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.

I didn't RTFA...

[A beautiful mind]

...but at least now I have the excuse that there is no FA.

Re:This is a story?

[blowdart]

It has a "blame Microsoft" angle, what more do you want?

Re:Doubts

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not try to read the fucking article. That is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no fucking article.

Re:And?

[Blakey Rat]

It's just posted here so we can get reams of replies talking about how over-rated Halo is, how much the Xbox (made by Microsoft!) sucks, how great Nintendo is in comparison, and how games used to have more "fun" back in the olden days. The network problem is entirely secondary.

So it's pretty much like every other Slashdot Games post.

I JUST POOPED A LARGE TURD

[Anonymous Coward]

It had a satisfying sweet smell and was flecked with little seeds from my multigrain healthy bread.

UPDATES TO FOLLOW AS EVENTS WARRANT STAY TUNED

Re:And?

[MightyMartian]

Indeed, the story should be "More dipshit net admins with fancy-ass certificates but no brains fuck up QoS once more."

Re:No sympathy...

[damn_registrars]

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...

Re:I JUST POOPED A LARGE TURD

[JustShootMe]

Congratulations. Put it in a journal and you might get on the front page too.

Crazy?

[spykemail]

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...

Re:you are an asshole

[Red Flayer]

Porn and gaming made the internet.

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 him that defense spending leads to a massive worldwide increase in porn viewing and production.

Ok, that's it!

[andr0meda]

"Halo 3" should be arrested immediately, brought to justice and then executed. And his bastard parrents too, for naming their kid "Halo 3" in the first place, I mean come on!

wait a min..

It's not the students fault ...

[ThirdPrize]

it is the Covenants fault. They are trying to crash the internet ready for the next invasion.

I miss Jon Katz too. Time for JabberKatz(tm)!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to fire up the ol' JabberKatz(tm) proggie.

I miss his sensational writing style. He turned mountains into mole hills, and geeks into wise sages. I kept all his articles from the old days and feed them into a special markov generator program that's available on the internet (Google for JabberKatz). The articles themselves should still be available by searching Slashdot.

Here's what it spat out today:

" As you may imagine, we catch a lot of time playing computer games on the Internet. " They had become obsessed with online killing, reported another TV reporter. They had delved into militia and hate-group websites, some papers said.

The United States has become a crusade for conformity, intimidation and exclusion.

There are thousands of working actors, but most often stories are posted from other sources or posted and readers are given links. Links are now a hallmark of the Monica Lewinsky scandal has crystallized the difference between choosing and blocking.

In my mind, both movies (and the author of God and the New York City, Chicago and LA, schoolyard massacres are unknown. Nor has one ever occurred in Canada, even though it's rarely explained and dubiously supported.

It's hard to be rational about this idiocy. " American Pie " is an proselytizing book (with a foreword by our own Robin " roblimo " Miller, Editor-In-Chief for the Open Source Software Development. "

This was pretty tough to read, not only in Disney World but in the chips and disk drives of a Silicon Graphics Irix Workstation.

Levy calls this new species, a fusion of humans and intelligent machines. This is the computer user's first bill of rights. The media have turned bland and timid. Though H.L. Mencken called them " Boobus Americanus ") who specialized in defining virtue and trying to live up to that responsibility. Mostly, people talk about memes, they are not. These reporters are never prosecuted. That's because courts have repeatedly ruled that the reporters are carrying out activities that are protected by the First Amendment end at the school door, when many kids, especially geeks, have spent much of the past year, TV stations, networks and newsmagazines sounded a steady stream of alarms about perverts, predators and porn online. Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, now Gates. Napster, Linux, Gnutella, P2P, Napster -- it seems only right to honor Wells, the father of science fiction franchises. In a different sense, open source and free software movements out of a series of one-liners, set gags, set-ups and cultural in-jokes and spoofs.

My Halo 3 story

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:Doubts

[mcrh]

Never use the word "Microsoftization" again.

Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word!

Re:Doubts

[vimh42]

Do not try to send UDP packets. That is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no UDP.