DumaOS Developer Q&A

[raf1212]

I do not understand how to block a player in which there is no shown in the geo filter, np: blacout

[Netduma Iain]

On 4/24/2019 at 9:08 PM, Zennon said:

But I was talking about a player max ping lobby check, so If they are over a max ms I set then it kicks me back out to search again.

So I would not need to hear them as they would be in a lobby with a ping higher than my selected so I did not want to play in said lobby anyway.

In a cod game if all the players have a ping that is comparable it is a fair and balanced as soon as a few high ms ping players enter the sync goes way off especially in Blops4 it just can not sync well between wide ping ranges.

I never use anything but party chat with my privacy set to friends only.

Sorry mate I thought I'd respond to this post already.

I understand what you're saying and I've thought of something similar before. The problem is it could be quite flakey when running on a dedicated server. Not all players have mic with open NAT so it will probably have false positives. Furthermore I'm not sure if detecting latency on mic is feasible, we'll definitely research it though and let you test

[Netduma Admin]

19 minutes ago, raf1212 said:

I do not understand how to block a player in which there is no shown in the geo filter, np: blacout

You would not be able to - you can only deny players you have a connection to. If the game's netcode does not require players in-game to connect to each other then there's no way the Geo-Filter can show you their connection

[Zennon]

25 minutes ago, Netduma Iain said:

Sorry mate I thought I'd respond to this post already.

I understand what you're saying and I've thought of something similar before. The problem is it could be quite flakey when running on a dedicated server. Not all players have mic with open NAT so it will probably have false positives. Furthermore I'm not sure if detecting latency on mic is feasible, we'll definitely research it though and let you test

I might be missing something here but what does a mic have to do with this? Can you only ping peers with mic's enabled?

On the original R1 fw there was a chart for players in your lobby, I use the og FW a lot and when all the players have round about the same ping times give or take around 20ms cod plays in-sync.

When there is somebody in with a 80-120 sometimes its higher it throws the sync out.

I can manually do this by using the old FW and checking the chart, I was asking for DumaOS to plot peer pings and to boot me auto from a lobby if they are over the threshold, what has this to do with mic's Iain? like I say I dont want to hear people with that high a ping I want to auto back out the lobby 

[major masingil]

has the glitch with wifi calling not working correctly on DumaOS on R1 V1.3 been figured out, and will it be implemented in V1.4? 

[bbursley]

Heres something I was hoping for, (not sure if it was suggested yet). If we boot the games up, all servers are generally located in doing so, so would it be possible for the DumaOS to traceroute each one and measure the latency, variation, hops etc., then create a special individual profile for allowing and denying based on that information? For example...(this might include player host types too, maybe?), you boot the game up and obviously all dedis are supposed to be seen, so then the netduma can grab all those IP's and ping each one of them, making not of the things suggested above, from there a user could view this in a tab where they could create a "profile" much like we usually have where we could deny the ones we decided we didn't want. so when we go to play these different games, we can select "BO4" profile, and the netduma can partly use this in its filtering process, additionally perhaps it could still have a ping rule somehow in case the game was like...nope no server for you, we need you on a player host instead, then the netduma could weed out the worst of those. I mean Its kind of a garbled suggestion but I think it would make each game experience more personalized and optimized.

[CrophiXx]

On 4/24/2019 at 7:31 PM, Netduma Iain said:

Can you elaborate please? Do you mean just standard cheaters in games like Pubg? I haven't done too much research into this area but I'd think it is unlikely as most games use what's called an "Authoritative server" paradigm. This means that the server decides which actions occurs (especially in paradoxical situations) rather than the client. Since the router is a middleware device it can't perform the servers job for authorising legitimate actions. 

That question was really good. 

I personally use this Router at most for UFC 3 which uses P2P in first place. When both players cant connect to each other, they get routed over a Server. Strict mode etc does a perfect job at this BUT too often I run into ppl wo have a 50-60 ping when we connect but short after that, I can watch their ping spikes up to 200-400 and they lag horribly even though the ping blocker accepted that connection. 

