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.

Comments

Doubts

[nielsslein]

I'd like to see more proof before I go and blame Halo 3 for this.

Re:Doubts

[CrankyFool]

Dude, you didn't even have to read the FA, it was in the summary! The issue was that the routers weren't shaping UDP.

Re:Doubts

[SatanicPuppy]

Oh, it's probably to "blame" in the sense that it's new, popular, and network intensive. I don't see any indication that it's doing anything WRONG, however.

Hard to say anything without knowing what was done, preferably from someone who isn't a student tech. It sounds like they saturated his bandwidth and he throttled 'em, which is pretty draconian. Sometimes, that's the only solution, especially if your university isn't all that tech savvy.

Re:Doubts

[hedwards]

The college I went to began to throttle bandwidth on file sharing programs between my junior and senior years. It made a real difference in terms of the ability to use the campus net connection. One could still share files by using the regular windows file share, but p2p was throttled down to .2kbps.

It surprises me that game playing alone was causing the network problems. I would expect that it was something else which was happening during the time when most college students are online. I haven't used the new xboxes at all, but don't they allow people to download large demos? If that is the case, that is a much more likely reason than halo. People may have recently purchased a new xbox because of the new game, but it probably wasn't the game itself that was the cause of the bandwidth problem.

Ultimately, there is typically only one connection to the net that is provided by the school, and if it is all being used up fine, but it should at least be something that is academically related or general net use.

Re:Doubts

[Anonymous Coward]

If either of you thought about this instead of just acting superior, you'd realize that they tried the "p2p" method until cheating became widespread, and then had to shift to a more complicated (but less efficient) server model that could run checks on the data and make sure nobody was cheating.

Highly paid professionals know more than you, don't worry.

Re:Doubts

[maraist]

It wouldn't be the downloading of the game, as that's TCP not UDP, and it very likely isn't connectivity to the internet, because that would have nothing to do with access to the central UNIX servers - Local networks are always faster than internet connections, thus, unless the summary of the article was lying, it was purely a HUB/Switch UDP network hog, and any good sys-admin of a massive local network would have done the same thing.

Consider a percentage of 10,000 hosts playing the game.. All sending multi-cast UDP packets. You have say 1,000 hosts sending several packets per second to every network that multicast is configured to broadcast to. So you have several thousand packets per second going to at least every network card in the dorms, and probably to/from all the student-accessible computer labs to boot.

While the central servers most likely were on isolated (non-broadcastable) networks, all the client-host accessible points were choked.

Re:Doubts

[OoZz]

I seriously just got done laughing for about the past 5 minutes ... so wish we could mod this more than +5 lol

Re:Doubts

[xQx]

Yeah, this is news?

Sounds like the university needs to stop relying on reactive shaping to identify traffic and buy more bandwidth.

Next they'll be bitching that people should stop masking bittorrent traffic to make it look like SIP which they prioritise up.

Just remember: There's no such thing as a stupid question... only stupid people.

Re:Doubts

[Blakey Rat]

Ok,

1) Saying that you know more about game networking than the crew at Bungie, the crew who have been making games with LAN and Internet play since freakin' Minotaur in 1992, that's just plain stupid. Let's see your credentials if Bungie's coders are so stupid.

Client-server is used because it's the only way to provide fair "hit negotiation" (the server always decides who hits who-- play Mechwarrior III for an example of a game without this) and it prevents cheating, since each client sees only what it absolutely needs to see to function.

2) Never use the word "Microsoftization" again.

Re:Doubts

[thealsir]

My high school had one dual ISDN link connecting about ~300 computers until my senior year...it would literally take 5-15 minutes to load mostly text web pages. The dumbasses in charge didn't get the message till I was almost out of school.

Shitty school internet is not a third world phenomenon at all.

Re:Doubts

[JNighthawk]

Thank you *very much*. I'm tired of reading people's bullshit, thinking networking an FPS is easy and shouldn't require much bandwidth, while making sure that no one can cheat easily.

To those that think it is: try it.

I must be new here

[OAB_X]

What a remarkably useless story.

Re:I must be new here

[Romancer]

Probably the facts:
1. There is no link to an actual article or any other related or corroborating information source.
2. The summary admits that certain router features were not enabled, and simply enabling them fixed the "problem".
3. The title of "Halo 3 Causing Network Issues" has so far been only superficially associated with the "problems" they were having by giant leaps of non technical assumption.
4. This is another KDawson post/nonstory.

Re:I must be new here

[Anonymous Coward]

the other 1% didn't read the article.

What is this article you speak of?

This is a story?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poorly configured firewall and packet shapers - reconfigured them and now stuff works better?

This passes for a story at slashdot now?

And?

[VeteranNoob]

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?

Re:And?

[Chandon Seldon]

The general geek perception is that the machine is a piece of shit. Unless you happen to work for Microsoft or have devoted your life to being it's love slave.

That's the Sony / Nintendo fanboy perception, which differs from the "General Geek Perception". Now, all three of the current-generation consoles are DRM infested crap... but console fanboys seem to be willing to ignore that.

Once you accept that any console is worth buying, each of the three have their advantages and disadvantages - that end up making any of the three a perfectly defensible choice.

The 360 has decent graphics, has Halo 3, is cheaper than the PS3, and has good games. That's enough for a lot of people.

So what?

[JustShootMe]

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?)

No sympathy...

[_Shad0w_]

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?

Good for you?

[Mattwolf7]

I fail to see a story here, your network was setup wrong and is now fixed. Case closed.

Wait a second.

[Entropius]

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.

Re:Wait a second.

[Bert64]

But this is a university network... Accessing SSH on university systems so that students can do their work is far more important than playing some games.
The network is there for research purposes, so thats students can do the research they need to pass their educational courses. Any traffic that facilitates the educational courses of the university should be prioritised, and anything else should get whatever bandwidth remains. And those games should be grateful they can play online games at all, the university is not obligated to provide them a connection nor allow them to play games on it (they could easily filter gaming traffic completely).

Re:Wait a second.

[MacTO]

Don't forget that those guys in the dorms playing Halo pay lots of money to the university, which pays for the network. Students are paying for an education, and maybe room and board. It is absurd to think that universities should be giving students free reign to academic resources for gaming. Particularly if their use is degrading the availability of those resources for their intended purposes. If you want a low latency connection for gaming, then buy your own and don't force others to subsidise your entertainment. Thing is, very few gamers will do that because they know that the minute they use a real ISP is the minute that they have to pay for how they use it. And most students would rather just bitch and freeload.

Re:Wait a second.

[Anonymous Coward]

And those games should be grateful they can play online games at all, the university is not obligated to provide them a connection nor allow them to play games on it (they could easily filter gaming traffic completely).

And the university should be grateful that the students chose to go there and not to the many high-quality competitors available around the country.

As in most things, it is a give-and-take. The university is not obligated to provide this service but if they did not provide it they would have a massive loss of students. The students have no reason to expect the university must carry this traffic, but they have every reason to get upset if they suddenly decide to degrade it.

Re:Oh! Boo hoo!

[JustShootMe]

I wouldn't have gone that far. I think that what the poster did was a reasonable action. But I wouldn't have thought twice about closing the ports if the situation had warranted it.

Gaming may be a fun thing to do, but it is not a god-given right, especially at a University where you are supposed to be, oh, I don't know, going to classes and doing homework?

Maybe I'm just a 32 year old fart that remembers the university days when people studied or went to the student union if they wanted to interact with people.

Re:My school's network sucks :/

[Xemu]

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.

Its a Journal Entry

[mobilesteve]

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.