Frag Infinity Tournament, Inc. - FITES LAN Party - www.fites.net
LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: tipperzack on March 19, 2012, 02:09:11 AM
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I was at a lan the other week and it was a small group of 10
But when 9 or more of us joined the same sever we got connection problems as people were being kicked and prevented from joining the sever
We think it was an issue caused by a new patch
So the question is what server tricks did Fites do to get there servers working at the lan?
Plus any one to confirm if its a new patch problem
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The only way it worked was to turn off punkbuster. :(
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We've played BC2 and BF3 at our LANS with 8-12 people, absolutely 0 problems.
I cant confirm or rule out patch issues.
Problem lays in the config of the router. Can you give any details about it?
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Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
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Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
+1
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It was a simple setup
We were in one room using the same router and IP connect and all joined the same sever
The error message was a "timing out error" to the sever
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I think he's asking, what type of router was it? Was it a simple Linksys/Netgear/D-Link/TrendNet/etc. with stock firmware, was is one of those but with a 3rd party firmware like DD-WRT or Tomato, or was it a PC running pfSense.
The devil is in the details and without details you can't properly diagnose anything.
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Next LAN we have I'm really going to try to dive into this. To be honest I dont know why I'm not having this problem and so many people are. It would be nice to know to share to the rest of the world.
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Does FITES have UPnP enabled in their router config?
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That would be a big negative. With all those people running god knows what. EEK.
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Thats smart, I figured you guys wouldnt do that. Most articles you read about setting up gaming behind a router say to turn it ON. However I have it disabled as well. I dont think it should be turned on. NAT should just be doing its job. Punkbuster should not be getting confused at who's who if NAT is just left to do its thing
Your setup isnt typical though with the dual wan's this year. I dont have that luxury to test at our next LAN. Might have to tether my phone to a laptop and do internet connection sharing for a 2nd wan.
Did you guys have these problems on a single WAN?
Wish I had more machines at work that could just LAUNCH the game LOL.
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I turned UPnP on at one point in a desperate attempt at troubleshooting but it made no difference (at least, not that I can remember; was trying a lot of things at that point). WAN2 was fully turned off and all traffic was set to go out WAN1 during the BF3 tournament, but again, that didn't make a noticeable difference in people getting disconnected. In the end the only thing we could find to work 100% reliably was to disable PunkBuster on the server.
Being under a time crunch we couldn't really do much more analysis than that. Turned off PB, it worked, don't touch it. :)
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Good to know. Thanks.
What setup was FrozenQ using at their LAN we were at? There was 8+ of us playing in the same server at one point and nobody had disconnect/pb problems there. Stock FiOS router?
I remember bumping into Dave on Steam chat while you guys had that LAN at his house before the 200 for testing. He expressed some issues there too. Were you guys running the dual wan then too? Or just single WAN?
Not trying to pry, but I'm trying to get as much info as I can. Been scowering the netz looking for more specific info, but the people who post, you can tell dont know much about their setup and cant provide the vital information.
I have some buddies coming over to help work on my Mustang <3 tomorrow, but we very well may get rained out. I might have them bring their PC's so we can get 3-5 people on at once. It would be a good opportunity to attack this.
I reset my pfsense back to factory defaults and uninstalled all packages to use as a control. I need to setup a logging server to dump all pfsense logs to as their retention period isnt very long.
You guys care to share any other information about your setup, or have any suggestions for tests that you would like me to run while I have the resources here? You guys dont run Snort/Squid/Clam-AV during the 200 do you?
I'm especially interested in any and all ports, the game and pb uses that might not have been documented on the internet, or people are overlooking. Thats going to take alot of reviewing logs.
thanks!
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I'll get you what info I can when I get home tonight. Test LAN in January was dual WAN also (it wouldn't be a good test if we didn't simulate accurate conditions). Only additional service running was NTP.
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Cool thanks.
With my luck it will probably all work and I'll have nothing to troubleshoot. :frown:
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I'm pretty sure I'm already onto something here but I wont be sure until tomorrow.
I'm not sure how the dual WAN scenario will play out though. Theres alot of levels of NAT going on here.
I noticed that VZ already NAT's my phone becaue it picks up a 10.X.X.X address.
PDANet will NAT the laptop.
Internet connection sharing will then put pfsense behind another NAT
and finally pfsense will be NAT'ing for the pc's
Your head spinning yet?
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I think you need about 13 more pfSense boxes just to be sure ;)
The firewall rules (set on the LAN interface because they are outgoing rules) are attached. WAN2 was completely turned off at this point as you can see by the last rule in the list. I was originally intending to keep all non-BF3 traffic to go out WAN2, but as I was troubleshooting I decided to take WAN2 out of the mix entirely just in case I was missing a port from the rules list, or the traffic wasn't being properly identified and routed out WAN1. Also, the three IP's you see listed are the BF3 servers we used for the tourney just as an extra measure of "paranoid packet passing".
