Solve my gaming woes with my fraternity.

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veritas7

Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2007
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I'll try to make this simple and easy for all to understand, as I know nothing about networking but the bare basics and hopefully won't confuse you pros here with my noob lingo (and limited knowledge about our hardware).

I live in a fraternity. I get lag spikes all the time - I see people teleport all the time during busy hours (i.e. all day until around 1-2 am when everyone has gone to bed). I live with 50 guys.

Our network:
DISH (local WIFI from ISP) => modem box => firewall/nat => switches => our rooms.

I don't have access to the firewall. It's a Dell PowerEdge running an old Xeon I think with CheckPoint NGX VPN firewall software. Can't login, because the company we 'rent' it from won't give it to me (its free from a graduate and I'm the tech committee chair for my frat).

Anway, I tried Hawking Technology's HBB1 to see if would help. I put it between the modem and the firewall as specified, and it didn't help.

What can I do to get rid of the lag spikes? Would buying a a WRT54GL, putting Tomato on it and somehow making it a dedicated QoS device work? Or would it overload with the sheer amount of devices/ips we have on the network?

More data: 50 guys in house, so give or take that many computers, plus consoles, wifi routers, etc.

We have a 5 up / 5 down Megabits/sec from our ISP. Through my ISP I forced all browsing bandwidth to use 3down/2up mbps and force all other data (IE P2P, which sucked up ALL our bandwidth before and cost us $$$/slow browsing) to the rest of the bandwidth.


TL;dr remove ping how by: Asking ISP to open ports to common gaming (Steam, Xbox LIVE, PSN) and put that data in the browsing 'side' (assuming all the gaming data is getting forced in to 'other/p2p' side of bandwidth)
OR buy some sort of device to help with QoS on both downloading/uploading too (rather than HBB1's uploading only optimization)
OR both?

Sorry for epic long post. I just want to play my TF2! :( Also I haven't had time to call my ISP yet to ask if the gaming data is getting shoved in to the P2P/other 'side' bandwidth. Probably an important piece of data I suppose? :p
 
Wireless will make lag worse.If you are already using it, try a wired connection.
If you can reduce the number of hops (routers / switches) etc, it might help.
Try the most direct connection and see if things improve. If so, you know the best you can get it.
If you have access to all the other netowrk hardware, you may be able to install a switch for everyone to run off that supports QOS.

Other than that, I cant think of anything that will help as you are sharing the line with many others.
Maybe you can invite them all to party, lock the room and have some gaming peace :D

edit:
I edited before you posted, pls reread in case it helps
 
Nenu said:
Wireless will make lag worse.If you are already using it, try a wired connection.
If you can reduce the number of hops (routers / switches) etc, it might help.
Try the most direct connection and see if things improve. If so, you know the best you can get it.

Other than that, I cant think of anything that will help as you have no control over QOS and are sharing the line with many others.
Maybe you can invite them all to party, lock the room and have some gaming peace :D
Click to expand...

I'm as direct as I can get. I am wired directly to the ethernet port in my room.

But yeah, it gets a tad better when everyone is away or asleep ... but usually I'm at those parties and/or I am asleep due to early classes :(
 
The question is then, can you afford a 50 port switch/router that supports QOS?
(note: I edited my first post)
 
The "Teleporting" you see is most likely from the fact that your bandwidth is being maxed out. I would defintiely try to see if you can get that firewall replaced or at least get access to it so you can configure any QoS features it has. WIth fifty users you may need to be looking into a beefier switch with QoS controls.
 
You can get 2 of these 40 port switches with QOS for $140 as long as the dealers are reputable!
(ignore the $9.99 price, click the "these sellers" link).
http://www.amazon.com/ProCurve-Switch-40-Port-J4121A-ABA/dp/B00004ZA8D

Product Description
This is a feature-rich, modular 10/100/Gigabit switch that provides scalable, low-cost switching and all the benefits of HP Proactive Networking. It is ideal for medium-to-large businesses looking for scalable, expandable, low-cost migration to 10/100/Gigabit switching to the desktop. It features easy installation with 40 autosensing 10/100 ports that support any combination of 10Mbps and 100Mbps connections with no configuration required and with open universal slots that accept any combination of modules, advanced monitoring with RMON (4 groups) and RMON extensions, IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging which puts a secure firewall between workgroups, port mirroring which lets you monitor any combination of ports with a single RMON probe, and IP multicast (IGMP) software that prevents the flooding of multicast video traffic and supports QoS for IP multicast traffic.

You'll have to get someone who knows how to set it up.
Someone in the house may have a friend who can do it.

edit:
I thought it was too cheap to be true, the QOS side only seems to apply to video multicasts so these arent suitable.
 
