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Hi. I'm jon.404, a Unix/Linux/Database/Openstack/Kubernetes Administrator, AWS/GCP/Azure Engineer, mathematics enthusiast, and amateur philosopher. This is where I rant about that which upsets me, laugh about that which amuses me, and jabber about that which holds my interest most: *nix.
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Its midnight...do you know where your packets are?

Posted 01-31-2015 at 02:13 AM by rocket357
Updated 01-31-2015 at 02:17 AM by rocket357

The internet sucks. Well, more succinctly: "The internet is run by people, and people suck."

My wife called me at work today complaining that our internet connection was unstable. While this isn't surprising, I suppose she anticipated my next question because she then said "but it only seems to be $game, everything else is working smoothly? Is this Comcast or your firewall causing problems?" I resisted the urge to absolve the firewall immediately of any wrong doing, and simple said "I'll have to find out when I get home..."

This brings back memories of Time Warner Cable's MTU issue I blogged about sometime last year (the year before?). In short, only traffic to facebook suffered, because it was routed across one particular link in Dallas that apparently was having packet retention issues. Before it was determined to be an MTU issue, though, I experimented with routing traffic via tor for facebook. Eventually this configuration lead to the transparent tor config on my home network, but I digress.

So tonight I'm wondering how $game could be routed differently across the internet, in order to miss a hop in Seattle that is apparently having packet retention issues as well (unfortunately, MTU doesn't seem to be the cause...it appears to be good ol' congestion). I thought for a bit (tor tends to introduce a decent amount of latency, which $game is a bit sensitive to, and I use ssh tunnels daily, so I'd like to actually take this opportunity to use a skill I don't get to use as often), so I decided to deploy an ipsec tunnel to a VPS running on vultr (go OpenBSD!) in a datacenter right next door to $game_host =)

I'm actually pretty shocked at how well this is working. My wife and I are both playing, sub 100 ms latencies, and virtually no load on the CPUs for the VPS (vultr's performance series VPSs are beasts...I may have to tone this guy down some) or my home firewall (surprising, as this is a 566 MHz PIII). Crypto is set to aes-256 with hmac-sha2-512 digest.

I know, right? Is the traffic even getting encrypted?!? (yes, I verified the traffic is getting encrypted and not simply by-passing the tunnel. Crazy, eh?)

Granted, $game isn't a bandwidth hog, it's more of a latency demon...but as long as our latencies stay sub-100 ms (they weren't with the traffic issues in Seattle), I think we'll be fine.

The internet is a silly place.
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Comments

  1. Old Comment
    It's always "your firewall." Don't you use the internet too? It's "our firewall" just like it's "our bank account". It's bad enough when it's the kid, but when the spouse throws that out too......
    Posted 02-03-2015 at 11:03 AM by vmccord vmccord is offline
  2. Old Comment
    Oh, I have an SLA on my home network, trust me...and I don't mean "Comcast's side", I mean "that stack of 8 machines running on, under, and around your desk that overheats the office and sounds like a boeing 747" SLA.

    My wife doesn't claim *any* ownership of that stack of machines haha.
    Posted 02-03-2015 at 04:21 PM by rocket357 rocket357 is offline
    Updated 02-03-2015 at 04:24 PM by rocket357
 

  



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