Originally Posted by
Mizukaru
so How am I going to be able to find what exactly wave broadband is using and tell them to stop using it? That seems pretty impossible seeing how most of their support members are booklet drones.
or list of providers that will work with FF14, when i move to a new apartment in 3 months
Best way to get them involved is to submit traces to your servers showing signs of potential congestion/packet loss along your route. Ideally, you would want some to other services as well if you can--provides more compelling evidence of a problem to help nudge them into taking action. While a tracert isn't evidence in and of itself because of how it works (it pings each hop in your route a few times, whereas your game data just gets forwarded from hop to hop), it provides a roadmap of where your data is going and can point out where certain segments are enforcing clampdowns due to congestion or otherwise suffering other problems. It's more like a test for smoke... that leads them to where to look for fire.
To generate a trace, you will need either the URL (like www.google.com), or the actual IP address. To get the address for your server, you can open Resource Monitor (just type the command "resmon", no quotes, in your Run or Search box and hiting the Enter key) and then log fully into the game. While in game, alt-tab back to ResMon and expand one of the Network/TCP related categories and look for the connection that ffxiv.exe is using. The Canadian connection will have an IP starting with 199, the Japanese one will start with 124. Once you have tat information, you can run a trace.
The process of running a trace is actually pretty easy, but some are not comfortable with it... I get that. But if you've gone through the process of getting the actual server IP, you technically should be able to stop there and just give that IP address to your ISP's Tier3 guys. They <should> be capable of terminaling in to either your modem or your headend closest to your modem and generating their own reports from there for testing. Mileage can vary though, and you may need to actually do the legwork of running a trace and emailing it to them to get them off their duffs.
Windows has it's own tool built in to run a trace, so you don't really need to get a third-party tool (although, they can give a lot of information, a simple tracert should be enough to peak their interest... it's a very common tool still used in IT). Open a command prompt. You can do this by typing the command "cmd" (again, no quotes) in your Search/Run box and hitting the Enter key. This should pull up a window for entering text commands. Typically it has a black background with white text. Formatted something like this:
Code:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.2.9200]
(c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\System32>
Before continuing, you may want to drag the window's width a little wider to avoid some of the wrap around text... can make the results look a little scrambled sometimes. Drag a corner of the window and just drag it like you would normally to resize a window. You can make all future command prompts wider by changing the default width. Click the black box icon up in the upper left corner of the window and select Defaults, then enter a new width value for the window size and click the "OK" button. Typically a value of 100 is enough to avoid the wrap around. Anywho... back to the how-to:
Your cursor should be blinking at you, waiting for a command. Make sure your focus is in the window (just click anywhere in the window), and type the "tracert" command, a space, then either the URL or the IP address you want to trace, and press the Enter key. Something like this:
tracert www.google.com
or
tracert 199.91.189.31
It will start pinging each hop along your route 3 times, and list the response times for each ping along with the name of the router/server as well as it's ISP. When done, it should look something like this:
Code:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.2.9200]
(c) 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\System32>tracert www.google.com
Tracing route to www.google.com [74.125.131.105]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms LPTSRV [10.10.100.1]
2 34 ms 20 ms 26 ms cpe-098-025-064-001.sc.res.rr.com [98.25.64.1]
3 13 ms 12 ms 10 ms cpe-024-031-198-005.sc.res.rr.com [24.31.198.5]
4 27 ms 28 ms 26 ms 24.93.64.124
5 33 ms 35 ms 30 ms 107.14.19.20
6 31 ms 31 ms 30 ms ae-0-0.pr0.dca20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.183]
7 29 ms 30 ms 61 ms 74.125.49.181
8 30 ms 46 ms 32 ms 209.85.252.46
9 32 ms 30 ms 30 ms 72.14.236.148
10 41 ms 44 ms 49 ms 72.14.234.168
11 43 ms 45 ms 43 ms 209.85.251.228
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 44 ms 43 ms 43 ms vc-in-f105.1e100.net [74.125.131.105]
Trace complete.
C:\Windows\System32>
When you see a * result like that for a response time, that means the ping timed out (took longer than about 3 seconds to respond... or didn't respond at all). When you see it with 3 stars like it did at hop 12, it isn't necessarily a cause for concern. Some routers will have a rule to flat out not respond to this specific type of test. What is of concern though is if that same router responds sometimes, but not at others (like you get a time/*/time response, or you ping it once and get * * * then ping it again and it responds). That is basically what you are looking for--erratic behavior.