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5 up and 5 down? Me and my 2 roomies here at college constantly max that out and sometimes I want to scream. I couldn't even being to think that 5 up and 5 down could support 50 college users with porn and torrents being on the interwebs.
 
The 'browsing' side of our bandwidth isn't always maxed; when this stutter/teleport lag kicks in, I speedtest our browsing connection - I usually always have the max speed.

I think this means that my gaming data is getting shoved in to the P2P side of our bandwidth - which last time I talked to our (small, friendly) ISP, they said it was constantly maxed out (due to probably torrents/limewire stuff).

I'll give my ISP a call this week about seeing to move the gaming data hopefully somehow (if they can) to the browsing side (if it already is).

Budget is small, as I am the one paying for anything. My committee doesn't get any budget, because, if the internet still works, I don't have a budget. AKA I've tried to plea in the past to ditch our current firewall and buy a measly $250 firewall device (that has other applications that are practical to use for my frat) that also has more administration options that I could use and see what's going on in our network. However, like I said before, for the house corp., if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Even if they spend a couple 10s of thousand of dollars on renovating an entire floor... I just hope when they get around to the floors with rooms that they rewire everything >_>...
 
veritas7 said:
Would buying a a WRT54GL, putting Tomato on it and somehow making it a dedicated QoS device work? Or would it overload with the sheer amount of devices/ips we have on the network?

More data: 50 guys in house, so give or take that many computers, plus consoles, wifi routers, etc.
Click to expand...

You would be trying to go elephant hunting with a BB gun if you took the approach of using some home grade entry level router for a network of 50x users. You need a device that is capable of handing a few thousand concurrent connections, not something that cannot event deal with 100.

My advice...built a router using a *nix distro that is very strong in QoS/Packet Shaping features. PFSense stands above the crowd. Using some older P3 computer with 256 or 512 megs of ram would be a perfect fit.
 
Sounds like they have it setup to send anything but http,https,dns to your 'slow' side which you seem to have figured out logically - even if your games are on the web side your still going to spike when people are around - 3mbit is like 3 streams or a few people on ebay.
I would say your connection isnt really upto the task of 50 users, even with QoS its either going to be dropping 100's of http packets (i doubt your isp would let this happen) or dropping your gaming packets...
 
Meh, properly configured router device or PC running a *nix distro as a router should drop packets at all. It sounds like lag to me. People let's think about this. 50 COLLEGE guys all pounding on a single 5up/5down connection with, I'm guess, no rescrictions or bandwidth management? I'll bet the sheer quantity of torrents running is kneecapping the bandwidth alone. No wonder your gameplay sucks.

The answer is not necessarily new switches with QoS or anythign like that yet, as these still need to expertise to configure them properly. At least temporarily, swap out your checkpoint box with another PC with 2 Intel/3Com/Broadcom/Tier1 Network cards and load a newer Firewall distro on it. But for 50 users, I'd say any mid level p4 (2.0Ghz+) with 1Gb+ or ram should be plenty to ensure you you don't EVER run into issues. As StoneCat said, PFSense is HIGHLY reccomended. Bulletproof, fast, and flexible, just like I like my women:D. Once you've established internet access with the new box using PFSense, just run through the Traffic Shaping wizard, reboot the box to make sure the settings loading properly, and see if that made a change.

Worse case senario? It doesn't have the impact you're looking for and you're out, at most, 2 hours.
 
Anything you do is going to be a endless battle. With that many people on that type of connection, it's going to be hard to deal with.

The only thing I can suggest is a proper solution such as PFSense, and tons upon tons of QOS filtering. You perhaps want to take a look at the other poster with 50 roomates who decided to purchase up multiple DSL lines instead and run a load balancing router from it with QOS.

Even just 50 guys on youtube will kill you, and we haven't even gotten to torrenting/file sharing.
 
Ockie said:
Even just 50 guys on youtube will kill you, and we haven't even gotten to torrenting/file sharing.
Click to expand...

What I like about PFSense...is you can deprioritize P2P/torrent/downloading traffic...and on top of that..even give it a cap...cap it at something like 1024 or 2048 megs.....leaving the greater majority of your bandwidth for other good useful purposes.
 
why not grab a beer, a cigar, a card deck, some brothers and head out back...generally hours of fun. or you could try to stir up some fun/trouble.

have fun with your brothers. I had fun with mine.
 
Also in a fraternity house with ~25 guys on a 1.5 down/384 up line. just this week we turned QOS on the routers and it dropped pings from 400ms to around 90 for steam games.

Me and another brother have been digging around for a box for pfsense/openbsd/whatever as a replacement, but just making a list of ports and QOS'ing solved half of the problems.

FWIW though, play less games and have fun with your brothers. its college, enjoy it while you can - you can game when you're 30 and working.



also, i'd imagine dish would kinda have high latency anyways.
 
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