Halo 3 Causing Network Issues 306
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.
Doubts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Funny)
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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:TAGGED AS KDAWSONSUCKS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.Re:Doubts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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And highly paid professionals should be a lot better educated than a group of kids, right? Oh well, whom am I kidding. But if you're writing a gaming library for millions of dollars, the library ought to h
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly paid professionals know more than you, don't worry.
Re:Doubts (Score:4, Insightful)
To those that think it is: try it.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word!
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Shitty school internet is not a third world phenomenon at all.
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Sixteen players in a big outdoors map, where they can see a lot of stuff? That's not an insignificant number of KBs per second. And if your college is like mine was--where some nights, literally 75% of the player population was Haloing--that can easily hit a few MB per second.
Well, trees, doors, walls, signs, etc tend to not move a lot. So usually all you need to send are the players themselves, bullets, and that's about it.
Okay, on second thought, that's not all that huge a number. But doesn't UDP have more overhead than TCP? Eh, I guess I don't know that much about this after all.
Actually, UDP has slightly less overhead: 20 bytes+layer 3 header for TCP (=32 bytes + Ethernet frame over IPv4), and 8 bytes+layer3 = 20 bytes+Ethernet over IPv4 for UDP. Yet, with TCP, the OS forces as least some congestion control, something that game programmers typically completely disregard.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Doubts (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know of any FPS programers who would want to fully utilize available bandwidth. If they did, it wouldn't scale and their game would suck.
What they do want to do, is minimize latency to keep character movement smooth and accurate to give the perception of real-time immersion and do that with a minimum of bandwidth usage, so that their game will scale to a practical number of players. Minimizing bandwidth usage helps improve latency and scaling.
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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 n
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I didn't RTFA... (Score:5, Funny)
Sysadmin does job (Score:2)
Good grief! What a ridiculous article.
I must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
#5 (Score:2)
Re:I must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
It's uselessness lies in the fact that it was a mis configured router causing the problems, and configuring it right fixed it. 99% of people on
I'm not sure about the story part, though I guess any yarn told by an individual about an event qualifies.
Therefore the tale is a story, is remarkable, and is useless, ergo 'What a remarkably useless story'
Honestly this one irritates even me, and that's saying something. I'm usually fine with non-stories, as I'm bored enough to not care. Talking about how you didn't properly set up your university network and didn't prepare for the largest game release in history (I'm sorry, but if you're running a network for college kids, why in the world weren't you ready for Halo 3? You should know for a fact that it's going to be huge, if you don't then you're living in a cave) doesn't make me want to like you, and then mentioning that your response was basically to shut down the kids ability to play proudly, like 'Look at me, I'm so smart, I killed a bunch of kids fun because I couldn't think of any of the other hundred ways to solve my problem and would rather just shut them down', well that makes me want to punch you in the face for being dumb, and proud of that dumbness.
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There is more here then your willing to consider or admit. First, We don't know how many people were using Halo, it eludes to gamers complaining after they got the network under control. Second, if it is something with Halo that requires an unusually large amount of UDP traffic, it could cause outages in other areas too. Like ISPs or inter conects that might be going flaky. Or it could cause a lot of other things to happen. That
This is a story? (Score:2, Insightful)
This passes for a story at slashdot now?
Re:This is a story? (Score:5, Funny)
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
So it's pretty much like every other Slashdot Games post.
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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 maki
Re:And? (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, he doesn't indicate that he DOES have the certificate.
I agree with
A few years ago, a friend of mine with very little (like almost none) network experience wanted to take a class for his CCNA. I'd been using Cisco equipment for years, and am very proficient, but I decided to go w
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I intend to begin a CCNA class in the spring myself. The only network-related experience I have is as a tech for a wireless ISP where I worked for a year. I worked closely with our admins (both of whom *are* experienced and seem quite knowledgeable) and enjoyed learning about
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You're saying that it's even vaguely excusable for a dorm network to not have good enough connectivity to handle some students playing video games?
Seriously, we could have an interesting discussion about how appropriate it is for a dorm resident to be downloading 150 gigs/week off Usenet, but it's perfectly reasonable for them to expect to have a functional network connection that they can use. I mean... they do *live* there and pay good money to do so - usually including a telecommunications fee that more
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?)