I would also LOVE a function where i could immediately close the connection to someone like that because in the game warframe there are countless trolls and there is no votekick system in that game. 

[bbursley]

31 minutes ago, CrophiXx said:

That question was really good. 

I personally use this Router at most for UFC 3 which uses P2P in first place. When both players cant connect to each other, they get routed over a Server. Strict mode etc does a perfect job at this BUT too often I run into ppl wo have a 50-60 ping when we connect but short after that, I can watch their ping spikes up to 200-400 and they lag horribly even though the ping blocker accepted that connection. 

I would also LOVE a function where i could immediately close the connection to someone like that because in the game warframe there are countless trolls and there is no votekick system in that game. 

Are you under the impression that the netduma blocks bad player connections? cuz it does not do that. The only thing the NetdumaOS of all forms was designed to do in the geofilter is blocking hosts. You cant control who connects to the game. HOWEVER, I dont see why if this was P2P why we might not be able to have some control over the other players that connect to the lobby. Even at that we would have to be host ourselves.

[CrophiXx]

46 minutes ago, bbursley said:

Are you under the impression that the netduma blocks bad player connections? cuz it does not do that. The only thing the NetdumaOS of all forms was designed to do in the geofilter is blocking hosts. You cant control who connects to the game. HOWEVER, I dont see why if this was P2P why we might not be able to have some control over the other players that connect to the lobby. Even at that we would have to be host ourselves.

I want the netduma to block bad connections. If a player intentionally makes his connection lag, I'd like to have a feature to block the connection to other player AT THE SECOND I recognize him/her lagging or abusing a lagswitch. The Ping Blocker doesn't block that kind of players because they first start lagging AFTER they joined the lobby. I am absolutely aware that this requires me to be host but what if I'd tell you that I am host most of the time (at least in warframe) AND that it would be a good feature for quite a lot of games, even if YOU don't need this feature because you might not be playing the same games.

[Danny80916]

I would love to become a tester hardware or software ! 😁I do like me some netduma routers I have the xr500 and xr700 along with a ton of other netgear routers .

[bbursley]

2 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

I want the netduma to block bad connections. If a player intentionally makes his connection lag, I'd like to have a feature to block the connection to other player AT THE SECOND I recognize him/her lagging or abusing a lagswitch. The Ping Blocker doesn't block that kind of players because they first start lagging AFTER they joined the lobby. I am absolutely aware that this requires me to be host but what if I'd tell you that I am host most of the time (at least in warframe) AND that it would be a good feature for quite a lot of games, even if YOU don't need this feature because you might not be playing the same games.

I dont think players intentionally make their connection bad, I think people just join and then suddenly get LAN traffic congestion that adds extreme delay to their packets causing spikes. Lagging for to long as a result of intentional cause usually boots you from a lobby.

[titofuenla]

On 4/25/2019 at 4:41 PM, Netduma Casey said:

VLan is definitely a useful feature, we plan on adding it in a later version.

With luck and soon... I've been with the R1 for more than 3 years and it's something I've been waiting for a long time.
In the original firmware was the option, but it did not work, I asked the team if I could repair it and they told me that it would be better to wait for DumaOS than to repair it because the team was completely immersed in the development of DumaOS. In the first beta versions that I could participate, if it included the option and the truth, I was glad to see it, although the joy lasted little because it was still broken and then it was eliminated from the following versions, losing all my hope.
I not only ask to eliminate the annoying double Nat because the truth is that with the DMZ is barely perceptible, but also because I can use the R1 neutral router and finally eliminate the damn router from the equation provided by the ISP that is completely garbage and makes my bufferbloat the most unpleasant thing that it can be to play online, besides that they are very blocked so that we can not work with them or do many things.

Greetings and I regret having extended so much, but as I said, they are something more than 3 long years waiting to use this option and using the R1 as neutral, was one of the options to buy it.

Continue this netduma team, you are doing a great job.

