| Lingering connectivity issue with gaming and VoIP I've had some lingering issues with gaming and audio on my network. I have had no complaints from my customers, but I notice it in my own personal use. I thought the problems would go away after I brought a couple marginal links up to par, but they haven't.
I have aperiodic disconnections ("server timed out") from game servers, on every PC game I have played online in the recent past. This includes Left 4 Dead, Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3. Sometimes it will occur every 10-20 minutes during a gaming session; other nights it may only happen once in 1-2 hours, or not at all. This is tricky to quantify, since I'm a sporadic gamer.
I also irregularly lose inbound audio during calls on a Sprint Airave femtocell. The outbound audio stream is usually fine. This occurs less frequently, typically no more than once every 30-60 minutes. This smacks of being a different issue; tonight I will forward UDP 5060/5061 to the Airave and see if that helps. I have a hunch it will.
My network is all bridged, with Ubiquiti PTMP and backhaul. It's lightly loaded, signals and capacity is great. My edge router is Mikrotik, which is also my PPPoE terminator for my client accounts. PPPoE sessions are stable; IRC chat, instant messengers and other persistent connections are stable and remain connected when the games time out. The issues occur at any time of day or night, regardless of network load.
It's a real puzzle to me. Any advice on troubleshooting this would be helpful!
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"thats what i need, a digi cam for when i need to take pictures. im not going to go around taking photos and stuff." Julio |
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| Are you handing your customers public or private IPs? |
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| reply to pacmanfan
Private. |
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| reply to pacmanfan
Are you connected via pppoe like your customers? Have you tried some ping checks? You can ping with a time date stamp and try to pin point your issues, ping your gateway and your providers gateway for starters |
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| reply to pacmanfan
I would have a constant ping up in the background that you can scroll back up when you get kicked out of a game. Its somewhat possible that irc/messangers are able to recover quick enough that you dont notice there was a disconnect? I would try the ping thing just to be sure.
Since you are doing NAT, its also possible there is some kind of NAT issue. Perhaps some kind of nat trans timeout? Are all of your trans timeouts default? |
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| said by AMonfiletto:Are you connected via pppoe like your customers? Have you tried some ping checks? You can ping with a time date stamp and try to pin point your issues, ping your gateway and your providers gateway for starters
The timeouts occur both over PPPoE, and by static IP on my network. I'm currently running on a static IP to make things easier to troubleshoot 
said by cooldude9919:I would have a constant ping up in the background that you can scroll back up when you get kicked out of a game. Its somewhat possible that irc/messangers are able to recover quick enough that you dont notice there was a disconnect? I would try the ping thing just to be sure. I watch the logs on IRC, and it stays connected to multiple networks during the game timeouts. Yes, I think it's possible IRC/IM isn't as sensitive to packet loss or high latency.
I've attempted to run some pings during gaming, but I haven't found a good program for that yet. I've run Ping Plotter free on my home PC, but the history isn't good enough to identify what happened more than about 10 seconds previous. I don't have any Linux boxes in the house right now, but that can be solved if I really need Smokeping or something else on *nix to do this right.
said by cooldude9919:Since you are doing NAT, its also possible there is some kind of NAT issue. Perhaps some kind of nat trans timeout? Are all of your trans timeouts default? I'm not familiar with the term "nat trans". Do you mean NAT-T, or NAT traversal?
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"thats what i need, a digi cam for when i need to take pictures. im not going to go around taking photos and stuff." Julio |
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| I was meaning nat translation which is a little repetitive i guess . At least in the cisco world there are different timeout periods for translations on different protocols. Such as:
ip nat translation timeout 300
ip nat translation tcp-timeout 60
ip nat translation pptp-timeout 300
ip nat translation udp-timeout 60
Some of the defaults on cisco can be as high as 24 hours on a single translation which can lead to obvious issues if you have a lot of traffic.
Not sure how this is setup on TiK |
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jcremin
join:2009-12-22
Siren, WI
kudos:2 | reply to pacmanfan
said by pacmanfan:I've run Ping Plotter free on my home PC, but the history isn't good enough to identify what happened more than about 10 seconds previous. Download the trial of "Mutiping" and set that up. The ping plotter is good for finding out where something is failing, but multiping is good for getting a good graph history of a ping. I set up multiple targets in the order of a tracert so it ends up being sort of the best of both worlds. First target is the antenna on my house, second target is the tower, third target is the core router, fourth target is the upstream ISP, and then a I have a couple targets of sites on the web so I can identify where a problem crops up since all the graphs line up nicely. |
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| reply to pacmanfan
You can use the trial version of PingPlotter Standard ver 3.30.1. Even after it expires it will still run. You get a nag screen (enter s/n) but if you wait 10-15 seconds you can tell it to run anyway.
~Mark |
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| reply to pacmanfan
Jcremin, thank you very much for the recommendation of Multiping. Once I figured out how it works, I had no problem narrowing it down to a wicked combination of faulty equipment AND outside interference at my home. A new wireless client and changing channels totally fixed all my problems Occams razor!
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"thats what i need, a digi cam for when i need to take pictures. im not going to go around taking photos and stuff." Julio |
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jcremin
join:2009-12-22
Siren, WI
kudos:2 | No problem, glad it helped! |
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