Question Some games are getting constantly disconnected, is it because of the physical firewall ?

[Infiltrat0r]

So my firm has a physical firewall, and we play several games - some of which are fine - while others keep getting disconnects every 5-10 minutes. It occurs on every computer, and only for those specific games, so my eyes are set on the physical firewall, probably something to do with ports, but I am not sure what.

Anyone else had this kind of problem? What can be done here?

 

[bill001g]

Hard to say for sure since games are not the same. In addition some games have a lot more trouble when multiple machines play the same game even behind a home router without a firewall.

If it was some firewall issue it would be some issue with a temporary rules timing out. Only way to know what is going on is to be able to look at the logs in the firewall and see what is happening. You may have to add some more logging to be sure that the firewall puts out a message when something happens.

If you have no access the firewall then you need to talk to the person that does or use your own network connection like your cell phone that does not need to pass the firewall.

 

[Infiltrat0r]

Thanks for the quick response. I have access to the firewall, its a fortinet physical firewall. Some games constantly being disconnected, others have no problem at all. It's either-or, there's no inbetween.

I'll try to see whats being logged.

 

[bill001g]

You are likely looking for UDP session issues. UDP unlike TCP does not have messages that indicate that there is a open session and it is active. Firewall might be timing out UDP because of lack of traffic.

 

[Infiltrat0r]

I don't have much of an idea what am I supposed to do. I haven't seen any settings for UDP, but maybe Im not looking at the correct submenu - most of them have TCP settings.

I enabled "games" and unkown apps here just in case but nothing changed.

 

[bill001g]

Knowing the details of a commercial firewall or even some of the better free ones is something people are paid big money for. It is something that take quite a bit of time to learn. You would have to be lucky to have a expert on your firewall on this forum that mostly is home users with simplistic setups.

Years ago I knew all about cisco firewalls but you forget after you retire and no longer use the knowledge.

All I can suggest is there has to be a log someplace. Many firewall you can set to log pretty much every single packet coming or going to a machine...you just set it to log the packets rather than discard or block them. You should with the time stamps on the packets be able to match up around the time you saw the issue on your pc.

Games can be tricky because they have multiple session open to multiple servers. This is generally not documented at all because the idiot children that play some games would use it to attack the servers when they lose a game. In addition the actual data is encrypted so you can not really tell what is being sent. You should though after looking at enough data be able to tell the difference between the data flow when it is working correctly and when it fails.

 

[Infiltrat0r]

Understood, thank you very much for the help dude.