing the unpatched version of Doom became grounds for having your Intargopher turned off (we didn't call it the Intarweb back in those days, ya whippersnapper).
I don't think he was being a jerk.
Students aren't going to learn much if you provide shoddy essential services to people living on campus. They're going to want to watch TV, play games, etc.
Now, if it's possible to order 3rd party networks such as Hi-Speed Cable or DSL, there at least is an outlet. I recall on my dorm (many) years ago a difficult time getting access to 3rd party networks, hence why the university's network was used.
I'll also note that some on-campus residences are a source of income for the university (i.e. they're not run at a loss), and actually advertise access to high speed Internet as a feature to entice them to stay on campus vs. scramble to off-campus housing. Some even require at least 1-2 years of on campus stay. If I've been spending most of my high school years with high speed access and now am forced to deal with degraded service, I would not be pleased.
-Stu
it is the Covenants fault. They are trying to crash the internet ready for the next invasion.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Actually, I know of at least one school that DOES block everything but HTTP. Well, sort of. They actually block every port except for port 80. Even then, some protocols are blocked (like AIM). I've had quite the adventure these past eight weeks trying to get around the limitations. Fortunately, some awesome people started up http://www.meebo.com/ for my IM needs, and Gentoo includes emerge-webrsync as an alternative to emerge --sync. Still, it's terribly annoying. If my home university did the same, I'd seriously consider moving off-campus. Students pay a large sum of money to live in the dorms and apartments provided by the University (~$6k/year). Part of that money goes toward funding the Internet connection. At the moment, the only type of traffic that they throttle is streaming video. That's enough. I don't need my games throttled, too.
My school has a game design major, that I'm a part of.
The internet in the dorms was shittacular. Horrible horrible service, and we had to pay 30$ a month for it.
And, the IT department, when called out on this bullshit, couldn't even give us a break down on how our money was being spent.
So, 3 years ago me and several friends sent an email out to everyone of importance around campus calling them out, basically saying it was bullcrap they advertise themselves as being all advanced at this university and having this gaming major, but the gaming major students can't even get online half the time in their dorms to play....games.
Within several hours, most faculty was writing back and agreeing with us. We showed up at a meeting, and the head of IT didn't have anything together at all.
Basically what happened was for a few months we could opt to be on a seperate network through the engineering department that wasn't managed by the IT department, but rather a professor in his spare time. And gasp, this network was far far superior and less buggy. It had 50% of the computers on campus on it, and 0% of the budget, yet still managed to be far more reliable.
Then, after the next quarter passed, we were allowed to get outside ISP service in the dorms. Alot of my friends get adelphia internet access. I just chose to move off campus, I was tired of dealing with it. You still had to pay the IT department for their crummy connection, on top of paying another ISP.
Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games
Humans have educated others through games since forever. Even chess is a strategy game meant to teach others about warfare. The military uses games even today to train soldiers how to behave in combat.
Schools would be better if they used more games to educate their students.
A smart professor could use Halo3 to teach about gender issues or the biology of human perception.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games.
I disagree with this, at least to some extent. I agree that education is primary, but don't forget that it's also a HOME for those living on campus. You can't do nothing but eat, sleep, and study.
This really depends on your school. When I went to school, the school's IT department acted solely as our ISP- they restricted us to our bandwidth (10 GB/week when I was there a few years ago, 20 GB/week now), but beyond that, you were free to use as much of the pipe as you could drink from. (Admittedly, it was a 300 Mbps pipe shared between 2100 users, but the link to your jack was only 100 Mbps, so.) The other advantage, however, was that data on the University's internal network was entirely uncapped (and essentially unlimited in bandwidth; buildings were connected by 10 Gbps fibre links, and they had a 700 Mbps pipe to other educational networks) and so all the actual 'school' work you had to do you could do with no real trouble, even if the outgoing network pipe was totally saturated.
However, my point was not to blather on about infrastructure.
Some schools provide internet access as a privilege, and there, they have no obligation to support any use of the internet they don't want to. All the schools I've gone to have charged you for it, and acted solely as an ISP. They had no right, nor did they claim to, to restrict or limit your use of the bandwidth you had contractually paid for.
I know, for example, the University of Edinburgh at one point basically restricted you to port 80 through a Squid proxy, which would have made me enormously unhappy had I gone to school there. Luckily, I did not.
