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

[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

[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.

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.

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?

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?)

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).

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.