Network issues during LAN party
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Ah, so this was the first time playing behind pfSense?
By far most common problem for any sort of gaming is the way pfSense applies outbound NAT. That is especially true for multiple clients connecting to the same game where they all try to use the same ports.
It's more of a problem for console gaming but it seems most games rely on UPnP to setup port forwards and pfSense does not (yet) support some of the modes required for multiple clients to all request the same port.
Did you have UPnP enabled? It's disabled by default and most SOHO devices just enable everything to reduce support calls.
You might have been seeing those clients falling back to a proxied connection mode which is normally far slower that connecting directly via port forwards.
Steve
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@stephenw10 correct, first LAN party using pfSense. I play plenty of games with just me on the network or I've had one other friend over at a time with a laptop.
I looked now and UPnP is disabled. I've really made no changes to pfSense other than getting it setup and installing a few more packages. I should enable it and then Allow UPnP Port Mapping?
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You should if the games you're playing require inbound ports. I would expect the game to have some sort of network status diagnostic. Since you seem not to be using consoles you cannot use the included test functions they have.
Those are the two biggest differences between pfSense and SOHO devices:
UPnP disabled by default.
Outbound NAT uses source port randomisation.See: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/games.html
Steve
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@stephenw10 thanks, I'm going to see if a friend can come over with his laptop so we can get two PCs plus my PS5 going at once and see what happens as a rudimentary test.
I also setup this based on a reddit response I got to this topic: https://www.pimdegreef.nl/bufferbloat-solution-for-pfsense/
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Was your dslreports result above with that shaping in place? It looks pretty good.
Steve
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@stephenw10 no it was from before I made any changes. The report after I made the changes was also an A, but I'm not sure if that's because it's just me on one PC and not hosting a LAN.
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The test there deliberately loads up the connection to a known amount so I would expect it to give a good indication even if you are the user at that time.
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Not seeing anything glaring, but there are a few questions:
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That HP t730 appears to have a Realtek NIC, is that in play at all, or are both WAN and LAN plugged into the HP NC365T NIC?
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I hate to assume, so I'll just ask... is PFsense running on bare metal or virtualized?
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If go to Status -> Interfaces, are there any "In/out errors" on your interfaces?
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Any chance you glanced at the link lights on your switches while the issues presented themselves? Any strange light patterns? (e.g. all lights solid, all lights blinking at the same rate, etc)
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Did you happen to peek at your bandwidth usage during the issues? Any chance someone tagged several torrents and left them to seed?
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What packages are you running?
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What model switches are you using? How confident are you about their health?
A few things I would do:
- From what I gather, that HP t730 is a Thin Client PC running a laptop CPU. The specs appear to be "ok" at face value... I guess... however, considering thin clients are cheap low-performance computers by design... you may want to entertain different hardware.
- Given your bandwidth, I personally don't think you need QoS unless you routinely saturate your upload bandwidth. If you're not using it, I'd re-verify nothing's configured. If you are using it and have been tweaking various settings along the way, I would blow it away and re-run the wizard.
- I personally would take that 8 port switch out of the mix to remove a point of failure... and just run a longer cable to the 16 port switch (assuming it's functioning properly). If 16 ports aren't enough, install a 24 port unit.
- As always, I'd check your cables. I'd also replace any custom cables with prefabbed CAT6.
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An update since we had the LAN. The only change I made was enabling UPnP and everything worked fine. No lag in any of the games we played for the 8 of us in attendance. Thanks again!
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Nice. Thanks for the update.
