Continual Disconnect Problems

Is anyone else having this problem with their cable?

Firewall hits since startup today: 400 while running only SL.

Modem continuously resets itself during gameplay at some periods of time... yet other times its stable.

Is there some security leak while online with SL?... There seems to be a pattern to the disconnections. It's only when playing SL. I've turned off all programs accessing the net except for the necessary ones. Firewall hits increase dramatically if SL is running (about 5 hits/sec).

I scanned all possibilities: no viruses, no spyware, no backdoors implemented (cept winblows). But for some reason.. all evidence points to SL. What's the deal here?

For what it is worth (yes, I'm a network admin so this isn't a typical setup) I run Second Life through a Cisco Pix 515 firewall and a Linksys router uplinked to a 8-port Linksys Switch. So not only does it make it through two internal hops, I don't have to add any rules to make it work for some magitastic reason.

I could slap a packet sniffer on and see what it is shooting out, but I find it pretty incredible that I don't have to forward a single thing. And I don't have my firewall open like a picket fence, either - hell, I don't even allow ICMP echo-replies from the outside interface!

So in short, if it works through a paranoid setup like mine - it should work through a machine hitting a cable modem.

Are those firewall hits TCP or UDP? My understanding is that SecondLife uses UDP, and since UDP is connectionless, there's no surefire way of matching outgoing packets with replies. Consequently, a firewall may be mistaking delayed UDP replies for unsolicited connection attempts.

I have no idie what has been said. But do you thank it makes any differents if zone alarm pro is up and running or not? Would there be less lag if it is not running?

I've got a bare minimum spec machine at work and ZAPro 4.x and it makes no measureable difference to disable it... believe me, I've disabled everything in MSConfig and it makes no difference

UU

Yes and no. ZoneAlarm will increase your ping (latency) slightly (by a few milliseconds), but will not reduce your bandwidth. For a FPS or other game where latency is important, you'll do better without ZoneAlarm. For something like SecondLife, where it doesn't matter if it takes an extra fraction of a second for data to arrive, it's better to have it running.

thanks again for the information

What's going on here.. looks like there incoming TCPs. Several other inbound issues occur even with that.

So I don't know what to do to stop this problem, it just seems like a big mess to clean up.

BLAH! ZoneAlarm BAD! I hate it! Uninstall it! I have a similar paranoid setup. modem -> linksys router -> 8 port switch. Nothing to forward, it's pretty nice. I believe the reason for this is that SL is UDP and not TCP ran.

I could always fire up SL and do a 'sh conn tcp' then 'sh conn udp' to see what is open. The last time I did, I think I had one TCP connection open and only a few UDP connections as well.

As far as I can tell, they use TCP for the initial authentication, then the application has built in data-checks for UDP, since it is basically 'send and forget' for any network device, so the app has to ensure quality itself at layer 7.

Pretty amazing how it works, actually.

We've noticed that Second Life does have issues with many older hardware firewalls, we haven't done that much testing on software firewalls.

In my particular instance, I was using an ancient (> 3 year old?) D-Link DI-804 router, which had the property that it was only able to keep track of connections to 32(?) servers, and it would start dropping them after it exceeded that number. So flying around (and especially teleporting a long distance) would cause problems in SL, since we maintain connections to each of the simulators you can see - during the teleport process and flying around, we maintain more connections than usual. A good way to test that this is the problem is to run some sort of peer-peer app that generates lots of connections while running SL - bittorrent or Kazaa are good at this.

Other (even older?) hardware firewalls have the even more annoying property of occasionally switching which packets were going to which machine if there was more than one computer running SL behind the firewall!

If you could let us know what sort of router/firewall hardware and software you're using, that would be good.

As a random note, I'm currently using a D-Link DI-604 (retails for about $40), which doesn't have any of the same problems. I think almost all of the recent hardware routerfirewalls use the same chip (a combo ethernet switch/router chip intergated with a StrongARM CPU), so they all might be OK.

- Doug

Einsman-

There may be another issue here: Namely the cable running to your modem

Try physically moving your cable modem, if it disconnects, you've most likely got a partially broken cable right near the connection of the modem. Back in the days of @home they gave me 4 new cable modems before someone decided to check the physical wire and discovered, lo and behold, 1 inch from the modem where it curved from the top of my desk to the outside connection, there was a break in the wire, though it had been stationary for about a year and started with the intermittant problem you're describing.

Also, I run Kerio Personal Firewall at home (you can download it from cnet.com) and have had no problems with it whatsoever. Easy to configure, and, unlike ZoneAlarm, didn't mess up my internal network.

Colin