Battlfield 2 online gaming

[YeOldeStonecat]

Not that Untangle is really designed for the "home front"...but I had setup Untangle at home to learn a bit more...before doing some more Pro deployments.

Went to play Battlefield 2 this morning..hung at the account login screen for a long time. Figured something from Untangle was blocking it...saw attack blocker graph going boingo....so disabled that. Still no login. I then look at Spyware Blocker going nuts on the graph....so looked at the events...tons of stuff to EA and GameSpy (authentication servers) logged in there..so I shut that off and my BF2 login flew right in.

[sky-knight]

You can't disable the attack blocker. I also play games through my UT at my main office because.. well that office happens to be my home.

I haven't noticed anything specific in terms of game lag however the attack blocker does do some strange things.

So from what I have seen you have two options. First, put your PC on a static IP and stuff it in as an unlimited exemption in the attack blocker.

The second, is more work but ultimately a better fix. Do some digging and find out what ports the majority of the game's packets run over. This is generally some kind of udp port, udp 27015 is the default for Source Engine games for example. Then, once you have identified the port, put the game traffic in a bypass rule. You will find this decreases ram requirements on your UT box considerably and it will decrease your latency to the game server as well.

Games I have played though my Untangle.

Eve Online
GuildWars
Half-Life 2 based stuff (TF2, Synergy)
Sins of a Solar Empire
Supreme Commander
Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2
Freespace 2
Freelancer

[YeOldeStonecat]

You can't disable the attack blocker. I also play games through my UT at my main office because.. well that office happens to be my home.

So on the rack...when you click the "power button" beneath the green button for the Attack Blocker appliance to be turned "off"..that doesn't kill it?

Overall the latency of UT, versus the PFSense I was running prior, doesn't seem much higher. UT is currently running on a dual 2.4 Xeon.

[Silver Bullet]

So on the rack...when you click the "power button" beneath the green button for the Attack Blocker appliance to be turned "off"..that doesn't kill it?

It does not. You have to add some parameters to /etc/default/untangle-vm in order to disable Attack Blocker.

I haven't gamed from behind Untangle in a while, but, I did run into some problems in 5.03. Those problems disappeared in 5.1 when Untangle introduced bypass rules. That is how I would game from behind UT personally. Just create the bypass rules specific to the gaming traffic (dest ports). This way you are not only bypassing the Attack Blocker, but your gaming traffic won't have to be processed by the rack either.

[sky-knight]

What I also forgot to mention is that my UT server is protecting a Team Fortress 2 server, as well as a Synergy server. Both servers ran wonderfully before I even knew what a bypass rule was much less get one configured correctly.

What I did notice later as an exorbitant amount of ram needed for gaming traffic from just one PC to be handled. UT replaced a PFSense unit to boot which I have found to be a far larger pain to deal with games. Just try Supreme Commander with pfSense... I dare you!