(Quite a bit of the time, I long for my school's internet connection. A 300 Mbps external internet pipe, a 10 Gbps internal network backbone, and an average of ~4 ms latency to the nearest sections of the internet cloud with an average maximum of 2 ms to anywhere on the school's internal network. I just wish they'd upgraded the in-room connections to gigabit before I'd left, although I realize it was a purposeful decision on their part- by leaving it at 100 Mbps, it was technically impossible for one person to saturate any of the network links.)
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Journal written by fender177 (1125877) and posted by kdawson on Sunday September 30, @03:17PM
I don't think this article was submitted as a story by the author. It looks like fender117 just posted a little story in his slashdot story, and kdawson stumbled upon it and decided to post it to the front page for some stupid reason.
Have your admins take a look at putting some Cogent bandwidth into the mix. Some will say it's crap, but I've found it to be excellent. You can get a 100Mb pipe extremely cheap from them.
Time to fire up the ol' JabberKatz(tm) proggie.
I miss his sensational writing style. He turned mountains into mole hills, and geeks into wise sages. I kept all his articles from the old days and feed them into a special markov generator program that's available on the internet (Google for JabberKatz). The articles themselves should still be available by searching Slashdot.
Here's what it spat out today:
" As you may imagine, we catch a lot of time playing computer games on the Internet. " They had become obsessed with online killing, reported another TV reporter. They had delved into militia and hate-group websites, some papers said.
The United States has become a crusade for conformity, intimidation and exclusion.
There are thousands of working actors, but most often stories are posted from other sources or posted and readers are given links. Links are now a hallmark of the Monica Lewinsky scandal has crystallized the difference between choosing and blocking.
In my mind, both movies (and the author of God and the New York City, Chicago and LA, schoolyard massacres are unknown. Nor has one ever occurred in Canada, even though it's rarely explained and dubiously supported.
It's hard to be rational about this idiocy. " American Pie " is an proselytizing book (with a foreword by our own Robin " roblimo " Miller, Editor-In-Chief for the Open Source Software Development. "
This was pretty tough to read, not only in Disney World but in the chips and disk drives of a Silicon Graphics Irix Workstation.
Levy calls this new species, a fusion of humans and intelligent machines. This is the computer user's first bill of rights. The media have turned bland and timid. Though H.L. Mencken called them " Boobus Americanus ") who specialized in defining virtue and trying to live up to that responsibility. Mostly, people talk about memes, they are not. These reporters are never prosecuted. That's because courts have repeatedly ruled that the reporters are carrying out activities that are protected by the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of the past year, TV stations, networks and newsmagazines sounded a steady stream of alarms about perverts, predators and porn online. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates. Napster, Linux, Gnutella, P2P, Napster -- it seems only right to honor Wells, the father of science fiction franchises. In a different sense, open source and free software movements out of a series of one-liners, set gags, set-ups and cultural in-jokes and spoofs.
> Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids
If so, perhaps it'll find something better to teach them than your "block everything" idea? "At School we learned where and how the biggest c**ts work".
Even non-net games should be banned. They are a total waste of time and resources, and only serve to rot the brains of 'players' who are being manipluated by the media giants to purchase products.
Nothing good comes out of these 'electronic video games'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Recently I purchased one of the limited Halo 3 packages. It looked great. But the game wouldn't start! Upon further investigation I remember I microwaved the disk for 3 minutes for no particular reason whatsoever.
I'm still pissed off though. Nowhere on the package it didn't say specifically about microwaving Halo 3.
We're having the exact same problem. Ever since the release date, the network has been ridiculously slow. Me and my roommate play a lot of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy which requires close to no latency to play well. We haven't been able to play because there is a half+ second delay between us and our opponents. :(
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
>Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games.
What kids? You have to be 18 to live in that dorm.
And it's not strictly *School*, it's a residence. Do you think it would be acceptable to only provide electric light for those who are actually studying? Or to only allow people to leave to go to class or to the library but for no other reason?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Sounds like your proud of having a shitty network there... Way to go!
