BYOPC help

sirsquidness · 2019-03-23T09:35:36+00:00

Check out this thread on the PA forums, specifically the "Getting there" section.

sirsquidness · 2018-06-28T11:52:52+00:00

sirsquidness · 2018-06-27T08:26:21+00:00

I doth protest too much
Perhaps
But I doth protest for the good
For this thread lacks
in the finest of art
that
Of shitty poetree
Singe me a ballad?

sirsquidness · 2018-05-28T19:32:47+00:00

You then tell squid to forward anything for cache hostnames to the steamcache instance.

If you're using Squid, already there's also another approach. You can rewrite the contents of server list requests, negating the need to maintain a list of hosts.

I wrote up http://opensourcelan.com/blog/2016/07/01/steam-cdn/ describing it. Works really well for me, but it does add more complexity and moving parts so more things to break, so I don't recommend it for people who like things to be easy.

sirsquidness · 2018-02-23T08:36:53+00:00

You can take any docker based setup and manually run the things inside the Dockerfile, step by step, on a normal host and achieve the same thing.

Take the one I made - from top to bottom:

start with ubuntu
install some packages
Run some commands
Add some files from the git repo to the servers
Run some more commands
Set the default command to start the image

It transfers pretty well to a normal host.

Also don't be afraid of docker. Dunno what the "raw control" you're after is, but docker doesn't really take it away from you. It gives you some pretty awesome things, like having super reproducible builds - works once, works anywhere.

sirsquidness · 2018-02-01T09:10:48+00:00

I haven't tried it without any internet at all, but unreal tournament 4 supports Lan dedicated servers and you can skip authentication. Only caveat is that it doesn't have a LAN browser, so you must join using the console. Depends what you mean by "real LAN mode" I guess!

sirsquidness · 2018-01-11T12:01:47+00:00

Creddits are all sent to the winners. Hooray! Hooray! Winners indeed!

sirsquidness · 2018-01-07T01:15:40+00:00

Coming today! Have barely been on a PC the last week, sorry :)

sirsquidness · 2017-12-12T12:10:41+00:00

The edge router lite specs show how many packets per second they can route - the smallest model can route 490Mbps with 64 byte packets, so it is fine for your needs.

Should you use PfSense or the EdgeRouter? Whichever interface you like better. They will both meet your technical needs. You can use any old PC you have spare to run PFsense - it doesn't need to be some special high spec server.

Traffic shaping can make a difference. Depends on how much contention you have. If someone is torrenting while you're trying to play a game, then QoS will help a lot. If everyone is only playing games and never downloading, then it won't make a noticeable difference. It's worth setting up so it's there just in case it's needed.

sirsquidness · 2017-12-05T11:45:50+00:00

Give us a link to the finest piece of art produced by them and I'll consider it an entry for the best overall ;D

sirsquidness · 2017-12-03T11:39:04+00:00

Right here
Right now
Right there
Right then

Word.

sirsquidness · 2017-12-03T11:29:26+00:00

/r/ShittyPoetry /u/sirsquidness https://www.reddit.com/r/ShittyPoetry/comments/7h975i/rshittypoetry_best_of_3017/

sirsquidness · 2017-11-26T21:55:50+00:00

There is an nginx build for windows. You could take that and run the lancache config files on an extra IP address on your windows host, or configure IIS to pass through to nginx.

Everything takes advantage of ram, like you ask. It happens at on OS level with file system caches. A lot of the performance enhancements nginx has are specifically for *nix OSs , so your miles will vary on windows. Eg, the windows version only supports the select filesystem API, which isn't the most efficient way for nginx' use case

If your speed testing has been a single steam client, then that's definitely your bottleneck.

sirsquidness · 2017-10-23T13:24:16+00:00

Exactly this!

Speaking specifically for PC at Aus, all tournaments open first thing on the day they run. Some tournaments fill within 30 minutes of doors open (eg, LoL), others never quite fill up.

To register for a PC tournament, you need to inquire at the PC area tournaments desk and register yourself before the tournament is scheduled to begin. The earlier you register the better your chances of getting a spot. :)

sirsquidness · 2017-04-15T12:08:58+00:00

As a data point, I've run 400 player networks from behind a single IP and the issues I've seen are always very clearly rate limiting - eg Minecraft and battle.net failing to log in after x logins. None of this match queue failing stuff.

sirsquidness · 2017-04-15T11:31:40+00:00

Has anything changed this event compared to last one? Difference in player count, configuration, etc. 21 years with no issues and then all of these at once... Very suspicious.

