So I just remembered that I can't play CS...

[Dragon365]

...because my stupid DSL modem fills up the cache while updating servers and will stop after a while because of this. Anybody have any ideas - I must play an online game tonight, and I don't have much else around (no money).

 

[Lord Evermore]

Up...what "cache" is your DSL modem filling?

 

[Dragon365]

my dad telnetted into it one time to see what it was doing, and discovered that while counterstrike was getting server info, 4mb of cache was getting filled up, and when it was full, the modem would stop working and i had to unplug the modem and restart everything

 

[DrVos]

Is the problem you are having with the Counter-Strike server browser? Have you tried Kali, Gamespy, All Seeing Eye, etc?

 

[Dragon365]

gamespy arcade seems to work until i have downloaded to many servers - i suspect that the same thing is happening

 

[Buddha Bart]

well if you can telnet into the thing, can you lower the TCP timeout?

bart

 

[Lord Evermore]

Well I don't imagine the cache filling up is an issue with the router. I can't even guess what cache it would be, since your router certainly isn't receiving data faster than it can send it to your computer, and your computer shouldn't be sending the data any faster than the router can forward it over the DSL (the TCP/IP standard includes allowing a device to tell another device to slow down transmission if it can't keep up). If it did cache your sent data, it would result in your traffic having higher latencies because your computer assumes the traffic is already gone and counts all the time it's cache. The router also wouldn't have any reason to be caching actual data other than possibly DNS information, which I don't think should be taking up 4MB even with several thousand servers listed.

What kind of router is it? Do you have the latest firmware on it?

Does the issue happen with any other games?

 

[Dragon365]

Issue doesn't happen with other games - firmware should be pretty new - it is a Cayman DSL modem/router - can't see the model number

 

[Lord Evermore]

Not sure how "new" it might be, I can't even find that Cayman Systems still exists. Ah, they seem to have been eaten by Netopia. The model number should be on the label on the bottom or rear of the unit. The firmware version can be checked by telnetting into it. The current version is 6.3.0 and either R7 or R9.

 

[ShawnReeves]

Change your Filter setting on CS. Without any filters the master server will list around 30k servers. If you add a few filter commands like, not full - ping under 175 - deicated - anti cheat software - and myabe couple others this should help. I return about 5k servers with these settings. Hope this helps for the time being!

 

[Buddha Bart]

If you add a few filter commands like, not full - ping under 175 - deicated - anti cheat software - and myabe couple others this should help. I return about 5k servers with these settings.

After the first time, yes this will work. But the first time it has to try pinging ALL of them to even find out who's under 175, playing game X, etc.

I suspect the problem is the number of half-open TCP connections waiting for servers that aren't around or are taking to long to reply. Almost like a SYN flood, but in reverse. Keep in mind a NATing router has to keep track of a lot of state for each connection when doing 1-to-N.

You either need a different server-browser, that can intelligently try blocks of servers at a time, or to lower your TCP timeout on the router (which I'm not even sure if it can be done, and could definatly have affects on other things).

bart

 

[Lord Evermore]

Lowering the TCP timeout on the computer itself might work as well as doing it on the router. One assumes that the router just uses the same information like that as it comes from the computer, rather than replacing it with its own settings. This is a very odd problem though, I've never seen any posts about this happening to anyone else.

 

[Buddha Bart]

One assumes that the router just uses the same information like that as it comes from the computer, rather than replacing it with its own settings.

Nope, every Layer 3 device has its own TCP/IP stack. The information about how long to keep what types of connections open is implimented within the OSs TCP/IP stack, and is not passed on as part of the information in the packet. The times are defined as part of the TCP standard, but as a range of acceptable values, not a fixed value.

bart

 

[Lord Evermore]

I thought the packets actually got a few bits set that increments the TTL so that as they're passed along, each device counts off one tick so that it doesn't end up passing through 129 connections or something. (Sadly, I do know quite a bit about networking and routing, I just never pay much attention to TTL.)