Fact 5. The network was not experiencing issues, it was simply inadequate. Packet shaping the UDP is only a temporary fix, network use will only grow in the future. Face it, this is the same thing as the big Telcos eliminating Net Neutrality, just on a smaller scale and with less money-grubbing.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
i thought the point of this was that halo 3 might be using an above average level of bandwidth for a multiplayer fps-game
given the post identifies what the peak gaming times are, it's assumed that there are a lot of gamers on the network
prior to halo3 the network handled such game time traffic just fine with no slowdown on the network
but after the release of halo, the network suddenly begins to crawl
the diagnosis and response are on par
what is missing is how much they had throttled UDP traffic given that it was enough to cause gamers to complain
which would have meant it was enough that it resulted in poor / bad game performance
if it was throttled to something respectable then there's something inherently wrong with halo3
if it was throttled to something aggressive then this post is a non-issue and is flamebait
so can anyone confirm exactly how much bandwidth halo3 is sucking up?
They do only provide electric, and accomodation, to those studying.
When you cease to be a student, you have to move out.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You think your school has bandwidth problems? My school has over 23,000 students on a 622Mb/s pipe. Of course that's just the connection to the state educational network. The actual internet connection is less then 200Mb/s. (The max utilization of that 622Mb/s pipe over the last year was 262Mb/s)
So, your school has about 2x the effective bandwidth per student as my school does. Yes, all our dorms are wired with cat3. My bandwidth is rate limited to 768kb/s, so it doesn't matter.
Some people were saying to move out of the dorms: My school requires all freshmen to live in the dorms for at least one year.
I must agree with this Coward. Some random university's network didn't have traffic shaping set up correctly. So? This is somehow newsworthy?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Just another example of why dorms should be isolated from the university's network. if they need to get in, they can VPN...
Except then when they got around to trying to attract new students they'd have a bit of trouble saying "internet access" was part of the price.
Maybe I'm off my rocker, but I believe my Bittorrent client uses UDP for DHT. Perhaps the school's pipe was being saturated by torrent downloads to begin with, and Halo was merely the straw that broke the camel's back? The fact that shaping UDP fixed the bandwidth issue tells me that an online game couldn't be the cause of it unless everyone decided to skip class for a campus-wide Halo-fest.
Sounds like the old iPhone excuse: "OMG, teh networks is down, it must be new product xyz's fault, and not my network misconfigurations!!11!!"
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
You didn't go to U. of Chicago, did you?
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
It looks like the network needs for Halo 3 are more picky than every other game I've played - WoW, WC3, Halo 2 etc play just fine. Admittedly if I want to host a game in WC3 I need to open a couple ports, but at least Blizzard tells me what ports to open. It looks like Microsoft's strategy is to just throw everything under a uPNP umbrella and call it a day. If they're this lazy with something as simple as port communication, I'm not surprised that they're doing other shady things with their IP stack, causing headaches for network admins the world over.
"Duke Nukem Forever Causing Network Issues"
Now, that one is a story ...!
n/t
At our campus, we had a similar problem, however, it was more perplexing. We found traffic to increase at night, so we simply turn it off at night, and that solved our problem.
It is sad that we live in a day when instead of trying to find a solution to a problem that fixes an issue. We simply try to find limits to reshape and alter the problem, without ever trying to address it.
Just for the record, dropped (shaped) udp packets are not recovered. TCP/IP notices dropped packets, has them resent, and automatically lowers the connection's transmission rate, whereas with UDP you're just tossing EMP's into people's datastreams. UDP/IP is much more primitive, and relies on application level consistency checks, which, for the record, almost never ever ever monitor packet drops & throttle themselves down when packets start dropping. Thats why most packet filtering systems simply de-prioritize UDP and will not drop UDP.
There's no in-depth info, there's no link to an article, it's not a review, there's no real information.
Seriously, editors, what the hell.
What happens is, after several years of non-compulsory higher education (i.e. instead of bailing out at 16, they stay on till 21-22), most people end up in jobs they could have been in anyway if they'd spent those years actually working in their field. Instead of making a positive income in the intervening time (and doing that to make investments, and pay for their own place and getting an early step on the property ladder) they end up saddling themselves with thousands of GBP/USD/EUR worth of debt (and/or have their parents pick up the tab).
If you are doing a college course in computing in the UK or US (or most parts of Europe), my advice is: DON'T. Total waste of your time. Take an entry level position now, and change job after a year or two. Do that a couple of times until you feel you are moderately able in your field and earning comfortably. Don't get sucked into one job for too long if it's not what you ultimately want to do or if it doesn't pay enough.
I would note if I had gone to college instead of getting (a pretty poor paying) first job, I wouldn't have been able to buy my first place when I was 18 and I wouldn't already have been earning 30-50% above an average graduate's salary by the time I was 20-21. All in all, 10 years later as it is, I'd be much worse off.