😉

[Guest Killhippie]

Are any of the devs going to push Netgear to update their code, so we are not running outdated versions opf OpeneSSL with possible vulnerabilities or minupnd which is still version 1.0 and is over a decade old! I ask about the low lying code on Netgears side because in this day and age being safe online is important the more IoT devices we have. etc As of now now the version of OpenSSL is from December 2017 1.0.2n I believe, and miniupnd is over decade old. There are so many packages Netgear dont update that third party firmware devs like Voxel (he can be found on the smallnetbuilder forum) he does a fork for the R7800 and R9000 using Netgears code with tweaks and updated packages to help with security and performance and general reliability

 Netgear filter ICMP for IPV6 which isn't helpful, most other router manufacturers don't, so this leads me to when will DumaOS actually support IPv6 and will you try and get Netgear to stop filtering ICMP? More ISP's are using IPv6 now (mine, which is IDNet have used it for years) and it would be good if DumaOS was compatible with what is really the future of internet routing.  Also anything in the works for a solution like Asus AiProtection. I know Netgear have Bitdefender Armour (I can't see that coming to the XR500 and its brethren) but DumaOS could have something similar baked in possibly or would put you at odds with Netgear?

Any chance of a guide or a semi automated QoS because hell I have no idea what my printer or Zeppelin wireless speaker should be using bandwidth wise and I don't want to spend hours tweaking it tbh, they certainly don't need an equal share of what's left after antibufferbloat takes its percentage,. so maybe a high, medium or low initial setting for certain devices could be given at set up and of course have it user configurable for those that want to tweak further, rather like the defunct Qualcomm streamboost and better seen in Cake or FQ-CoDel. I know Cake is more CPU intensive so maybe not great to run on older hardware, but something like cake would be really helpful to many I'm sure. We also need more device classifications please, that was also promised but never materialised. and will we get WOL on these routers?

 I know they are gaming routers but some thought needs to be put into the fact they will be used as the households main router, so streaming, NAS functionality etc all need to be looked into and improved, I would love to be able to prioritise devices that use a lot of bandwidth for streaming as well as the small amount for gaming. Also maybe a theme that isn't red, the Asus colour scheme is clear and concise, so something similar would be great. Red looks snazzy for a gaming router which I imagine was part of the thought process behind the colour scheme of both the R1 and later DumaOS Netgear devices, but damn its hard on the eyes at times, and not great for colour-blind people I imagine.

[Fuzy]

Can you tell us more about adding DHCP option. Most players are looking for the best possible connections by turning to Optical Fiber. Not wanting to multiply the different routers, we need these options as well as the vlan to get rid of our ISP box obsolete! I discuss with many members who deserve to turn to DUMAOS because these options are not available vis-à-vis the competition!

[CrophiXx]

13 hours ago, bbursley said:

I dont think players intentionally make their connection bad, I think people just join and then suddenly get LAN traffic congestion that adds extreme delay to their packets causing spikes. Lagging for to long as a result of intentional cause usually boots you from a lobby.

What are you actually here for?? Even if your beliefs were true, and there were no such players who use lagswitches of any kind, I personally don't want anyone start lagging in my lobby after they joined no matter if they cause the lag intentionally or if it's caused by just a slow connection. Lagswitches ARE a real existing problem in games and the R1 has nothing against this at the moment. I'm not sure why you even commented because your posts make you look like someone who has no idea whats going on in a lot of online games. Please if you're just here to tell ppl their suggestions are not worth it, stay away or stick to facts so we can discuss existing problems in online games and how to make the R1 even better. 

You might play different games than I do and even if you don't face problems like this, other people might have them a lot so please let a Dev comment on this and stop spreading your false beliefs just because you might have never seen someone abusing a lagswitch. 

And as I already stated: I know that cutting off a connection to a lagging Player requires me to be host and this is very situational but WHEN I am the host, i'd like to have something at hand that really helps against these guys. 