One thread on the pfSense forums suggested turning on Sticky Connections, which I did (System:Advanced:Miscellaneous) but reading the description of it now, it seems like it's more for incoming load balancing and even if the dual-WAN was turned on for BF3 it wouldn't have mattered for it's outbound traffic.
There are no additional packages of note installed and as mentioned earlier, the only service listed as running in the dashboard is the NTP server.
Hope that helps and of course, let us know what you find or ask other questions here if needed.
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Cool. Thanks. I'm on my phone so I'm kind of just skimming over this but it looks helpful. Ill read over it again tomorrow. Ill add you to steam too. If you have time tomorrow while we'really working on this and want to sit in or offer any suggestions for troubleshooting I can setup any appropriate remote connections. Who knows... the more heads we can get in this the better chance we have at solving a problem that could benefit the comminty as a whole.
My biggest fear is that it just works and we have nothing to fix. Then we have to intelligently break something.... but we'll see I guess..
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What do you guys have outbound NAT set to?
http://i.imgur.com/mTpRV.png (http://i.imgur.com/mTpRV.png)
I had it initially on default and the state table looked like this....
jared
udp 66.55.159.91:25200 <- 172.16.0.103:3659 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
udp 172.16.0.103:3659 -> 108.2.145.140:3659 -> 66.55.159.91:25200 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
icmp 66.55.159.91:1 <- 172.16.0.103 0:0
icmp 172.16.0.103:1 -> 108.2.145.140:22595 -> 66.55.159.91 0:0
sean
udp 74.91.113.111:25200 <- 172.16.0.117:3659 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
udp 172.16.0.117:3659 -> 108.2.145.140:3659 -> 74.91.113.111:25200 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
icmp 74.91.113.111:1 <- 172.16.0.117 0:0
eric
udp 74.91.116.205:25200 <- 172.16.0.116:3659 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
udp 172.16.0.116:3659 -> 108.2.145.140:3659 -> 74.91.116.205:25200 MULTIPLE:MULTIPLE
icmp 74.91.116.205:1 <- 172.16.0.116 0:0
We tried to all conenct to the same BF3 server and as you can see all communication is going out on port 3659. This obviously presents a problem when the server replies to the WAN.
I changed the outbound NAT setting to automagic, and the source ports coming from the router are completely random, and we can connect.
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Going to test a Stinksys router with DDWRT. Will post results.
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Outbound NAT is set to automatic.
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Well... in order to change routers I've always had to call up support and get them to break the DHCP lease. I assume its tied to the MAC address of the router, but even spoofing the MAC on the DDWRT router didnt help. It refuses to pull a WAN IP unless you call support. I sat on the phone on hold 90% of the time with FiOS support for 40 minutes and eventually was hung up on. I've made that call lots of times but for some reason I must not have had good luck. So we never tested the DDWRT router. :(
We got the dual WAN's setup, but couldnt get a stable enough connection even for web traffic. 3G signal at my house isnt very good. I dont know what else to try to do for a Dual WAN. I wish there was something I could install in pfsense that could tether straight to from my phone rather than adding another level of complication to it.
After we switched to Automatic Outbound NAT, the Public interface was communicating on random outbound ports and we recieved no errors for anything at all. No Punkbuster errors either.
We kind of got bored and thought it would be a good idea to play with the one model rocket I had. And then after not retrieving it on a windy day when I'm sure it ended up in the next town, we TRIED to make a rocket out of an empty Corona bottle. When that endeavour failed we decided to light off a rocket engine with no rocket. Those are gonna make for funny YouTube videos.
I have pcaps and pfsense was sending all firewall logs to a syslog server that has a webadmin. I might try to go through those on another day.
I was hoping that it wouldnt work so we had something to try to fix. Unfortunately it did. I only have one copy of BF3 so testing it again will have to wait for another time more people are over. We have a spare Steam account for our group, but havent gotten around to a spare Origin account yet. I should have jumped on that when BF3 was half off this past week.
Sorry I couldnt find more :( Maybe the pcaps/logs will offer some more insight.
*EDIT*
Also looking at vG's BF3 server through TCAdmin, it has an option to delete the PB Screenshots and Logs. I can look at screenshots, but I dont see a way to look at PB logs. I can look at the server logs, but I'm not sure if anything relevant will be in there. Are the servers you guys were running still up? Would it be possible to get those PB logs?
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WAN2 was completely turned off at this point
Don't get hung up on the dual WAN's.....we did NOT use them during the BF3 tournament.
I am pretty certain we didn't renew the FITES BF3 server. The other two servers were "donated" by other groups, though I'm not sure who they are. Czar would have that info.
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The other two were donated by me :)
Will be more than happy to do it again for next year if BF3 is a tourny game!