My mother is university lecturer as it happens, and teaches medical students. Despite her being quite senior and well paid, and about to retire, I've been earning more than her since I was 20. Which is a bad indictment of the value society places on those in teaching positions and and indication of how big the deficit still is good software/systems engineers (formally qualified or not).
With regard to: The stupid part is to rely on your college education to make you an outstanding member of whatever field you are in As far as software developers go, maybe 1 in 30-50 graduates are keepers (at interview), which I'd say is about the same for non-graduates, probably slightly worse odds than it is for non-graduates. I would say this is because there are usually a number of candidates that think graduating is all that's required, and that J2EE is the be-all and end all (and that operating systems, SQL databases and LDAP directories are "stuff they don't need to worry about" - I expect that is a familiar experience for many here).
Never mind 'making people an outstanding member of their field they are in', they should be at least teaching them more than they could learn themselves down the local library in half the time. Currently, that is not happening. The GOOD graduates are the ones who've taught themselves things that are outside the curriculum (and it's that very spirit that makes them valuable throughout their careers).
Isn't the whole point of the firehose to keep garbage like this from getting posted?
/. to link to.
Or is this just the editors really reaching for a crazy anti-Microsoft rant? Maybe Vista is just so bad that people aren't even using it enough to write complaints and security screeds for
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I must agree with this Coward
Careful dude, some ACs are Klingons and would KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND for saying that.
Some random university's network didn't have traffic shaping set up correctly. So? This is somehow newsworthy?
It's revenge. In the good old days slashdot reading admins could get a unlimited network connection and download torrents 24/7. Then undocumented download came in and they had to limit themselves to 90GB less a hard to determine safety margin. Some ISPs did shaping too, so unfavoured applications like torrents got crippled. This spoiled their fun.
Then Halo 3 came out and they see loads of people having fun playing it. But Halo is released by Microsoft and so must have a downside. And sure enough it does - the network has been slow recently and it therefore must be to blame. The solution is to cripple its network connection. The fact their users with XBox 360s got a taste of disappointment the admins felt when Comcase limited their downloads is an added bonus.
It's a bit like when Vista came out, some Linux sysadmin decided not to support the deprecated feature of DHCP it relied on, with the happy side effect of not allowing customers to use Vista.
The really funny thing is that whenever anything Microsoft does anything that in anyway stops people using Linux the people that do this sort of thing would be outraged.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Well I guess this does prove that Halo 3 has been a success at the very least!
A smart professor could use Halo3 to teach about gender issues or the biology of human perception.
That trite point would take several seconds of the professor's time, what would they talk about for the rest of the semester? Honestly if my college professors had tried to tie their non-computer lessons into Halo, I would have stood up and left.
Jesus, don't you fucking nerds get enough computer games and science fiction movies at home?
Microsoft implement a depreciated standard and people start complaining that its not supported ?
Go try and play your DirectX 3 Games and get back to us
A whole lot of people dont do anything anymore other than sit in front of a computer/console all day. Gaming and social networking is turning society into a bunch of vegetables how never leave their rooms.
Is there an article behind this? Did this sysadmin do ANYTHING to prove or find what the real issue was?
Sounds like the point is "It says Halo3 causing problems" so it must be newsworthy. If there was an article behind this explaining why this was an issue and had details such as Network graphs showing overloaded routers on the LAN or switches being overloaded or dropping UDP packets or something.. then we'd have something here.
Instead all this says is NOTHING of value.
----
Just remove the spaces and do the intelligent thing to email me.
I think chess is too abstract to teach lessons about the strategy warfare. Maybe something like, the lords don't care about you if you're a pawn.
-Dave
I need more power!
"Microsoft implement a depreciated standard and people start complaining that its not supported ?"
Depreciated? Id software changed over to UDP with quake3 and has done that ever since because it uses less bandwidth.. I think UDP is the norm for most if not all internet multiplayer games nowadays...
Yeah so the other day, i was walking around town with my mate, and we were really thirsty.
And we walked for ages, until we met this guy, and we asked him for a drink, and he gave us a drink!
"sudo rm -rf your-face"
I was talking about the part of DHCP, not UDP
I had users complaining that they couldn't connect to the network. I reset the switch and it worked again. Interesting story huh?