[SOLVED] Online game disconnected from the router after an hour ?

[issac.21597]

I play Star Citizen and the would disconnect and booted to desktop saying "Session has expired" after exactly one hour and keep happening with series of play through. I know it's not the problem with my PC or the game because it didn't happen when I play with the mobile data. The router is from Huawei. HS8545M5. It only happen to this game, I can play other online games fine.

I changed my DHCP to static and it didn't work. I don't know what to do anymore.

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

Star citizen is a mess, if you are gaming for a whole hour be thankful you can play for an hour at a clip.

 

[Ralston18]

Change your computer back to DHCP. Allow the router to provide IP addresses assignments.

Make and model router?

The router's logs (if available and enabled) may provide some clue as to what is happening.

Who has full admin rights to the router? You will need help from that person.

 

[issac.21597]

I have the logs but don't know what to look for. I have the exect timeline of what happened though. Between 19:14 and 20:14. Exactly one hour of playing.

 

[Ralston18]

What to look for: there should be some entry that explains or states what happened at 20:14.

Take another look at the router's logs. Try to capture a screen shot of the log entries between 19:14 and 20:14 if possible.

Otherwise just capture between 20:10 and 20:16 for example.

Post your screen shot here using imgur (www.imgur.com).

 

[issac.21597]

....Deleted....

 

[issac.21597]

This is the Debug Log.

2021-07-10 19:07:04 [Debug][Debug-Log] static:[dhcpd]send Ack, xid[c8b6a23d], mac[8c🇧🇪be:05:a2:e4], request serverip[192.168.100.1], yourip[192.168.100.68], dns1[192.168.100.1]

2021-07-10 19:26:10 [Debug][Debug-Log] static:[dhcpd]send Ack, xid[844ec7db], mac[1c🇧🇫ce:30:28:db], request serverip[192.168.100.1], yourip[192.168.100.182], dns1[192.168.100.1]

2021-07-10 19:26:11 [Debug][Debug-Log] static:[dhcp6s] terminal device mac[]

2021-07-10 20:27:11 [Debug][Debug-Log] static:[dhcpd]receive Discover, xid[8db50533], mac[00:08:22:d6:0a:fc], option60[android-dhcp-6.0]

2021-07-10 20:27:11 [Critical][Debug-Log] static:[dhcpd]xid[8db50533] choose [main] address pool

2021-07-10 20:27:13 [Debug][Debug-Log] static:[dhcpd]send Ack, xid[8db50533], mac[00:08:22:d6:0a:fc], request serverip[192.168.100.1], yourip[192.168.100.125], dns1[192.168.100.1]

 

[bill001g]

I assume those logs are from the router ?. EAPOL messages are related to wifi sessions. Is your pc connected via wifi or ethernet. Does it do the same thing on ethernet. The only disconnect in the log is one that is requested by the end device and it may not even be your pc.

This is rather confusing since there are multiple devices..ie mac addresses... in both these logs. Nothing really stands out as a problem though.

How much testing have you done with other games. If you leave a constant ping run to your router IP does that take packet loss when your game crashes.

A actual network issue should effect more than 1 game. When it is only 1 game you tend to blame the game.

So a option if you are willing to spend some time is to use wireshark and capture all the traffic. You need to watch it run when things are good and then when it breaks in the game quickly stop wireshark so the buffer does not get overwritten. This is going to be rather challenging for someone who has not actually watch data sessions before. Maybe you get lucky and wireshark will see the issue and flag the packets. What you need to attempt to find out is does the server just all the sudden close the session or are you getting transmission errors on your side before it does it. Then again I can't see errors happening on a specific time interval.

If it is something like DHCP timeouts those tend to be very clear and wireshark does a good job of decoding them. You have to look for it though, wireshark is like drinking from a firehose there is a lot of data. There are ways to filter traffic but that is going to take time to learn also.

 

[issac.21597]

Yes the pc is connected via Wi-Fi. I know that the problem is with the router because I played the game with the mobile data and it work just fine. The ip that end with 182 and mac 1C/DB is my pc.

