Online Gaming [important?]

[atripes]

With my recent move into a college apartment, I have pondered new questions. Amid my wonder radiates the one question that has kept me frustrated (put lightly) for days: Should online gaming be considered a middle/high priority for a campus network?

Let me break it down. The college is running Packeteer which is a program that sets priority to certain applications/ports. Obvsiously Web (80) and FTP (21) are considered highest priority while applications such as P2P's are low or even disabled.
The game I play is Counter Strike and most online games use dynamic porting. Even still, my gameplay is dramatically lagged with spikes and disconnections. The game is unplayable.

Onto my question at hand, since online gaming is such a popular hobby among 13-25 age range (give or take), and even a "safer" hobby than say P2P or porno, why not allow higher bandwidth to be allotted to such applications? I'm at a technical school so obviously there are some boneheads, but wouldn't it be ok to implement a system of allowing certain data (Counter Strike data) to be sent at a respectable speed?

I understand the networking team isn't here to cater to my adolscent addictions (we're talking about video games, now ;]), but i doubt it would be a burden to allow a little more flexibility with gaming. At least it would save a large amount of emails to the help desk :].

Weigh in with your opinion. Disagreements will be considered if arguments are presented.

[skroo]

Onto my question at hand, since online gaming is such a popular hobby among 13-25 age range (give or take), and even a "safer" hobby than say P2P or porno,

What makes it "safer"?

why not allow higher bandwidth to be allotted to such applications?

For the obvious reason: it's not required to get work done.

I'm at a technical school so obviously there are some boneheads, but wouldn't it be ok to implement a system of allowing certain data (Counter Strike data) to be sent at a respectable speed?

Not unless you implement a system to check, packet-by-packet, what is and is not Counter Strike traffic. That requires investment, administration, maintenance, and network reconfiguration, all of which take time and money. Any IT Director who approved budget for something like that should be shot.

[spahkle]

It's always difficult to post directly after skroo. Unless you're really good, you end sounding like you're mumbling like an idiot. So here goes..


**mumble mumble mumble**

[skroo]

**mumble mumble mumble**

Heh, cheers :)

[bascule]

I'm sure your campus is much more concerned that you can access online registration, classes, and campus-related information and materials than whether or not you're an LPB in Counterstrike

[drkl1ght]

In my opinion, they shouldn't directly limit anything that is legal, but Counter-Strike should not have priority on the same level as FTP or e-mail. If I were in college, I would NOT be happy if my all-important report never made it to the professor because the CS players got priority.

Better to give all the gamers a spike than to let somone's term paper get lost in the pipe because everyone else is overloading the network with counter strike.

And even if the server doesn't actually get that pummeled, it is still more important for students to be able to do web-based research quickly than for gamers to get high ping. It is hell when you are assigned something and must tell the professor that the computer prevented your doing of it.

[atripes]

Good opinions, makes me see this catastrophe in a new light ;].

[Zhym]

Obvsiously Web (80) and FTP (21) are considered highest priority while applications such as P2P's are low or even disabled.

FTP and web browsing aren't even close to highest priority. They're probably "best effort" - meaning they aren't penalized, but neither are they given priority.

Lots of traffic is more important than web and FTP. Routing protocols. Steaming video (depending on the school, there can be a lot of that used for actual educational purposes). VOIP. Perhaps even telnet, depending on how grades and other administrative systems are set up. NFS/DFS traffic between research areas. Just about anything else that's not P2P, MMORPG, IM, IRC, FTP, or HTTP.

In fact, if you compiled a list of protocols in use at a university, the ones used directly by students in the dorms would rank dead last in a network admin's ranking. Online gaming isn't the intended purpose of a university network.

Most schools I'm familiar with are moving to a model where they firewall student network segments off from the rest of the network, tightly control what gets in and out, and heavily police bandwidth usage. They want to block P2P, limit the impact of bandwidth-heavy games (remember when "Doom" was a network load stress-testing tool?), and somehow control the spread of viruses and worms in an environment where the school has almost no control over patch levels or A/V software.

