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)
I must be new here (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a story? (Score:2, Insightful)
This passes for a story at slashdot now?
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?
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?)
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?
Good for you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doubts (Score:1, Insightful)
Hard to say anything without knowing what was done, preferably from someone who isn't a student tech. It sounds like they saturated his bandwidth and he throttled 'em, which is pretty draconian. Sometimes, that's the only solution, especially if your university isn't all that tech savvy.
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).
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.
Re:Wait a second. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh! Boo hoo! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 people.
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.
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.
Re:Doubts (Score:2, Insightful)
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 new xboxes at all, but don't they allow people to download large demos? If that is the case, that is a much more likely reason than halo. People may have recently purchased a new xbox because of the new game, but it probably wasn't the game itself that was the cause of the bandwidth problem.
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.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly paid professionals know more than you, don't worry.
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.
Re:I must be new here (Score:1, Insightful)
What is this article you speak of?
Re:Wait a second. (Score:1, Insightful)
As in most things, it is a give-and-take. The university is not obligated to provide this service but if they did not provide it they would have a massive loss of students. The students have no reason to expect the university must carry this traffic, but they have every reason to get upset if they suddenly decide to degrade it.
Re:Doubts (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Doubts (Score:2, Insightful)
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:And? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 making any of the three a perfectly defensible choice.
The 360 has decent graphics, has Halo 3, is cheaper than the PS3, and has good games. That's enough for a lot of people.
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.
Re:Doubts (Score:3, Insightful)
Shitty school internet is not a third world phenomenon at all.
Re:Doubts (Score:4, Insightful)
To those that think it is: try it.