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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.
...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.
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
It has a "blame Microsoft" angle, what more do you want?
Do not try to read the fucking article. That is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no fucking article.
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.
Sadly enough, I know someone who chose his 4 year college based on ping times to his favorite Quake servers...
You'll probably be shocked to hear that he graduated by some sort of formality...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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!
- Halo 3's network protocol is so abysmal that it needs a big chunk of bandwidth. I'm not talking that everything must be done The Right Way (ie, sending just what other players pressed and a checksum of the game's state like Doom1/2 did), but even sending the coords for objects you can see won't take more than a few KBs per second.
- the routers were buggy and crapped out after seeing more than X streams, counting every UDP packet as a separate stream (a moderately popular bug). As shaping fixed the issue, I doubt this could be the culprit.
- the whole univ having nothing but a slow DSL uplink or so. I don't know where the article's poster is from, but if that's a 3rd world country it's possible.
Somehow, not knowing anything about Halo, I suspect a combination of the first and third reason.The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
Missed one - the routers crapped out on packets per second, not on bandwidth. This is probably the most likely one.
As far as the network protocols being abissmall you are about right. They have devolved over time.
Once past the stage of serial connections, the early gaming protocols efforts tried to use multicast+unicast or broadcast+unicast technologies to run peer-to-peers like networks where people truly played against each other.
These times are gone. It is all client-server now.
This explains the admin problem - I bet that most of the students were fragging each other silly together and played within the same map and the same game. That all ended up as a lot of client-server connections. This does not consume a lot of bandwidth on average, but it is capable of flatlining the network for short periods of time every time something interesting happened in the game because the data is tromboned back and forth across the same bottleneck many times. 1 student moves and the server sends the data to 16 others, and so on. Essentially this is a form of amplification/positive feedback loop. If the same students were playing games with other people located elsewhere the effect would not have occurred.
This is a classic example of devolving and microsoftization of the gaming protocols. If the game was running locally using broadcast+ unicast or multicast_unicast to inform all local participants and only one dedicated hypernode checked what is going on outside the small "local world" there would have been no bandwidth/pps problem.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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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.
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.
"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."
Yeah, how dare college students try to use the network for gaming.
Seriously though, this is something that A LOT of people miss. College students are living at the college 24/7 for at least 4, more if they go to grad school, years.
It's fine to say something like "No porn, games, file sharing, etc." at work or at a high school where business and education are the only things that should be happening. Why? Because the employees/students should go home and do those things on their own Internet connection.
But that doesn't work in a college. The students can't just go home to their own Internet connection, they're stuck at the university with the network available in the dorms. The universities need to buy more bandwidth instead of throttling the speed down to levels non-suitable for gaming. There will be a time in the near future where Internet bandwidth available to each user will be a large portion of the decision process for students applying to college. Right now I'm applying to about 5 different colleges that are 99% identical, if I'm accepted into all of them then I'm going to have to decide between them based on which one has the greenest trees, is closest to a bar, has the best cell phone coverage, and which one has the least amount of throttling on the Internet connections in the dorms.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
If your university did buy more bandwidth, I can assure you the quality of the students gaming experience didn't cross anyone's mind. It's not quite as simple as the network admin calling up the local ISP and going to the next tier.
Aside from the argument that the bandwidth is for educational use, trying to support gaming in our dorms would be a full-time job based on the number of calls and emails we get on a daily basis about it.
People use to be all "well that sucks, i'll get over it." Now I've got parents calling wondering why Johnny can't play his favorite MMO that he "really, really likes to play." I seriously thought that a guy that came to my office a few weeks ago was going to hit me because he couldn't play FFXI.
The worse part though, is when a group of students try to fake network problems in order for us to fix Johnny's issues, because, apparently, we don't monitor the network at all until 20 people on the same floor complain.
If they really need their fix, they are more than welcome to get a cable modem from the local cable company. I can't vouch for all Universities, but nobody here is forced to use our LAN.