My VPN server lags like a.....

[jmcoreymv]

...VPN server that lags.
Heres the problem, me and my friend like to play starcraft alot but lately battle.net has been really messed up and slow. We each have excellent ping to each other ~50 ms, we are on the same cable node. Starcraft only supports ipx/spx unless your using bnet. So I setup a win2k server machine and setup a vpn server using pptp. Now when we play SC over the vpn connection using ipx/spx encapsulation it lags like soooo bad, it is completely unplayable, but when we join bnet it works fine. Any reasons to this or fixes for it would be appreciated thanks.

Also, what ports does PPTP vpn server use because I want to turn of dmz on my router and just foward the needed ports.

 

[RSI]

~50ms good??? My cousin has cable and pings bnet at 15-25ms.. 50ms is good? wha??

Yeah you're right SC only supports IPX/SPX unless you use Battle.net... I don't know why it lags so much though... sorry

 

[jmcoreymv]

50 ms is good when you have an ISP called cox@home, who might i add, now charges for tech support.

 

[Marine06]

When jmcoreymv and I tried to play sc it lagged like a b**** like he said earlier. I host a game and there isnt any lag until he connects to the game and then the lag kicks in. Is it since cox stinks or some other problem like lack of ram? Thanks for the replies and help!

 

[jmcoreymv]

^

 

[pm]

It's the 1.02 patch and the fact that they increased the limit on players. The patch reduced the required Bnet memory/bandwidth footprint on their side so they could add more players per server, but now they are pushing the network capacity to the limit and the latency is an added effect of this due to capacity constraints on the Bnet network.

As far as VPN - why are you playing through a hardware VPN router? And besides a VPN router shouldn't incure any latency cost when not routing IPsec packets - at least that's my understanding of it.

 

[jmcoreymv]

Im not running a hardware vpn I dont think, the vpn server is win2k server machine, I just have a Netgear Rt311 NAT router sharing the ip amongst my household pcs.

 

[pm]

I'm still somewhat confused as to how VPN - Virtual Private Network - could cause lag when accessing a non-VPN site on the web. There's a bunch on different ways of implementing VPN, but none of them (that I know of, and I'm far from an expert on this) introduce latency when not actually sending VPN packets. Since you are using software VPN, then this becomes even more improbable. I thought you were talking about the latency through a hardware VPN converter/router/whatever-they-are-called - which definitely introduces some latency to a connection, but the latency for non-VPN packets is orders of magnitude less than the latency for secure packets.

In any case, my answer about the effect of the 1.02 patch on Battle.Net is definitely true. Go to www.battle.net and check the forums. The latency problem is on Blizzard's side.

 

[BoberFett]

What kind of machine is running VPN hardware-wise? VPN does encrypt, is the CPU not fast enough to encrypt and decrypt the outgoing and incoming packets?

 

[jmcoreymv]

Its a p3 500 with 128 megs ram.

 

[LocutusX]

If you're on the same cable node, shouldn't you be able to use a direct IPX connection?

 

[jmcoreymv]

I dont think so, also we both have routers, I have the netgear rt311 and he has the linksys, so it wouldnt make it past those anyways.