Maybe the way the game server work doesn't like my router.

 

[bill001g]

Nothing real interesting for you mac you see it associate successfully with the router and not much else.

How would the router possibly know what game you are playing. All it sees is data streams to IP addresses. Unless you configured some firewall or qos stuff the router just blinding sends traffic to the remote IP. It really doesn't have any way to know what that IP is actually doing.

If you think it is the router try a firmware upgrade. The only think I can think of is it is has some bug that is timing a session out. The router keeps a table of sessions in a NAT table. For UDP session it sets a timer to remove it but as long as it sees any data it will reset the timer. TCP sessions are removed as soon as it seen FIN messages.
This is not very likely, this timeout method is done by every router in existence so the code is very well known but I suppose someone might have messed up. You can not change or even see this stuff in most routers.

 

[issac.21597]

The thing is I got completly log out of the game every time it happened at exactly one hour mark, I can even set a timer at it. I'll try using the wireshark and see what comes up.

 

[issac.21597]

I did the wireshark thing and there's a lot of information came out. 3600s range. I will give the last few minutes.

 

[bill001g]

Do you know which IP are doing what. If the 54.230.x.x and 3.237.x.x are cloudflare and amazon. Both very large hosting services they may or may not even be the game related if you have other stuff open.

Most game traffic uses UDP so I would think that is the 3.237.194.214.

Now there might be a control/authentication session on tcp. This is why game stuff is so hard there is no documentation on what they are doing.

So if we look at the highlighted session even though it is red a session reset packet is valid in this case.

Now their might be something just before this that would be interesting BUT it is still a application issue.

What you see is FIN acknowledgement packets. This means there was likely a fin packet send not long before this. My guess is your client...ie the game program on your machine...send the FIN packet. There Encrypted alert is also a indication of a closing session.

These messages are all send by the application to cleanly close the session. There is no way to say why the application closed the session, it is all encrypted. I mean you would see the same thing if you told the client to log out. It can also be something strange in the way data is being cached at a hosting service but there is no way for a end user to know anything. Hosting services make things even more complex to figure out.

So this does not tell you much. There is no network issue all the communications is fine. The server and the client are sending messages back and forth to each other. A FIN packet is clean session close, you can think of it as a logoff on your computer rather than just turning the power off.

A actual network problem you would see thing like duplicate packet messages or RST messages that happen with no FIN or other message near them. Lets say you unplugged the internet cable from your modem but left it powered on you would see your machine send the same packet over and over becuase it got no acknoledgement of data reception. At some point it would get a bunch of RST packets because it gave up and assume the session was down.

 

[issac.21597]

So the problem is with the game? Playing with mobile data seem fine. Guess I have to reinstall it and see if it work.

 

[bill001g]

It would be nice if the game companies were more helpful. They have all kinds of dignostic tools. The game has a fairly good idea what type of errors occur. They either have this stuff disabled and/or they will not let players see it. I know some games had testing tools but the hackers used them to cheat on those games.

 

[issac.21597]

Found this in the game log. Don't know what it means.

<2021-07-10T12:35:31.687Z> [CSessionManager::RequestFrontEnd] Started - RequestFrontEndReason="OnLobbyPostGameUnload"!

<2021-07-10T12:35:31.687Z> [CGlobalGameUI::OpenLoadingScreen] Started

<2021-07-10T12:35:31.687Z> [CGlobalGameUI::OpenLoadingScreen] Request context transition to LoadingScreenView

<2021-07-10T12:35:31.692Z> [>] data

<2021-07-10T12:35:31.707Z> [CSessionManager::RequestFrontEndImpl] frame[289047] : RestoreLocalSession not restored during async-game-shutdown. Returning to FrontEnd after session tasks complete - SessionId[2147484171]

<2021-07-10T12:35:35.311Z> [<] data

 

[bill001g]

This is a question for tech support at the game company.

 

[issac.21597]

This is a question for tech support at the game company.

Oh well, thanks for the adivce. I'm truly appreciate it.