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Ethernet and You, networking for the administrator.


Sphere

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If you feel this thread has helped in some way, or you like what you see, don't just comment, feel free to like as well.

With that said. Welcome to this thread...

 

I would like to point out first that this thread is more useful for those who have access to the Ethernet settings on their server box or mini-server PC. This is what I know, and have found to work the best for best results.

Onboard versus dedicated. Now I have both. I tried using the 1 Gigabit onboard and the 10 Gigabit Ethernet card. Without playing with any settings, and with tweaking the settings, people noticed that the dedicated hardware made a difference. I believe the reason why a 10 Gigabit Ethernet card has a more powerful advantage over on-board would be the processor on the chip, and also the huge cache capabilities available. If you are dealing with packet spamming, you want a cache solution that matches your workload. The dedicated hardware also comes with beefy cooling solutions if you buy them. I use the ASUS Republic of Gamers Areion 10G Ethernet Card. This is not a cheap purchase if you are using a cheap system. But if you are spending $1400 AUD on a CPU and over $2000 in RAM, for example, $200 more isn't really that much, is it? Get dedicated, makes the onboard garbage look like the garbage it is. The extra settings onboard do help, but I have seen registry edits that sometimes cover some of the out of the box features that the paid solution provides.

The people who say that Ethernet doesn't make a difference, you need to buy better Internet. Are they correct? Yes. But so is your location. I am near the node. There is very little resistance between me at a house and the rest of the world. If you live too far away from a node, do not consider hosting for many players.

But your settings you do use make a difference. This is what I am using.
Is what I am using going to be correct for everybody? You tell me, I only work here lmao.

Your DNS servers are important. This defines the hop number between you and your players. Will it be the best for everybody playing? You can get most players as good as possible by choosing the right DNS server directory. I use "8.8.8.8" and "1.1.1.1". There are other options out there, please consider your options. This option, however, will not exist for everybody. If you are hosting from Turkey or Macedonia, you will not be allowed by your Internet Service Provider to change your Domain Name Service to anything else, because of censorship of the Internet. If you want to be able to change this as a server provider, you will more than likely have to talk with your ISP and consider a business line. This will probably cost more money.

Disable power management. Do you want to have your device turn off to save power?

MTU ( Maximum Transmission Unit ). Leave this at 1500. I have tried as low as 1024, but I cannot be sure if this is going to cause packet loss at this level. Do not go below 1024, and my recommendation is keep it at 1500. If you can lower it, great, your packets may go faster. But get ready for the potential of packet loss. And packet loss can mean disconnections.

Disable Nagle. Please for the love of God and all that is Holy, turn this old technology off. It murders UDP packets like a monkey with a gun. Just think about that analogy. Would you want a monkey to have a loaded pistol or an AK-47? Nagle is the worst technology for server hosting when you are using UDP packets for Peer-to-Peer connections. Kill it with fire!! I have tried with and without. Using it is literally like giving a monkey a gun and letting that animal loose on a population. The horror! Anybody who uses this crap is proof that Jesus died in vain and legally changed his middle name to f******. Don't use it!!!!!!!

Your game servers CPU priority. This one is a hard one to figure out. I have had it on high priority, and people reported great results. I have put it on low priority, and people reported great results. Same for crappy results on both. And changing it made immediate results. To be honest, you are going to have to play with this and get feedback from your players. ASM lets you change this under Administration. Do not use real time, your server will eventually crash. The thing you need to remember is, the CPU priority impacts the server frame time. That frame time is associated with packets in and out.

ARP Offload. Now as far as I can tell this feature is best left enabled. There really should be no reason to disable it.

Direct Cache Access. This feature lets you take some of the packet data and move it into the CPU cache. For me personally, I use the DCA1.0 Packet Payload. I am hopeful that it will help with UDP packets which primarily are just a Packet Payload, and it's not quite certain if the UDP packets in this situation have a header or descriptor. I want that thing moving as fast as possible. The caveat, however, is that my CPU has a monster CPU on-die cache. Your CPU might not. The tech community at large however believes that the DCA has no tangible benefits in the real world. It is still debatable as to if this feature helps or harms network traffic, and may have no tangible benefit at all.

