Network Issues

[Havoc]

Today at approximately 4 pm EST. I attempted to play Unreal Tournament 2004. Unreal Tournament 2004 is a popular first person shooter, and is one of the several games supported by the WCU gaming club and its server. I have been playing Unreal Tournament since 2000, and have continued in my career since I’ve been at school. This however, is the first time I have seen this sort of issue with the school network affecting game play. As you can see from the provided screenshots – my in game ping times have skyrocketed far beyond acceptable levels i.e.: below 80 milliseconds. I have played UT at school since I got here in August, and have never experienced this sort of issue before. What genuinely concerns me is that on a network with the amount of bandwidth that WCU has at its disposal, ROUTING is the only factor in determining ping times for games such as UT that use small sequences of packets through a dedicated port to interact between the client and game server. Again referring to the attached screenshots you can see that my in game pings and DOS pings (I made sure to use the same size packets) are quite different. The only explanation I can infer is that something related to the TCP/IP port used by UT (Port 7777) or a range of ports in this region have been blocked or throttled by a WCU router / firewall. That or there is merely a problem with this range of traffic on an outgoing router, switch, or other piece of network equipment. Tracerts will not reflect this issue, because they do not work with specific ports. You can also see that my ping times in Counterstrike Source, a game with similar network dynamics are far below my UT pings, which again leads me towards the port theory, as Counterstrike uses ports in the range of 27015 – a much higher port that is likely not scanned or throttled by any of our equipment here on campus. I ask that you please take the necessary steps to correct this issue as soon as possible. It makes no sense to throttle the ports for a game supported by the University Funded gaming club. Again I would like to reiterate that this problem began on 1-18-06, I played UT the night before (as I always do) with no latency concerns. Thus if recent changes have been made to the network, you may want to examine them. Thanks for the time and consideration, feel free to contact me regarding this matter.

 

 

http://adamfaulkner.com/USERS/splitwww/heh/dos%20ping.bmp

 

 

 

[ Edited ]

[Adam Faulkner]

Hope it cleared up. ITS should have access to our forums.

[Havoc]

It’s been pretty good lately, despite a few isolated incidents. Hope it stays good =X

[Phonetically Phamous (dice]

I have a screen shot of 3149 ping on CS.1.6 need a host that accepts bitmap files…

[Adam Faulkner]

Please only post ‘current issues’ we are not interested in how bad our network was, but what we can do to make it better.

[Author]

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