[bbursley]

3 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

What are you actually here for?? Even if your beliefs were true, and there were no such players who use lagswitches of any kind, I personally don't want anyone start lagging in my lobby after they joined no matter if they cause the lag intentionally or if it's caused by just a slow connection. Lagswitches ARE a real existing problem in games and the R1 has nothing against this at the moment. I'm not sure why you even commented because your posts make you look like someone who has no idea whats going on in a lot of online games. Please if you're just here to tell ppl their suggestions are not worth it, stay away or stick to facts so we can discuss existing problems in online games and how to make the R1 even better. 

You might play different games than I do and even if you don't face problems like this, other people might have them a lot so please let a Dev comment on this and stop spreading your false beliefs just because you might have never seen someone abusing a lagswitch. 

And as I already stated: I know that cutting off a connection to a lagging Player requires me to be host and this is very situational but WHEN I am the host, i'd like to have something at hand that really helps against these guys. 

Well someones getting really offended. Alright if you think thats the case, build your own lagswitch and test it, then come back to this forum and let us now how wrong you were...lol. There is literally ZERO reason why someone would want to induce purposeful lag if they are not the host. Hosts used lag switches beause they gained an advantage over other players by killing them and then unfreezing the game. If another player uses it and they are not host, they get ZERO advantage, in fact as I just stated, they will get disconnected more likely than not. Oh and i have no idea? Buddy let me tell you something. Im 28 years old and I have played my FAIR share of online games, if there really "was" a game that let lag switching be allowed or taken advantage of, then it seems like your gripe is with the developers of that game and not this forum. Go cry somewhere else. Don't attack people just because they are stating the facts. Maybe your connection is just crap and you think people are lag switching. more often than not that's actually the case. you might be able to "add" delay at best, but even that isnt lag switching, and it would have to be constant. In fact, go take buffer bloat off and start streaming while gaming, chances are you'll get your lag you want,  that's most likely exactly what you're seeing. Also, the person may have DSL or really poor and inconsistent routing. I don't need to prove my point, I think you being here in a forum dedicated to getting a better ping proves my point pretty clearly. I have played many games in the pas that have player who started at a 4 bar and then drop down and go back up, did they have an advantage? Nope because their kd at the end was still pretty garbage. 

[bbursley]

3 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

What are you actually here for?? Even if your beliefs were true, and there were no such players who use lagswitches of any kind, I personally don't want anyone start lagging in my lobby after they joined no matter if they cause the lag intentionally or if it's caused by just a slow connection. Lagswitches ARE a real existing problem in games and the R1 has nothing against this at the moment. I'm not sure why you even commented because your posts make you look like someone who has no idea whats going on in a lot of online games. Please if you're just here to tell ppl their suggestions are not worth it, stay away or stick to facts so we can discuss existing problems in online games and how to make the R1 even better. 

You might play different games than I do and even if you don't face problems like this, other people might have them a lot so please let a Dev comment on this and stop spreading your false beliefs just because you might have never seen someone abusing a lagswitch. 

And as I already stated: I know that cutting off a connection to a lagging Player requires me to be host and this is very situational but WHEN I am the host, i'd like to have something at hand that really helps against these guys. 

Also my main point was that your post was wrong, and that you cannot change lagging players connecting to your game. On dedicated servers we have no control over that, and as a p2p match when we don't have host, we don't have control over that. perhaps there would be a way where the router would identify a high latency player and then "drop" all of their packets both ways. So really the feature doesn't work well because more games these days are not player hosts. It would be a waste of time for the team to focus on something like that (at least in this moment) over all the other more important features.

 

[fatal0Efx]

2 hours ago, bbursley said:

There is literally ZERO reason why someone would want to induce purposeful lag if they are not the host. 

I'm sorry but this is not true at all for a number of reasons, the main one I can think of is a concept called Lag Compensation.

Lag compensation was introduced to help counteract the inherent benefits of P2P/Listen Server hosts.  Unfortunately some games had very bad implementations of this that actually benefited people with higher latencies more than the actual host.  Essentially the host was often "penalized" with artificial lag to level the playing field.  That is a crude explanation but basically what happened.  