Downshift Retries. I leave this on 7. I don't see any reason not to just leave this at max.

Flow Control Rx & Tx Enabled. You need this on if you are using Interrupt Moderation. It makes a massive difference to the connection quality.

Interrupt Moderation Rate. This thing is really important for server hosting. You are literally going to be spamming and being spammed by packets. Each packet interrupts the CPU. Sure enough, you can offload a pile of stuff to the Ethernet card. But the CPU is going to get involved. Only gamers who are not hosting require not using Interrupt Moderation rate; to be disabled in order to get an edge at first-person shooter games. The Interrrupt Moderation Rate should be medium typically speaking. Too low or too high has undesired results. Adaptive can be better, but has the undesired result of having both near and far players on the server at the same time competing, resulting in some suffering and some having a blast. Medium is the best middle ground and best result I have found so far.

IPv4 Checksum Offload. Rx & Tx Enabled. Yes just leave it on.

Jumbo Packets. Kill it with fire, you are using tiny packets in large volume, not large files. This will hurt your traffic having it on for server hosting.

Large Send Offload V1 and V2. Got this on now. This feature, if it works for the server at all, should be good. Usually, it works on TCP packets. Not sure about UDP. Eh, no harm in having it on.

Maximum number of RSS Queues. From what I can gather, this number is the number of CPU cores you want to set for the Networking. My card defaults at 8. I have tried 4 and 8. Less than 4 has undesired results.

NS Offload. I just leave it enabled.

Priority & VLAN. I just leave this enabled.

Receive Buffers. 4096. I am told that having this at max is the best results for hosting. This number is not the same as packet volume, such as with MTU ( Maximum Transmission Unit ).

Receive Side Scaling. From what I remember, this allows networking to change CPU cores. But it also keeps networking on a CPU core as required. It does help. Keep it enabled.

Recv Segment Coalescing. I did try without, it wasn't so good to have it disabled. Keep it enabled.

TCP/UDP Checksum Offload. Tx Enabled or disabled. If you include Rx, your servers will not be reachable by any players on WAN. Just letting you know this.

Transmit Buffers. 4096. Make this big, it helps.

ARK server arguments : -InitialConnectTimeout=60000.0-ConnectionTimeout=60000.0-P2PConnectionTimeout=60000
It appears that using this helps in some instances. Better connecting to the server for people with slow computers and far away locations, also helps people to not disconnect around megabases. But it will not prevent a server disconnection in general. I find it useful if you happen to need to change an Ethernet Setting and don't want to kick all your players. Everybody pauses in-game and then resumes after the Network Card comes back online once the settings have applied.

 

I think this is about everything. If you think it helped, or you want to discuss a setting or feature or maybe you found something else different helped, feel free to expand and contribute to this thread. If it did help you, let us all know your experience. Thanks for reading!

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Sphere would you be willing to help me? If so, I send a Steam friend request because I can't send a private message on the forum. Not everyone needs to know my public IP and firewall settings...

So to cut to the chase: my dedicated server is not working on my public IP and remains routed to my static internal IP as if I failed at port-forwarding and configuring the firewall.

Sphere what tools do you use to diagnose where the server is being blocked?

I understood all you have written on this guide, am also self-hosting and port-forwarded every port the ARK wiki threw at me, yet my server remains LAN only. I desperately need help diagnosing the problem, because 19th april my server must be up and running for the LAN party. I am using Windows 10 Professional x64.

I am up for anything at this point, sharescreen on Skype, Discord Teamviewer, paid, because of the deadline.

Hosting Minecraft servers goes just fine, port-forwarding and opening port 25565.

 

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6 hours ago, RoosSkywalker said:

Sphere would you be willing to help me? If so, I send a Steam friend request because I can't send a private message on the forum. Not everyone needs to know my public IP and firewall settings...

So to cut to the chase: my dedicated server is not working on my public IP and remains routed to my static internal IP as if I failed at port-forwarding and configuring the firewall.

Sphere what tools do you use to diagnose where the server is being blocked?

I understood all you have written on this guide, am also self-hosting and port-forwarded every port the ARK wiki threw at me, yet my server remains LAN only. I desperately need help diagnosing the problem, because 19th april my server must be up and running for the LAN party. I am using Windows 10 Professional x64.

