Orcon steam content server charging for data

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Orcon steam content server charging for data

Snackos

243 posts

Master Geek

#93696 27-Nov-2011 13:09

Something funny going on. Today all I have done is download a game from steam. The entire time it was showing the Orcon banner, and yet it has only put some of that data in the O-zone. Exactly the same thing happened yesterday. The game is about 15 gigs and yet only half of it is zero-rated. It was definitely showing the Orcon banner the entire time. Or does that not matter?

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321 posts

Ultimate Geek

#550561 27-Nov-2011 13:40

Steam downloads as quickly as possible from multiple servers.. so without some firewall rules or 3rd party apps steam will download from some other servers.

Personally I just use SteamManager but if you know your way around firewall you can set a block from 0.0.0.0 to 219.88.241.89 and 219.88.241.91 to 255.255.255.255 on port 27030 TCP

However Orcon is still downloading the contents, so in some unlikely cases your game may not be on the server yet, an error will pop up saying the server's busy. If so just disable the firewall rule to download from Steam.

Snackos

243 posts

Master Geek

#550562 27-Nov-2011 13:44

So even if it shows the Orcon banner, it will still get some data from elsewhere? That's annoying. Will take a look at this Steam Manager.

xpd

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#550624 27-Nov-2011 17:43

Yep, they cant guarantee that they have all the content on their server (just the way Steam is), Ive been caught out the same as well....... in saying that though, they do have hell of a lot of the content :) (6 TB think I saw last)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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ptinson

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#550787 28-Nov-2011 09:23

Even when it is full there is no guarantee that you will be served by our Steam CDN node.
Its part of the steam CDN and we have 'no' control over what CDN node you are serviced from.

If you want to be as sure as you can then you need something like Steam Manager mentioned above.

CDN = Content Delivery Network

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xpd

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#550797 28-Nov-2011 09:39

Hmm Steam Manager site sets off alarm bells here...

Details:

Web page:
http://www.anguswolfcastle.co.cc/steam

Description:
Access to the web page was blocked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
The web page is on the list of websites with potentially dangerous content.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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Ragnor

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#550836 28-Nov-2011 11:03

xpd: Hmm Steam Manager site sets off alarm bells here...

Details:

Web page:
http://www.anguswolfcastle.co.cc/steam

Description:
Access to the web page was blocked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
The web page is on the list of websites with potentially dangerous content.

Sounds like the kind of false positive issue that most website "blacklist" software suffers from.

The website is just a wiki, the actual download a rar file containing:
- a csv listing server ip addresses.
- a plain text cmd (batch) file that adds rule to the windows firewall and a few other tweaks.
- PortQry, a microsoft utility for testing connectivity to a server.

xpd

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#550838 28-Nov-2011 11:05

Yeah kinda figured that, Ill wait till Im at home tho before i have a look. Dont want to set the boss off too :)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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#550840 28-Nov-2011 11:10

False positive, the site is fine.

xpd

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#551167 28-Nov-2011 19:34

Sigh... cant use Steam Manager - Win7 only and reqs Windows Firewall turned on..... dont have 7 and I never have the firewall enabled.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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alliao

321 posts

Ultimate Geek

#551192 28-Nov-2011 21:10

xpd: Sigh... cant use Steam Manager - Win7 only and reqs Windows Firewall turned on..... dont have 7 and I never have the firewall enabled.

Any firewall's fine I suppose. All other solutions doesn't gracefully reject the connection, which Steam hates. It'd appear to be hanging while waiting for time out..

Ragnor

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#551201 28-Nov-2011 21:35

xpd: Sigh... cant use Steam Manager - Win7 only and reqs Windows Firewall turned on..... dont have 7 and I never have the firewall enabled.

