Gaming Consoles and IPv4

Mon Sep 28 15:49:35 UTC 2020

For certain styles of games or for games with crappy netcode, it can be.

For most others performance is perfectly acceptable in a peer to peer in
the vast majority of cases.

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 11:11 AM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:

> Yet (apparently) worse?
>
>
>
> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL>
> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb>
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions>
> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix>
> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange>
> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
> ------------------------------
> *From: *"Tom Beecher" <beecher at beecher.cc>
> *To: *"Mike Hammett" <nanog at ics-il.net>
> *Cc: *"Justin Wilson (Lists)" <lists at mtin.net>, "North American Network
> Operators' Group" <nanog at nanog.org>
> *Sent: *Monday, September 28, 2020 9:21:09 AM
> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>
> Why stray away from how PC games were 20 years ago where there was a
>> dedicated server and clients just spoke to servers?
>
>
> Much cheaper to just let all the game clients talk peer to peer than it is
> to maintain regional dedicated server infrastructure.
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:35 AM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
>
>> Why stray away from how PC games were 20 years ago where there was a
>> dedicated server and clients just spoke to servers?
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Mike Hammett
>> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL>
>> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions>
>> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
>> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange>
>> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
>> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: *"Justin Wilson (Lists)" <lists at mtin.net>
>> *To: *"North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog at nanog.org>
>> *Sent: *Monday, September 28, 2020 7:22:28 AM
>> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>>
>> There are many things going on with gaming that makes natted IPv4 an
>> issue when it comes to consoles and gaming in general.   When you break it
>> down it makes sense.
>>
>> -You have voice chat
>> -You are receiving data from servers about other people in the game
>> -You are sending data to servers about yourself
>> -If you are using certain features where you are “the host” then you are
>> serving content from your gaming console.  This is not much different than
>> a customer running a web server.  You can’t have more than one customer
>> running a port 80 web-server behind nat.
>> -Streaming to services like Twitch or YouTube
>>
>> All of these take up standard, agreed upon ports. It’s really only
>> prevalent on gaming consoles because they are doing many functions.  Look
>> at it another way.  You have a customer doing the following.
>>
>> -Making a VOIP call
>> -Streaming a movie
>> -Running a web server
>> -Running bittorrent on a single port
>> -Having a camera folks need to access from the outside world
>>
>> This is why platforms like Xbox developed things like Teredo.
>>
>> Justin Wilson
>> j2sw at mtin.net
>>
>> —
>> https://j2sw.com - All things jsw (AS209109)
>> https://blog.j2sw.com - Podcast and Blog
>>
>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 9:33 PM, Daniel Sterling <sterling.daniel at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Matt Hoppes raises an interesting question,
>>
>> At the risk of this being off-topic, in the latest call of duty games
>> I've played, their UDP-NAT-breaking algorithm seems to work rather well and
>> should function fine even behind CGNAT. Ironically turning on upnp makes
>> this *worse*, because when their algorithm probes to see what ports to use,
>> upnp sends all traffic from the "magical xbox port" to one box instead of
>> letting NAT control the ports. This does cause problems when multiple
>> xboxes are behind one NAT doing upnp. If upnp is on and both xboxes are
>> fully powered off and then turned on one at a time, things do work. But
>> when upnp is off everything works w/o having to do that.
>>
>> There are many other games and many CPE NAT boxes that may do horrible
>> things, but CGNAT by itself shouldn't cause problems for any recent device
>> / gaming system.
>>
>> It is true that I've yet to see any FPS game use ipv6. I assume that's
>> cuz they can't count on users having v6, so they have to support v4, and it
>> wouldn't be worth their while to have their gaming host support dual-stack.
>> just a guess there
>>
>> -- Dan
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:29 PM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Actually, uPNP is the only way to get two devices to work behind one
>>> public IP, at least with XBox 360s. I haven't kept up in that realm.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----
>>> Mike Hammett
>>> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL>
>>> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb>
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions>
>>> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
>>> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix>
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange>
>>> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
>>> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
>>> ------------------------------
>>> *From: *"Matt Hoppes" <mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net>
>>> *To: *"Darin Steffl" <darin.steffl at mnwifi.com>
>>> *Cc: *"North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog at nanog.org>
>>> *Sent: *Sunday, September 27, 2020 1:22:51 PM
>>> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>>>
>>> I understand that. But there’s a host of reasons why that night not work
>>> - two devices trying to use UPNP behind the same PAT device, an apartment
>>> complex or hotel WiFi system, etc.
>>>
>>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 2:17 PM, Darin Steffl <darin.steffl at mnwifi.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>> This isn't rocket science.
>>>
>>> Give each customer their own ipv4 IP address and turn on upnp, then they
>>> will have open NAT to play their game and host.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 12:50 PM Matt Hoppes <
>>> mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know the solution is always “IPv6”, but I’m curious if anyone here
>>>> knows why gaming consoles are so stupid when it comes to IPv4?
>>>>
>>>> We have VoIP and video systems that work fine through multiple layers
>>>> of PAT and NAT. Why do we still have gaming consoles, in 2020, that can’t
>>>> find their way through a PAT system with STUN or other methods?
>>>>
>>>> It seems like this should be a simple solution, why are we still
>>>> opening ports or having systems that don’t work?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
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