Rum Servers

The Rum site just recently went through some major changes. On February 19, our ISP moved to a new location in downtown Atlanta. They are now in the same building as the Network Operation Center for their uplink, Cable and Wireless. That means that serveral router hops to the Rum server have been eliminated. That would appear to be good news and the elimination of the extra hops should improve response time and latency to the Rum servers. Unfortunately it seemed to have the opposite effect and packet loss and latency to the server started to deteriorate right after the move until the servers were virtually unplayable. In addition to that, periodic freezes have been occuring where all communication to the servers stops for up to a minute. I have been working with our ISP to identify the cause of the problem but it is a time consuming process. We suspect the hellish cw.net router bordercore4.Atlanta.cw.net as the source of all our misery and have reported the problem to C&W. Cable and Wireless doesn't want to acknowledge there is a problem which leaves us with the task of providing proof positive that the router is faulty which we are currently working on. If you'd like to help, do a tracert to the server while you are experiencing lockups or excessive lag and email the output to us at [email protected]. It would be very helpful to also have three pings. One to the source of the latency and one to the hop before and after.

The good news is for now the lag seems to have disappeared and server response is better than it was even before the move. Packet loss is still higher than it should be but much less than before and it does not seem to be causing a problem. boardercore4 is a huge Cisco router with multiple modules. I think C&W has long been aware that this router is a problem even though they refuse to acknowledge it. I suspect they have been replacing some of the modules in the router, probably as a result of our complaint, and that is why performance is better.

One final bit of news concerning the servers... We will soon be adding a second server machine and moving the Quake servers to it. This new machine is a Risc based processor and is serveral times more powerful than the current server. This machine can easily handle more than five completely full Quake servers so there will never be server lag again once we make this change.