nailbat.us

Big wall of blue text about the new latency meters and network performance foo. Kinda relevant for that night recently when we saw an internet backbone router in LA die.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/217 ... ort-Comics

Some things to take from that:
Probably the biggest factor that we have some control over is the home router/firewall. I've had firmware updates do wonderful things to my connection. It is also, however, a good way to brick your router device if you do it haphazardly.

The next most important factor (that there's indirect control of) is the ISP connection. I'm not saying about changing ISPs, I mean checking the health of the connection I have. I had diagnosed that something went bad with my cable modem that capped my download speed to 4 Mbps, rather than the 20 Mbps I had gotten a month before. I used a number of tests via http://www.speedtest.net to determine that, and patiently got the ISP tech to test the same from my place, and replace the modem. (Or they could have found an issue in their office, too.)

An interesting side note from that post:

*As of July 2010, the 'official' definition of Broadband Internet (per the FCC) is '4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream'. Anything lower than this is not 'officially' broadband.

This means most ADSL connections are not broadband by that definition. Even though I get 5ish Mbps downstream (enough to watch HD streaming), my upstream is capped under 1Mbps.

Oh, the other interesting piece of the wall of blue text was how they have something to reduce latency in instances/raids, but it requires 3x the bandwidth. I am looking forward to when they can turn that on again.

This will all become pretty much irrelevant when the tier 1 and tier 2 providers start supporting IPv6 later this year. Point to point direct routing should see a significant drop in ping time, regardless of whether or not the 'last mile' ISP or the MMO provider support IPv6 all the way to the end device.

Cool, that's good to know, considering I had read something rather recently that Cisco routers (like these darling little Linksys units many of us have) don't support IPv6. Ironic! They've been part of developing IPv6 for 10+ years as I remember, but they haven't had their little product design teams add in that little feature yet? Router fail!

I do agree this is RouterFAIL by Cisco.

They did buy Linksys and their product like some years ago for a home router line. Depending on how well their technologies merged, I can see how ipv6 can not be in the Linksys routers. It still sucks that we may need to upgrade. Hopefully they'll release a software upgrade for the newer routers.

I might give a try an open source bios to my router at some point. I know that Sean like's the dd-wrt bios he has on his router. I'm not sure dd-wrt has ipv6 support though. A friend of ours is playing with ipv6 with another bios called Tomato.

I haven't tried using it yet, but my Linksys RVS400 has IPv6 support (at least for the LAN - no IPv6 support for the WAN at this time). Just go to Setup > IP mode. You can choose IPv4, or IPv4 and IPv6 (again, for only LAN). This probably won't help much with the problem you're describing, but since I'm not a network expert, I thought I'd point it out.

tethealla wrote:I'm not sure dd-wrt has ipv6 support though.

It depends on the router model that you have and the build version of the dd-wrt software. The newer 'standard' and 'mega' builds have it but the slimmed down versions do not. This is an issue with some routers as the standard and mega builds take more than the 4MB of flash that a lot of routers are limited to. Some of the older builds have v6 at a lower memory requirement but are less stable.

As an alternate firmware, dd-wrt works pretty well for me. The trick is to get the details on your router in their database, then go to their forums to get the low-down on what the actual 'current' build for your router is. The Linksys WRT310N I'm using only recently had its support page updated to state the preferred build. Last time I updated it, the info was still from a year or two ago.

The thing to understand about IPv6 is that for a very long time yet, the world will operate in dual mode; IPv4 with IPv6. Modern operating systems favour IPv6, so if you can get yourself an ISP that has IPv6 at the last mile, you're golden. Your Interwebz experience will be a little better. Home routers will mostly be update-able via firmware updates to support IPv6, but even if they don't, your experience should still improve with IPv6's intelligent routing. Essentially fewer hops and shorter transit times.

You can NAT IPv4 behind IPv6. So if your DSL modem or FiOS termination or whatever supports IPv6 (and it should, since you should get that from your ISP), then any additional router in your house can remain IPv4 and still reap the IPv6 benefits.

In short, if/when/as Blizzard support IPv6 in WoW, the user experience should be more robust as long as their backbone ISPs and peering points also support IPv6.

For anyone interested, tomorrow is World IPv6 Day, and Blizzard are taking part with a couple of Battlegroups. In case anyone has alts on any of these realms, or wants to create one just to take part... http://ipv6.blizzard.com