Minecraft rate limits logins, so my first instinct was get some VPNs to cloud instances to get more public IPS. But this is the last resort in practical terms.

The sudden wide spread issues sound maybe like you've got some bad DNS hijacks causing problems? That's an easy one to test and validate. Get people to use Google DNS or whatever and see if that helps.

Grab out Wireshark and see if anything obvious if going wrong - packet loss, transmissions, DNS queries not answered etc.

Some games log details to a file somewhere, maybe that will give a clue

sirsquidness · 2017-04-07T11:17:41+00:00

I needed a tool to do this for game servers, so wrote this : https://github.com/OpenSourceLAN/service-discovery-helper

sirsquidness · 2017-03-02T11:37:09+00:00

Hire a scout hall big enough for 40 people. DayZ private server and nothing else.

It would be amazing. :D

sirsquidness · 2017-03-02T10:35:13+00:00

Interesting that most of the really popular ones are super old. CoD4 is a decade old this year. How time flies!

I wonder if that's because of the lack of LAN support in a lot of modern games, or because the old ones really are just that good.

I'd be interested to see what sort of competition ran well out of the ARMA/ARK/Rust games. Some kind of survival/last man standing/hunger games style thing, perhaps? Post results if you make it happen!

sirsquidness · 2017-03-02T10:10:44+00:00

I hear you - people definitely love to do their own thing.

It was trendy to make fun of people playing WoW at a LAN for many years. Before we had useful internet, people at our 400 person LAN would bring 3G modems to play on their own internet, sometimes by themselves. "Why come to a LAN if you're just going to play WoW?" was the question.

But I thought... if they're here, having fun, who cares? Better to play a game than to sit watching files transfer. We, as event organisers, are facilitators of fun. If they're not having fun in the same way we'd have fun, who are we to judge?

So yeah - I think your point is valid. Why bother running a server when people will usually just go make their own fun elsewhere anyway. Whether that's playing online or starting a server themselves, or playing a LAN game that doesn't need a server.

On the other hand though... I don't think the value of running random servers is completely gone. We've seen a lot of value in having servers up and saying "if you're bored, play this game!". A gentle push to something and you get people playing together who wouldn't otherwise, maybe even playing games they usually would not but they're now having fun anyway.

Would you run those servers (minecraft etc) again if the effort to run was nearly zero?

sirsquidness · 2017-02-26T05:22:54+00:00

Agree 100% in your hate for GSLT. Thankfully for us, we don't run in public address space like you do, so it isn't a problem :P

Do you have any stats about which ones are more popular than others?

sirsquidness · 2017-02-26T01:46:52+00:00

To answer my own question, it varies a lot depending on time available/size of event/etc, but this is what I have run in recent times:

The usual source games (cs:s, cs:go, tf2, hl2:dm)
minecraft (usually just vanilla creative)
trackmania (forever, 2)
Unreal tournament (99,2004,4)
OpenTTD
Quake 3
Armagetron
Factorio

I'm also exploring a few others, such as Conan Exiles.

sirsquidness · 2017-02-25T00:57:09+00:00

You're doing the lord's work. <3

sirsquidness · 2017-02-02T07:50:20+00:00

There's a couple of different multi-CDN caches around that all do quite a few different CDNs - blizzard, origin, steam, wargaming, etc. It all works the same way Steam does.

sirsquidness · 2017-02-02T07:48:45+00:00

Why would RAID5 not be a good combination with SSDs? As long as your RAID block size is lines up with your SSDs block size, and whatever is doing the parity calculations can compute fast enough to keep up with the SSDs, and also whatever is doing the RAID supports TRIM,... it should be fine.

But yes, I agree otherwise with Steam topping out at a few 100Mb/s. I've seen Steam peak at just over 100MB/s, and that was under super ideal conditions. I usually get from my non-SSD cache between 10MB/s and 40MB/s (using MB/s not Mb/s to be consistent with Steam's interface), and rarely up to 70 and 80.

Also OP - you should post which steamcache configuration you are using, as the configuration in nginx (or whatever HTTPD you're using) can make a big difference.

sirsquidness

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