I am up for anything at this point, sharescreen on Skype, Discord Teamviewer, paid, because of the deadline.

Hosting Minecraft servers goes just fine, port-forwarding and opening port 25565.

 

You need to open the ports for TCP and UDP for your server on both the Server box and the Modem. On top of that, if you have certain Internet Security suites such as Trend Micro installed, the Anti-Virus package may be re-routing your traffic through a proxy service. This would prevent WAN connections. You also need to make sure that the Server box has a static IP address set in the Networking, and that the Modem is expecting packets from that IP address for the ports that are open. One more thing, you will not see your server on the WAN if you are attempting to connect to that server on the same network. You would have to go to LAN to see your server connected. You can test to see if you can see your server on WAN if you connect your gaming PC to your mobile phone Internet, and then make a search for your server using a different IP address separate to your server. There is a workaround solution to this problem. I will gather that information for you now. Hold on.

Edit1. If any of your mods are out of sync, or if your server needs updating, the server will not appear on the Steam list.

Edit2. Here is a Link to the LAN/WAN thing I was talking about, that should help. https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/615086038669053850/

Edit3. If you are using a password-protected server, you need to tick a box to see password protected servers under unofficial.

Edit4. If you connect via LAN instead of WAN, you will not be able to use an obelisk to cross-ark servers. That guy says he did not need to use NAT LOOPBACK  or IP Passthrough, he just forwarded the ports and all was working.

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Thank you very much for the reply, but I am quite past that. I gathered screenshots of all the relevant information, so you don't have to do guesswork and waste your valueable time. Though as said before these screenshots seriously expose my IP and all that, and I do not want to place that on a public forum.

For the sake of getting things to work, I kept my server as simple as possible.

- No mods

- No cluster with tribute downloads

- Default ports

- No automated scripts with restarts and back-ups

- It is meant to be a private dedicated server for me and my friends

Also I want to upload some less sensitive screenshots but the forum throws error -200 at me.

So is there any way I can send the screens? Even a super secret throw-away email is cool with me, if you really, really don't want me to know anything, not even your Steam, you can use this and send me the fake email address. https://trashmail.com/

Here are some less intrusive screenshots I uploaded on a non-indexed site.

dd4k7g2-bab10fa3-aae6-45a1-a49c-0ba94061

lan_by_roos_skywalker_dd4k7fp-pre.jpg?to

my_survivors_by_roos_skywalker_dd4k7fd-p

no_unofficial_by_roos_skywalker_dd4k7f9-

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I was able to fix his settings. He needed a static LAN on the server, the server firewall settings needed adjusting, and the modem port forwarding needed adjusting. All easy things. The last step I think he got stuck on was in the need to restart the modem to apply modem changes. ARK server manager said that the server was waiting for publishing. That problem is resolved.

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12 hours ago, kusty974 said:

And the golden question :

still no solution for cluster transfert for dedicated server behind router that don't have nat loopback ? (All servers instance on same network)

It's probably better to get a decent modem anyways. Just as it's a good idea to get a better ethernet solution over onboard.

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12 hours ago, Sphere said:

It's probably better to get a decent modem anyways. Just as it's a good idea to get a better ethernet solution over onboard.

Hm I though about it, but it really sounds too bad since my router isn't that bad (cisco 1800).

I was hoping they will correct their netcode but nothing untill now...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay been 10 hours now. I found that with the players, high priority works great now. But many weeks ago low priority on the CPU worked better. Huh?

XDa

The primary problem I was getting with high priority was disconnections. But it seems that there is no longer a problem with disconnections, but rather a problem with server responsiveness, aka lag. Once I put it back to high, the servers operate normal. But I bet if I get more disconnection problems again, I will have to adjust the priority again.

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And another 10 hours since the last time. Okay so update, people are loving high priority. But go back to many weeks ago, I was using this and getting problems. I have switched between low and high many times, and changing it fixed it for people each time. A little confusing. You will have to figure out what works best for your players.

Just checked with a friend who is also hosting. He is using low priority and having a flawless time with his friends who are reporting no problems. Yeah, I think you need to talk with your community about how the connection is going, and then adjust it while they are on the server and obtain feedback.

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