High ping from the dorm

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » August 28, 2004, 12:25 pm

Unfortunately I am having lots of trouble connecting to any online game ranging from EQ to Battlefield to Warcraft.. and it's been this way since I moved in.

When I am able to connect to veeshan I maintain a ping of 4000-8000+, making it worthless to say the least. For a few seconds it will drop down to 100 or 200 - but not enough to call it constant. I've tried pinging the servers only to have it time out (using cmd->ping) as well as tracert. It will go through the first two lines and after that it will complete with stars. Therefore, I'm sure it's an issue here with the school's connection.

For battlefield I can connect to a server momentarily and will be disconnected within a matter of seconds. I'm at a small school of about 2000 right on the water, so obviously there's no big computer group here for me. Any suggestions?

noel · Post by **noel** » August 28, 2004, 1:46 pm

It's not likely the school is blocking your outbound connection since you're able to get some connectivity. There are a couple of other possibilities.

1) you school might be using a packet shaper to control the amount of bandwidth going out to their 'commodity' (regular Internet) link. If this is the case, they could be limiting traffic for ports that are associated with file sharing and online games.

2) your school's residential network could be so full of infected/compromised hosts that your bandwidth is being sapped from probing frames looking for infected hosts. If you have a firewall installed, check the log and see if there are a lot of incoming connections to your PC that are not from sources you're initiating.

A couple things to consider:

If regular web browsing/email download happens quickly, then it's likely there's a traffic shaper of some sort inline. Ideally, just call your student help center or whatever and ask them. Most of the time they'll tell you if they're blocking something or shaping traffic (at least if they're smart).

You should really have a firewall sitting in front of you on a student network. Student networks are probably some of the most hostile environments out there since most students don't have a clue about network/PC security. Once you get a firewall installed, learn to read the logs. Zone alarm Pro will put up a little pop up bubble when your PC is getting hit with bullshit.

Hope that helps.

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » August 28, 2004, 1:57 pm

So in other words, time to find a new hobby. Gotcha

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » August 28, 2004, 2:16 pm

I got some inside info from the network guys at the university when I went there and bandwith limiters are the new hot things for schools to implement. They put them in there, and set them up to limit bandwith used per connection (and yes typically by P2P limits etc). Supposedly more and more schools are implementing these now.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » August 28, 2004, 3:44 pm

College kids have it rough these days! Back when I lived in a dorm, my 300 bps modem zipped along at full speed!

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » August 28, 2004, 4:16 pm

Winnow wrote:College kids have it rough these days! Back when I lived in a dorm, my 300 bps modem zipped along at full speed!

Yeah with the limits they're setting I can barely reach that ...

Adex_Xeda · Post by **Adex_Xeda** » September 8, 2004, 9:12 am

I spent 5 years in a dorm room with wide open access to the University pipe.

I spent 2 years in an apartment with cable modem service

I've spent 3 years after than with DSL service.

My DSL service has been more solid than the sporatic cable service, and the clogged university pipe.

Move off campus, negotiate your internet on your own terms.

BTW you might also look around for wireless services. Motorola came out with the new Canopy system for wireless internet providers. You might have such a vendor in town. I use those Canopy systems for my remote sites that backhall traffic research data. They work great and they provide bandwidth competable with DSL or Cable.

Llaffer · Post by **Llaffer** » September 8, 2004, 2:00 pm

Rellix wrote:So in other words, time to find a new hobby. Gotcha

Or buy a dial-up account to play on

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » September 9, 2004, 12:34 am

Well it turns out they changed everything -- and have only kazaa ports blocked. I haven't been able to connect to anything for over a week now so I assumed they had everything blocked (port scans from online confirmed), but the IT people claim it's open.

The problem is so many people are using the network that no one can connect to battle.net, everquest, etc.. any gaming servers. Is there anything I can do about this other than get a dial up?

murr · Post by **murr** » September 9, 2004, 1:23 am

I'm a student employee on the network staff here at UNC and while we don't have a bandwidth limiter on specific programs/ports in place, there is an overall upload cap. For whatever reason, we can't host for shit on Bnet this year - anyone who joins our WC3 custom games (hi dota) lags to hell. Didn't happen last year, weird stuff. We lag more than normal when we join others games as well. Hopefully it will improve as the network settles down.