You can still try one of the other methods/programs
http://www.anguswolfcastle.co.cc/steam-1/filtering-methods

xpd

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#551286 29-Nov-2011 09:00

I found another program to try, havent tested it yet tho - running out of HDD to download anything else :)

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Nebbie

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#551758 30-Nov-2011 11:35

Hi Guys

Slingshot & TCL have Steam content servers as well and I've had look into how it works.

The CDN Servers require a lot of memory when I mean a lot if you have 64gb of ram depending on the load might not be enough memory. The CDN first loads the game .dat files into memory then seeds them to the customers from memory it only reads it once from the hard disk and thus reducing the demand for HIGH I/O performance, if there is lot of demand for just a few LARGE games this may use up all the memory.

I've spoken to the Steam guys in charge of our servers and apparently if you got at least 7tb of disk space you have all the content including localized content (Different Languages etc)

I also believe that you can select in your steam client to ONLY download from the selected Server.

Thanks
Bevin

PS: On a side note, I think Steam need to seriously develop their CDN server its extremely buggy and crashes a lot however the steam administrators usually restart the service within 5 - 10min (manually LOL)

---------------------------------------------------------------
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nbree

5 posts

Wannabe Geek

#552362 1-Dec-2011 18:12

Nebbie:
The CDN first loads the game .dat files into memory then seeds them to the customers from memory it only reads it once from the hard disk and thus reducing the demand for HIGH I/O performance, if there is lot of demand for just a few LARGE games this may use up all the memory.

That's actually a somewhat odd way of implementing such a service, given that on Windows it's not even remotely difficult for a single service to totally max out the bandwidth of multiple disk channels using unbuffered asynchronous I/O; as game downloads are large, they are the ideal case for streaming this way, and an application which uses (say) 16Mb I/O units and manages its own LRU cache of stream data *really* shouldn't need that much RAM to keep one or two upstream gigabit links saturated with file data.

Maxing out a 10GbE uplink, now that's a bit more work - especially via UDP, as the sheer number of user/kernel transitions for a ~1500 byte MTU just kills you. That's the real reason why you'd want to use an HTTP-based server instead, just because the user/kernel transitions can deliver massive chunks in a single call instead of a bajillion 1500 byte ones with their attendant overhead.

I also believe that you can select in your steam client to ONLY download from the selected Server.

Alas not; the setting in the Steam client only selects the preferred server, and when initiating a download over the classic CDN on port 27030 the steam client receives a list of 3 IPs to use and tries all of them (roughly similar things happen when using the http CDN, although the details are different and less clear as Steam aren't advertising ISP-specific servers at all via their http download system yet).

So, you really do need to use a third-party tool, be that Mr. Wolfcastle's or a non-firewall-based alternative like mine (which is linked off Mr. Wolfcastle's master list of techniques, and I wrote because my main gaming machine runs WinXP, and so should suit xpd's needs just fine).

Since I'm on TelstraClear it's not entirely simple for me to test access via other ISPs, but the most recent version I uploaded (v0.4.1) should be capable of auto-detecting Orcon and selecting its Steam server, although since the GeoASN stuff is new there's always a possibility I've got it wrong.

I note via the forum title that an outfit called Kordia are lumped in with Orcon; I can see in the GeoASN database I'm using a couple of netblocks assigned to Kordia Limited under AS24324 - I have no idea if those netblocks are ones I should treat as equivalent to the ones assigned to Orcon or not, and so I trust if that is the case then someone using those netblocks will let me know directly.

Ragnor

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#552754 2-Dec-2011 17:51

I also believe that you can select in your steam client to ONLY download from the selected Server.

The setting in steam only sets "preferred server/mirror", Steam will often use multiple servers to download - hence the need for 3rd party blocking applications.

In NZ we have Slingshot, Orcon, Telstraclear, Xnet and Affinity hosting content mirrors currently.

In Aussie the ISP's actually worked together to un-metered each others servers, would be great if you guys could get together and do the same here.

It's probably much cheaper than the cost of dealing with all the "my steam downloads weren't un-metered" support calls!

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