Hi,
We are running a small-ish LAN event in Toronto where we have to use a single IP address to NAT between 250-350 players. I have been made aware of possible issues with different services like Steam, Origin and Twitch who can run into issues when a large number of connections seem to originate from a single IP address. I just wanted to poke the list to see if anyone can chime him on their experiences with NATing customers and the impact it might have on public services. I am usually using public IP address space for players when designing most large LAN events. Dealing with NAT for a medium-ish amount of customers is not something I am used to do.
It feels silly to worry about that when you assume that WISP sometimes(mostly?) use CGN when providing internet to customers. The same could be said of most large office buildings around the world.
I appreciate any input on the matter!
Thanks
Laurent
You can always bring up an HE IPv6 tunnel and hand out public IPs that way.
Hey Laurent,
Hi,
We are running a small-ish LAN event in Toronto where we have to use a
single IP address to NAT between 250-350 players. I have been made aware of
possible issues with different services like Steam, Origin and Twitch who
can run into issues when a large number of connections seem to originate
from a single IP address. I just wanted to poke the list to see if anyone
can chime him on their experiences with NATing customers and the impact it
might have on public services. I am usually using public IP address space
for players when designing most large LAN events. Dealing with NAT for a
medium-ish amount of customers is not something I am used to do.
My $Dayjob run big LAN party events in the UK. We mostly run public v4/v6
to players for the issues you identified, however we have previously NATed
our exhibitions and selected chunks of machines for various reasons and
have never really come across any issues. I would say that the most I have
NATed is around 50 machines, so I can't say for certain that 250-300 will
be OK, but in my experience I've not seen any issues with Steam / Origin.
Things I would watch out for are specific games, things like LOL and
Runescape tend to have their own numbers of players per public v4.
Is it only a single IP you have? If you could get any more you could NAT
overload chunks of people to different IP addresses limiting your login
pool size?
The main issue we see with these big CDN services is bandwidth - lots of
people getting to the LAN and updating all their games! Not sure how much
you struggle with this, but if you do, check out -
GitHub - multiplay/lancache: Dynamically Cache Game Installs at LAN’s using Nginx.
Hope this helps!
Tom
Hi Laurent,
We regularly have people run 50-150 person events with everyone sharing a
single external IP and have minimal issues. Our biggest events are League of
Legends tournaments and I believe those are streamed on Twitch. I don't
think you are going to have a problem, but feel free to hit me up for ideas
if you do run into issues.
Matt Freitag
Network Engineer I
Information Technology
Michigan Technological University
(906) 487-3696
http://www.mtu.edu/
http://www.it.mtu.edu/
I do the network for a few lan parties. Last year we had 400+ people on 3 IPs and didn't have any issues. I don't think those services are that picky anymore since the rise of CGN.
Just a side thing, but my advice is to look into setting up a lancache server for Steam.
It really depends on how stupid the nat device is. If the mappings are
global you're looking at about 200 per user, if they aren't you're no
where near an issue.
Either way you're likely fine unless everyone tries to torrent at once