Now, by erratic, I don't mean the slight variances you see at each line. It's going to fluctuate a little. The red flags are the intermittent timeouts, and a large difference in response times... like a swing from 30ms to 90ms, then back to 35 on the same line. Sometimes it's really out there... like 25 to 1500 than down to 90. If you start seeing swings where it varies by more than 50% between the best and last times, there may be something going on there. You will want to run a couple traces to compare them... you may find it looks good, then it looks bad, then it looks good again. These are the kinds of things that need to be brought to their attention---something is causing communication to bog down periodically, and it may at times cause data to get dropped and be retransmited. This can bring about the rubberbanding/lagged responses if it is happening enough to get you flagged for slow start in the TCP/IP protocol, and under extreme conditions it can cause disconnnections.
Now that you have been able to sniff out some potential problems... how do you get that lovely data to you ISP? Email is a great tool. Some will even let you paste it directly into a chat window if your contact is that way. But, you need to get it into the clipboard to do that. You can right-click anywhere in that window and a menu will pop up. Click the option to "Select all", and it will highlight all text on screen and within the buffer (it buffers a good bit of text that has rolled off the screen). Now, just press the Enter key and it copies all that text to the clipboard. Now you can just paste it into any text editor, email, chat window, etc. like you normally would (either that program's Paste option from the edit menu, or the Windows shortcut combination of CTRL-V).
Now, if you find you are doing this often, there is a way to just run the trace directly into a text file. It's basically done through the same process, but you append switches to make it dump the results into a text file instead of showing them on screen. You can save the commands into a .bat file that you can just run when you want, and it will dump it all into a .txt file that you can copy out of, or just email the whole thing. I'll put a sample up here that you can use for a guide, edit it as you see fit:
Code:
ECHO OFF
CLS
ECHO. >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT
ECHO %time% %date% >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT
ECHO Tracing path to 199.91.189.31
TRACERT 199.91.189.31 1>>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT
ECHO Traces/Pings Complete
ECHO. >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT
pause
start c:\WUTEMP\NETSTATS\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT
Just open Notepad, copy that text in, then save it to your desktop or other convenient location as a .bat file. Make sure to open the File menu and click "Save As...", then change the file type to "All files (*.*)" under the file name field, and give it a name ending in .bat (like FFXIV_Trace.bat). Depending on your environment settings, it may save it as FFXIV_Trace.bat.txt if you don't change it to "All Files", and then it won't recognize it as an executable file and will just open it in notepad when you run it.
This is basically what the batch file is doing:
ECHO OFF turns off the echoing of typed text, keeps the screen from getting cluttered
CLS clears the screen
ECHO. >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT inserts a blank line into the file FFXIV_TRACE.TXT, which is created or saved in the folder path C:\WUTEMP\Netstats.. edit the path and file name to whatever you like
ECHO %time% %date% >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT adds the current time and date to the start of te trace log
ECHO Tracing path to 199.91.189.31 this is just a notice that will show on your screen... if you trace a different IP, it will still show this one if you don't edit it. This is just there to remind me, in case I forget to update it if my IP changes so I know I need to update the file.
TRACERT 199.91.189.31 1>>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT this is calling the trace just like you normally would do in a command prompt, but it is redirecting the output instead to he text file
ECHO Traces/Pings Complete just another notice that shows up on your screen to let you know the trace completed. Did this since all output is sent to the text file--you don't see the results on screen
ECHO. >>C:\WUTEMP\Netstats\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT just inserting a blank line at the end of the session. Add the blank lines at start/end because it will append the results each time it is run. So if you run it twice, you get two traces, each with a time/date stamp, with a few blank lines between them
pause just pauses the script, and asks you to press any key before continuing. Did this because I will sometimes run this while in game, and the next line would cause the game to loose focus
start c:\WUTEMP\NETSTATS\FFXIV_TRACE.TXT this is a call to open the log file so you can review the results. After doing this, the command window will close on it's own
Alright! think this may be setting a record for a wall of text. Note that the folder path and the name of the text file are listed with a lot of commands. You will need to edit them each to keep it all together, or you will get weird results. May be easier to just create a WUTEMP folder at the root of your C: drive, and then add a NETSTATS folder inside that. The first time you run the script it will create the new text file, and each time you run it it will append the results to the same folder. If you want to archive the logs, just change the name of the log file (I just change it to the date it was run), and then it will just create a new file the next time you run it.
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