This was widely an issue in several CoD games in the past (maybe even still today, I don't play so I don't know), as well as Destiny 1.  Many users, including myself (as much as I hate to admit), used to throttle our upload/download speeds and try to introduce artificial lag on my home network, to avoid gaining host in these games, because we'd have a much better experience than if we were host.  With that said, this conversation is essentially moot. 

23 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

I want the netduma to block bad connections. If a player intentionally makes his connection lag, I'd like to have a feature to block the connection to other player AT THE SECOND I recognize him/her lagging or abusing a lagswitch. The Ping Blocker doesn't block that kind of players because they first start lagging AFTER they joined the lobby. I am absolutely aware that this requires me to be host but what if I'd tell you that I am host most of the time (at least in warframe) AND that it would be a good feature for quite a lot of games, even if YOU don't need this feature because you might not be playing the same games.

What you are asking NetDuma to do is actively boot people out of an active game session.  That would be nearly no different than DDOSing someone so they would lag out of the game and you win, which is rampant on P2P games these days, see Destiny 1 and 2 competitive matches.

Ultimately NetDuma only attempts to prevent bad connections from getting together.  It will NEVER negatively affect a gaming session in progress.  Doing so would be against the TOS of just about every game there is.  

 

[bbursley]

2 hours ago, fatal0Efx said:

I'm sorry but this is not true at all for a number of reasons, the main one I can think of is a concept called Lag Compensation.

Lag compensation was introduced to help counteract the inherent benefits of P2P/Listen Server hosts.  Unfortunately some games had very bad implementations of this that actually benefited people with higher latencies more than the actual host.  Essentially the host was often "penalized" with artificial lag to level the playing field.  That is a crude explanation but basically what happened.  

This was widely an issue in several CoD games in the past (maybe even still today, I don't play so I don't know), as well as Destiny 1.  Many users, including myself (as much as I hate to admit), used to throttle our upload/download speeds and try to introduce artificial lag on my home network, to avoid gaining host in these games, because we'd have a much better experience than if we were host.  With that said, this conversation is essentially moot. 

23 hours ago, CrophiXx said:

I want the netduma to block bad connections. If a player intentionally makes his connection lag, I'd like to have a feature to block the connection to other player AT THE SECOND I recognize him/her lagging or abusing a lagswitch. The Ping Blocker doesn't block that kind of players because they first start lagging AFTER they joined the lobby. I am absolutely aware that this requires me to be host but what if I'd tell you that I am host most of the time (at least in warframe) AND that it would be a good feature for quite a lot of games, even if YOU don't need this feature because you might not be playing the same games.

What you are asking NetDuma to do is actively boot people out of an active game session.  That would be nearly no different than DDOSing someone so they would lag out of the game and you win, which is rampant on P2P games these days, see Destiny 1 and 2 competitive matches.

Ultimately NetDuma only attempts to prevent bad connections from getting together.  It will NEVER negatively affect a gaming session in progress.  Doing so would be against the TOS of just about every game there is.  

 

Throttling is a joke, it does not do anything to help a player by any means. Lag compensation is when a game interpolates your position and actions in a game, that doesn’t mean it necessarily gives players an advantage to lag switch, lag switches actually cut off your connection so you are sorely misinformed hence the name “switch”. Lag compensation is something that has been in games regardless of peer to peer or dedicated servers, so idk where you got that information. Yes players can artificially delay their packets, but there is almost no sense in doing that these days when all you have to do is take your geofilter and place it somewhere else (your position). So queing packets and lag switching are not even entirely the same. If all this nonsense was so true, then why is it that players with fiber optic internet are destroying people without it? So perhaps queuing may help, but they have already stated that is considered part of that addition. Again lagswitch-cuts off connection, queuing, holds packets but does not cut it off entirely. Lag switching was advantageous in peer to peer because hosts could stop all players on the map and then kill them, making you virtually invincible. Since you are the console determining decisions, then you are right and the player is not. That’s why we have changes in lag compensation and more use of dedicated servers or listen servers because of these issues, it makes it easier to cheat. So no it’s not moot, the point still stands that you can’t block people with bad connections, because you said it yourself, it’s like ddosing a player, EXECEPTION being that you are the host and your router can cleverly cut their communication off to you entirely. That’s actually lag switching, but only to one specific player. 