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School had a misconfigured network and a capacity shortage. Network admins broke a commonly used application in response rather than either buying more capacity or properly configuring their network.
This is old news for those of us who use P2P protocals for file downloads. The news here is that the "most usage is probably illegal anyway" excuse for de
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Not to say that you don't have a point and this might be valuable in that circumstance, but
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Sure, it's not as if Windows admins use routers or anything like that. Apparently only "real tech geeks" do (whoever they are).
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I have met some windows admins who are fairly competent at what they do. I also have met some who could barely figure out how to move the mouse. Aa a whole linux or unix admins tend to be much more competent than windows admins, as a whole. And as with everything, there are exceptions going both ways.
The reason is simple - the barrier to entry is much higher with unix and its variants. So once you're in that
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But my original post was mocking the idea that only non-Windows admins would care about routers. That wasn't your point (unless you were the AC), but it was his.
No sympathy... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:No sympathy... (Score:5, Funny)
You'll probably be shocked to hear that he graduated by some sort of formality...
Re:No sympathy... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, that's why I got gibbed! (Score:2)
Good for you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a second. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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Try setting up a halo 3 server at your job once you graduate, and see how fast they shut it down. I know, apples and oranges in some ways, but in both cases the network is there for a specific purpose.
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In other words I'm paying to send you to school. I don't want my taxes used to expand a school network to accommodate gamers. I certainly do
But why is it a choice? (Score:2)
umm (Score:2)
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
Crazy? (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Ok, that's it! (Score:2, Funny)
wait a min..
Ah, Doom (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
It's not the students fault ... (Score:2, Funny)
My school (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I just don't think that gaming is one of those things that universities need to bend over backwards to support.
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Not to say they should give it precedence over internet in the library, but on nights and weekends...
Its a Journal Entry (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This is the kind of thing kdawson routinely posts? Ahh, the Jon Katz of the 21st century.
(I actually liked Jon, but he was one of the most hated editors of all time)
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My Halo 3 story (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still pissed off though. Nowhere on the package it didn't say specifically about microwaving Halo 3.
iPhone (Score:2)
I have Halo 3; it complains about "Open NAT" (Score:2)
UDP Packets (Score:5, Informative)
Since when is a single paragraph front-page worthy (Score:3)
Seriously, editors, what the hell.
What firehose? (Score:3)
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
Re:I JUST POOPED A LARGE TURD (Score:4, Funny)
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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 pe
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Just because you pay for the use of something doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want with it. Try turning your rented apartment into a brothel and see how far you get with that.
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TOS should be illegal. If I bu
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Now if EULA's and TOS's were written in plain english using understandable terms then maybe people would read them.
We may live in a litigious society but that does not mean we need to stand for having legalese everywhere in 6 point font so people wont read it for any number of reasons up to and including being partially blind.
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There are some TOSes that need to be taken out and shot, but that doesn't mean all TOSes are bad.
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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 e
Re:My school's network sucks :/ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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When you cease to be a student, you have to move out.
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Your tax dollars, via defense spending, created the internet. If you choose to use it for gaming and porn, that's your perogative -- but especially in a place of learning (a university) recreational usage should play second fiddle. You don't like it? Live at home in Mom's basement like all the other cave-dwelling trolls, where the only one 'throttling your bandwidth' will be you or your Mom.
Whew. That said, you might be able to make a Neocon's head asplode if you tell
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Personally, I don't think it's funny or not funny, I just think it's an example of finding a problem and solving it. Personally I think FPS games are a pox on almost every network and I stay as far away from them as I can. If I had to acribe any adjective to this, I'd say "expected".
On the flip side, I am not all that happy with kdawson for posting such a journal entry, and I recognize that you did nothing wrong in any case here. kdawson really did you a disservice with frontpaging
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Keep that up and you'll turn into Jack Thompson, who's about to get sanctioned by a judge for doing something really stupid.
Do we have to *subsidize* it? That's an entirely different story, but doesn't really come into play in this argument.
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Is that you, Jack Thompson?