September 2nd, 2007 Pekk
Okay, the title may be a little bit strong, so don’t get the wrong idea here. A few days ago at my house my mother decided to upgrade to FiOS, not because she wanted digital cable television or super-faster internet (we already had Optimum Online high speed internet access) the problem we faced was actually a telephone issue. The people at Verizon (our same phone service provider before the upgrade) suggested that the only way to fix our phone issue is to run a new (old-style) phone wire to the house; which they refused to do. The other alternative they gave was to upgrade to FiOS, and so we got it.
Having used FiOS for a few days I can say that after the few internet speed tests I’ve done it is definitely faster than my old provider (which, to my knowledge, is hailed as one of the greatest providers across the country because of its speed), but in the first 10 seconds of using this new FiOS internet connection I quickly conjured up a reliable method to completely shut down my internet simply by using it!
Sounds funny doesn’t it? Well let me tell you what I did and then I’ll tell you the information I’ve gathered about this situation so far. First I ran some speed tests on a few sites, dslreports.com and speedtest.net which I found later, and I believe is more reliable because it showed more consistent results. After this I think the next test I decided to run on it was a game test. I picked a game to try and see if I noticed any better ping results and any faster connection or anything like that. I picked Counter-Strike as my game. After loading Counter-Strike (via Steam) I clicked Find Servers to find a server and set my usual filters of ping < 50 and pretty much left the rest of the filters blank. I was absolutely shocked when only 5 servers appeared! Usually I would get at least 20-30 servers with that ping.
I started wondering if my ping was somehow worse and that more servers were being filtered out. I eventually got to thinking that maybe the problem had nothing to do with the service, but the router that they gave me. Sure enough this was the problem. This strange Actiontec brand of routers that I’d never heard of was doing something strange. I decided to log in and try to set up some port forwarding. My first thought related in this area was that maybe it was blocking some port and not all of the servers on the server list could be contacted. So I set up some port forwarding, lucky for me this router actually has a lot of port schemes predefined for a lot of well known programs and games. Counter-strike was on that list. I opened the Counter-Strike ports via the preset template they gave and clicked apply, then I tried again. The same thing happened.
I eventually found my way to a system log in the router which gave information about the messages being sent to and from the network, as well as error messages. I decided to click the Refresh Server List button in CS to get a new list so that I could go back to the admin log and check it. I got the list and tabbed back and then hit the refresh button to get a new log readout. The connection to my router timed out. I tried to go to a website like google.com, but again my connection timed out.
I repeated this process of “get server list” and “try to connect to the router or the internet” and I found that it was more than correlational. I was busy with other things that day so I didn’t bother trying to figure it out until earlier today.
I did a google search for fios counter-strike server list and found that there were many other people who had this same problem and they posted their concerns and cries for help in forums, dating back to over a year ago.
Through my scouring I’ve discovered that there’s a bug (or feature?) in the router that forces the router to die out when it detects any type of message flooding. So presumably what’s happening is that Steam is getting the server list, which has ~12000 servers world-wide and sending out a ping to each one and a request for the server info, each server replies with haste and the router perceives this action as maybe some kind of distributed denial of service attack, and so it shuts down all new connections for about 30 seconds to a minute. Other services I’ve noticed like AIM, will actually stay connected, and work perfectly find (I saw people signing on/off and I was talking to some people also during this time).
I found one forum post that suggested the following remedy, though it didn’t work for me:
played around a bit with the MI424WR configuration file, and found where the UDP flood protection was enabled. In the config file, look for the section:
(protect
(udpflood
(enabled(1))
(rate_limit(30))
)
(icmpflood
(enabled(1))
(rate_limit(30))
)
(synflood
(enabled(0))
(rate_limit(30))
)
(winnuke(0))
)
I set the “enabled(1)” to “enabled(0)”, and reloaded the configuration into the router. It appears to have removed the Steam issue (although the flood of packets still results in some NAT failures, probably due to the large amount of traffic). Try it out, and see if it works for you.
Though it didn’t work for me, I thought I’d document it here just in case I found another solution to the problem. Other posts on that same thread and forum suggest that using another router will fix the problem, but will also slow down your speed maybe. Since my Verizon router takes the coaxial connection and my older routers don’t I don’t think this is an option for me. Though another post I’ve found (maybe it was a different forum, too) suggested to poke through the router settings for the verizon router and find a way to switch it to a mode that will make it act as only a modem, and then use another router maybe as a routing device.
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