Universities don't need an Internet to be scared of, as long as they have dorms.

[atripes]

FTP and web browsing aren't even close to highest priority. They're probably "best effort" - meaning they aren't penalized, but neither are they given priority.

I meant to note that they are considered highest in the studnet housing VLAN. Great response, though.

[skroo]

Lots of traffic is more important than web and FTP.

True, but with the trend over the past five years or so for integrating what seems like pretty much every network-based client into the browser, it's becoming common practice to give port 80 priority, followed by application-specific ports. I'm willing to bet that they do a lot of web-based interaction with school systems (registration, housing requests, coursework, etc.) there. Then again, that usually gets handled by a layer 3/7 QoS device such as a PacketShaper - and I notice that Packeteer is aiming straight at the educational market, so it's probably not an unreasonable assumption that there is *something* in place.

Routing protocols.

Agreed. IMHO, they should *always* have priority, period.

Steaming video (depending on the school, there can be a lot of that used for actual educational purposes). VOIP. Perhaps even telnet, depending on how grades and other administrative systems are set up. NFS/DFS traffic between research areas. Just about anything else that's not P2P, MMORPG, IM, IRC, FTP, or HTTP.

True, and I basically agree with you on this as well - however, he did make an interesting point, which is that the traffic shaping appears to be on a per-VLAN basis. Which makes sense, given that your biggest offenders in his example, student housing, are likely to be exactly what you've outlined here - P2P, IM, etc. Given the potential for this swamping the school's Internet feed, it would make sense to crank down the QoS on these applications and services where necessary to do so.

In fact, if you compiled a list of protocols in use at a university, the ones used directly by students in the dorms would rank dead last in a network admin's ranking. Online gaming isn't the intended purpose of a university network.

Amen to that. In general, dorms tend to get QoSed to death as a rule of thumb - make the bandwidth unattractive enough to running a server to begin with, and people will be pushed towards just using it for work purposes.

Besides, if you're spending your college career stuck behind a screen playing Counter Strike, you're missing out on a good chunk of life.

[Shatter]

Looking at this from a different perspective, given where I work, I see one thing that's missed, that was brought up originally:

If the school is giving higher priority to PTP and saring aps and protocols, and slamming teh gaming, for "bandwidth" reasons, they're absolutly stupid. Gaming packets are reletively small, You can get full frame rates without loss on a 144k pipe with three people playing. However one asshate with bit torrent or kazzaa can tie up $3000/mo of bandwidth downloading movies.

As for the safer comment... I havn't seen any viruses piggy backing on counterstrike like you do with Kazzaa.

If it were me I would have all the PTP file sharing ports blocked off on a campus system. If people want movies and porn they can use USENET just like everyone else has in college before PTP. It was fine for us, it'll be fine for them. I've never not found what I wanted there. FFS, it's a pornicopia of perversion and piracy. All on Port 119.

[drkl1ght]

If it were me I would have all the PTP file sharing ports blocked off on a campus system. If people want movies and porn they can use USENET just like everyone else has in college before PTP. It was fine for us, it'll be fine for them. I've never not found what I wanted there. FFS, it's a pornicopia of perversion and piracy. All on Port 119.

I would not recommend blocking ports, as it is much to easy to get around. People will just use other ports. The people who will be hurt are those who hardly know what a computer is, and need to use some obscure application that happens to use the Kazaa port. More effective would be to put bandwidth caps on high-traffic users, or on those ports used by P2P applications, which would keep the problem limited, without fully disabling anything.

[DETsysmd]

Good opinions, makes me see this catastrophe in a new light ;].

Good to hear. but one question remains...

WHY COUNTER STRIKE? GOOD GOD MAN, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???

sry, i feel better now.... :)

[atripes]

Post was almost dead, sigh.

And CS is the highest paying and most popular FPS on both the internet and LAN.