[FrancesHinden]

Our house has 3 PCs connected to the internet, all via the same router, two with a wireless connection and one with a network cable.

Yesterday my husband and I were playing on BBO, he from one of the wireless pcs, and I from the one with the network cable. Suddenly both my LHO and I got a red dot, and then I disconnected. I got an ongoing message saying "Connection Lost, Reconnecting..." then a pause while it started logging on again, then the screen flashed slightly as if it had lost connection again, and it said "connection lost, Reconnecting..." again. While this was going on

- My internet connection remained live
- My husband's connection remained working perfectly

I then changed to the other wireless pc, and had exactly the same problem. So three computers, all at the same IP address, all with working internet access, yet only one of them could maintain a connection to BBO.

After a couple of minutes I was allowed to log back on. Is this a BBO problem?

My LHO was able to rejoin at approximately the same time. He's had disconnection problems before (about once per 50 boards or so) but I always just thought it was his broadband connection.

[helene_t]

If you are sattisfied with the BBO-TV functionality (playing/kibbitizing the main room, or watching vugraph), you can probably solve this problem by using bbo-tv on one of the computers.

[FrancesHinden]

I need to be able to reserve seats, or to be able to go to a table with a seat reserved for me.

[hrothgar]

Hi Frances

There are a couple possible explanations:

1. Your ISP might be playing silly load balancing games. Some ISPs like to play God and try to optimizing their networks. They perform stateful inspection of packets and do all sorts of weird stuff. Its possible that the TCP connection that Jeffrey was using was treated differently by the ISP than the TCP connection that you were using.

2. As I understand matters, BBO uses an application level timeout to disconnect users from the site. Unfortunately, this means that Fred and Uday are the only ones who can make a meaningful comment about what prompted the original disconnect.

Once you've been disconnected, life gets a bit more complicated: When you go an initiate a new connection the BBO server downloads a lot of data to the client.

I've argued in the past that this wasn't a very good design choice. Lets assume that the network is experiencing some performance issues: The last thing in the world that you want is a positive feedback loop in which

Network saturation causes a disconnect
the disconnect forces a reconnection
the reconnection causes an increase in the volume of traffic

You might have fallen victim to this type of issue... One of the PCs is plugging along happily throwing a few bits back and forth every once and a while. Once your PC had disconnected it needed to receive a lot of data before it was able to do anything.

[downagain]

Happened to me as well yesterday evening. Internet was still running, but couldn't connect to the bbo-server.

[FrancesHinden]

hrothgar, on Sep 25 2007, 12:44 PM, said:

1. Your ISP might be playing silly load balancing games. Some ISPs like to play God and try to optimizing their networks. They perform stateful inspection of packets and do all sorts of weird stuff. Its possible that the TCP connection that Jeffrey was using was treated differently by the ISP than the TCP connection that you were using.

Sorry to sound stupid, but I thought it was all the same TCP connection: we have one connection to our ISP via the router, I thought as far as the ISP was concerned it doesn't know or care how many computers etc are logged on. We certainly have only one externally visible TCP/IP address

[uday]

When you connect to bbo, you actually connect to any of a handful of machines. These days, you connect to any of a half-dozen or so IP addresses, which are on a handful of different machines.

It is possible that the two of you were connected to different machines at BBO (and the connection to one (or the BBO machine itself) was acting up while the other was not). It is possible that something about the two connections (eg. MTU size) is different enough that one was disconnected by some machine along the way the other was not.

We have a couple of timeouts in bbo. Idle timeouts are usually very slow to act, and offer you a warning dialog box before they boot you. The server aggressively boots people whose connections seem to be stuck.


As an aside: around 17:00 eastern time yesterday, we lost about 3000 users in 1 minute when one of the big incoming network hiccuped. When this sort of mass boot happens, the servers limit the rate at which new users can reconnect ( to protect the people who are already connected) and you get into that 'reconnecting - failed - reconnecting' dance while the servers sort it all out.

[FrancesHinden]

It was at about 1700 Eastern time yesterday (2200 BST) which I guess answers that.

[hrothgar]

FrancesHinden, on Sep 25 2007, 03:21 PM, said:

hrothgar, on Sep 25 2007, 12:44 PM, said:

1.  Your ISP might be playing silly load balancing games.  Some ISPs like to play God and try to optimizing their networks.  They perform stateful inspection of packets and do all sorts of weird stuff.  Its possible that the TCP connection that Jeffrey was using was treated differently by the ISP than the TCP connection that you were using.

Sorry to sound stupid, but I thought it was all the same TCP connection: we have one connection to our ISP via the router, I thought as far as the ISP was concerned it doesn't know or care how many computers etc are logged on. We certainly have only one externally visible TCP/IP address

Hi Frances:

From the sounds of things, you have a number of different PCs that all link into the same gateway. That gateway is (probably) providing whats known as Network Address Translation (NAT). This means that all your home PCs have their own IP address (Probably starting with 192) that they use to communicate with the NAT box. The NAT box keeps track of all these communication while presenting a single distinct IP address to the outside world.

TCP connections ride on top of the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP provides a number of distinct services that developers need to build complex applications. TCP provides

process identification
reliable data transmission
flow control
congestion avoidence

In many cases, a single application will use multiple tcp connections. For example, when you download a web page, most web browsers will use a separate tcp connection for each image.

Ideally, this level of detail should be completely transparent to the end users...

[helene_t]

hrothgar, on Sep 25 2007, 04:24 PM, said:

Ideally, this level of detail should be completely transparent to the end users...

Like "Your computer crashed but you don't have to worry about why"

[bid_em_up]

FrancesHinden, on Sep 25 2007, 06:21 AM, said:

I need to be able to reserve seats, or to be able to go to a table with a seat reserved for me.

You should be able to do this in BBO TV now.

Although the wording is not intuitive, select "I want to play in a pickup game", there you have the options available to enter your partner and your opponents names.