UDP Badness [Was: Re: How to measure network quality&performance for voip&gameservers (udp packetloss, delay, jitter,...)]

Fri Mar 10 20:28:42 UTC 2006

On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 11:43:59AM -0800, Matt Ghali wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 10 Mar 2006, Bill Nash wrote:
> 
> >You will not learn hatred until that MMO you host implements a 'Report 
> >network problem' button that does a traceroute, and automatically emails 
> >it and a canned message to your NOC mailbox. Ultima Online did this, back 
> >in my nocling days. Like monkeys expecting a reward, those little bastards 
> >pounded on that button until the lag stopped.
> 
> That's hilarious- I just finished emailing ras offlist about the 
> same tool. It also (somehow) allowed them to send their blather to 
> hostmaster at ea.com.
> 
> http://matt.snark.net/crap/idiot/idiot5.txt

Not to try and troubleshoot your 5 year old ticket or anything, but their 
ingress traceroute shows what looks like Baltimore to San Francisco to 
mae-west to a sjc based server (probably someone honoring meds :P), and 
the outbound traceroute used to troubleshoot it coming out of VA and going 
over mae-east. Nothing in that traceroute proves that AboveNet was or was 
not having issues at mae west.

While the output from traceroute is simple, obtaining meaningful data from 
it about what is actually wrong requires an operator with expertise and 
years of experience. Jumping to conclusions about what is or isn't wrong 
based on traceroute is probably one of the largest failings of noc people 
in general.

But thanks for reminding us of the crappy crappy networking that went on 5 
years ago. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)