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

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.

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.

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.