[Netduma Fraser]

Alright guys, if you're going to have a discussion please do it elsewhere. This is a Q&A topic. If you have a question then please ask.

[bbursley]

Actually the Netduma can negatively affect player experiences. 

1. It can force bad connections (like DSL) to connected to dedicated servers. 

2. It can connect player from regions to other regions which now causes them lag as a result of lag compensation.

3. If every gamer out there had a Netduma and did what they wanted versus what the servers and netcode wanted. What a mess that would be, and to be quite frank, that’s what we’re heading towards. There’s no possible way that every person having a geofiltering router is going to create a positive benefit for everyone in the long run. People are effectively altering the natural way the connections are made. So when a group of people from France wanna come over to the USA and have 2 bar connections and lag the hell out of us. Who really benefits from that? Especially when we are using dedicated servers and have no control over it. I think it’s gonna get to a point where geofiltering is gonna be detectable because servers are going to change and start dropping people who continue to drop multiple requests. Then what do we do?

[DAKOTADOCKALL]

I think iv asked this before but could there be a feature in the future to wheere you can have a button you press in the QOS that automatically does a speed test and sets that in for the sliders could be useful.  

[purpleandgold33]

I posted this a long time ago and Jack thought it was a good idea and he said he was going to bring it up to you guys. So here's my post and suggestion. Can we get this soon please?!! 

Duma needs a temp ban feature that actually works. How you work it is you'll have the option to ban for say like 1 hour or multiple hours or 24 hrs. I don;t know about anyone else but in bo4 I pretty much play on ping assist and connect to all of the servers around 30ms. But that doesn't mean its a good server cause low ping, obviously. So sometimes for say like chicago server is playing like crap but yesterday it played great. Well, 24 hr ban or whatever. Cod ww2 chicago for me played like absolute garbage. Unplayable always. So permanent ban then. This feature is so important that it should've been done yesterday! 

[Zennon]

3 hours ago, purpleandgold33 said:

I posted this a long time ago and Jack thought it was a good idea and he said he was going to bring it up to you guys. So here's my post and suggestion. Can we get this soon please?!! 

Duma needs a temp ban feature that actually works. How you work it is you'll have the option to ban for say like 1 hour or multiple hours or 24 hrs. I don;t know about anyone else but in bo4 I pretty much play on ping assist and connect to all of the servers around 30ms. But that doesn't mean its a good server cause low ping, obviously. So sometimes for say like chicago server is playing like crap but yesterday it played great. Well, 24 hr ban or whatever. Cod ww2 chicago for me played like absolute garbage. Unplayable always. So permanent ban then. This feature is so important that it should've been done yesterday! 

To add to your suggestion.

Temp ban only ban's one IP from a bank of possible hundreds in a server bank. to ban the whole server it would need a wild card system to look something like this 35.566.*.*

[Guest Killhippie]

On 4/30/2019 at 10:40 PM, DAKOTADOCKALL said:

I think iv asked this before but could there be a feature in the future to wheere you can have a button you press in the QOS that automatically does a speed test and sets that in for the sliders could be useful.  

Yes please oh please can we have a speed test button in the GUI that's been promised for so long and has never materialised, also any chance of being able to update DumaOS though Netgear without netgears layer needing updating. The sparse updates from Netgear and lack of bug patches from Netduma is a bit tedious. Also more testing on Macs please, I just found out NTGR were testing the router on El Capitan, thats five years old, and new macs have a completely new file system, called APFS. HFS+ is out the window, also testing with safari 10 isn't helpful when we are on 12.1! Netduma need to talk with Netgear otherwise these routers are just going to be as buggy and as insecure as other Netgear routers and DumaOS may be also buggy due to Netgears lack of due diligence updating their outdated  code, just a thought.