Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months (github.com)
238 points by babuskov 14 hours ago
duckduckman 13 hours ago
I think what we’re seeing here isnt Valve messing up but rather the middle east conflict expanded to cyberspace and spilling over to impact civilians. Look at the timing and affected countries. China isnt also exactly known for free internet.
WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.
STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplification. I would not be surprised if this is somehow weaponized and/or blocked/analyzed in real time that then breaks the connectivity.
numpad0 10 hours ago
STUN/TURN is basically icanhazip for WebRTC. STUN gives you your public IP:port. TURN is the same, but the returned IP:port is the one that had been dynamically allocated to you at time of querying, rather than the actual ones.
WebRTC clients take that STUN/TURN response and send to peers through out-of-band, through e.g. a lobby server chat mechanism, to set up the connection. This allows NAT table entries to be created as if they are outbound connection at both ends.
You can't make P2P connection with STUN/TURN alone. STUN/TURN is just a tool required for WebRTC.
foresto a few seconds ago
> TURN is the same, but the returned IP:port is the one that had been dynamically allocated to you at time of querying, rather than the actual ones.
I don't know you mean by this. I have implemented STUN, so I know how it works. I'm pretty sure TURN doesn't reveal an address/port any different from that revealed by STUN. Its discovery feature literally is STUN.
Rather, TURN provides an address/port discovery service and a data relay service that can be used in cases where two peers wishing to connect are both behind difficult NAT, meaning there is no quick and reliable way for them to connect even when they have their STUN results.
bob1029 8 hours ago
TURN is the last resort and isn't just signaling. It carries the traffic as well.
If you can make all the STUN servers fail from the perspective of the clients, you could hypothetically force them to use TURN servers that are more centralized and easier to spy on. STUN negotiates pipes n:n. TURN is closer to n:1.
michaelt 7 hours ago
ars 12 hours ago
I think you have that backwards, WebRTC doesn't work, and STUN does.
RossBencina 10 hours ago
I think you have it sideways. STUN [1] is the NAT traversal / "NAT hole punching" process that allows peers to discover their public IP addresses and establish direct P2P bidirectional UDP communication. WebRTC depends on STUN to establish P2P communication. You may be thinking of TURN [2] which amounts to routing traffic through an intermediary node that is visible to the two peers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_...
api 4 hours ago
We do P2P in our networking software and this is why we do it all in band instead of using STUN, TURN, or other common methods. Those get blocked and they’re also often insecure.
STUN has mitigations now against being weaponized but it’s still a shit protocol. The fact that neither STUN nor TURN contain any way whatsoever to accomplish any kind of rendezvous without yet another signaling path boggles my mind given how easy it would have been.
apitman 2 hours ago
> The fact that neither STUN nor TURN contain any way whatsoever to accomplish any kind of rendezvous without yet another signaling path boggles my mind
Interesting. Can you expound on this a bit? How does ZeroTier do it?
api an hour ago
sylware 7 hours ago
IPv6 and minimal assembly-written network code going without niche and complex features.
Scroll_Swe 21 minutes ago
>China isnt also exactly known for free internet.
Be careful, HN is a crazy china and leftie and MENA glaze site now.
jofzar 14 hours ago
I know I'm just preaching to the choir here but my favourite thing about open source/published source libraries/applications is discussions on bug reports/pr's like this.
It's just something so heartwarming of multiple people coming together to describe their symptoms, workarounds and theories of what could be causing it.
cedws 12 hours ago
GitHub discussions used to be so much higher quality though when the platform was for professionals. Now, I see so many discussions that devolve into practically being reddit/4chan threads. Another reason to leave.
sph 12 hours ago
Only on those posted to social media including Hacker News. There is no devolving into memes for niche discussions only interested parties know about.
Don’t blame Github for getting spammed whenever an issue reaches the front page.
hmry 10 hours ago
cedws 11 hours ago
phrotoma 7 hours ago
Eternal September.
throwaway2037 10 hours ago
> when the platform was for professionals
OsrsNeedsf2P 12 hours ago
I feel like it's gotten more professional. 10+ years ago people were dropping the hard R in pull request reviews, now everyone is acting like LinkedIn-speak and Stars will get them their next job
rezonant 11 hours ago
throwaway2037 11 hours ago
Title does not match GitHub issue: "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries"
saidnooneever 37 minutes ago
this looks like not Valve issue. the problems noted seem to indicate only countries which very aggressivly scan and filter connections. P2p is very sensitive to this.
SDR is a relay network, and encrypted, so like onionrouting etc.
its well known malicious actors can abuse it by publishing a p2p game and running coms over SDR via that game...
you can imagine that people want to inspect this traffic in these regions..
RossBencina 14 hours ago
Wild hypothesising here on HN but if you read to the end of the GH issue users have been reporting that STUN has been failing (i.e. no P2P link establishment, fallback to high-latency relay servers.) Multiple users have been able to work around the issue by manually substituting older Valve WebRTC dlls. I'd love to read a postmortem from the Valve devs.
raincole 9 hours ago
> in Israel and possibly other middle east countries
Why did you leave this part of title out? For clicks?
etiam 9 hours ago
You've been here long enough to understand that would exceed the title character limit.
raincole 9 hours ago
I just tested it. Copied&pasted the original title into submit form.
Nope. Right within the limit.
etiam 5 hours ago
7bit 9 hours ago
mschuster91 9 hours ago
Or maybe because if there is one thing the world doesn't need, it's yet another thread devolving into flamewars about the Israel/Palestine conflict?
raincole 8 hours ago
Then don't make this thread. One can't discuss an issue about Israel/middle east's internet connection while pretending the war doesn't exist. Technical issues don't float in a perfect vacuum sphere.
mschuster91 8 hours ago
59nadir 6 hours ago
What an absolute dud of a submission, I can't believe this got so many upvotes. I guess people saw "Valve" in the title and figured it must be important, even though the content of the issue doesn't even line up with the title.
babuskov 14 hours ago
The rabbit hole started as a major P2P issue in Israel and possibly other middle east countries and further investigations revealed it seems to be a worldwide problem.
tancop 5 hours ago
worldwide means israel russia and china so far. all countries that dont exactly like internet freedom and have a long history of spying and censorship. this might be a side effect of some government policy against p2p networks designed to make it harder to bypass censoring isps.
some_random 2 hours ago
The age of people all across the world being able to just connect to each other other the internet is coming to an end. I wish the internet was still a business backend and hobbyist playground but I'm not sure it ever was just that.
0xb4k4 12 hours ago
The title make it seems like it's broken everywhere...
thenthenthen 14 hours ago
Mmm im in China and played a third party game through steams Spacewar dev game (enabling steam p2p i think) like 3 weeks ago and it worked fine.
komali2 13 hours ago
Valve fascinates me because the devs there occasionally seem to be simply the best on earth in a given field, but despite that, bizarre bugs will persist for a long time. My favorite was how steam in home streaming from a PC to a steam deck wouldn't work if the steam deck had an Ethernet and wifi connection - one of the connections had to be disabled or the stream would always crash.
Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.
3form 10 hours ago
The company is very small, and they're doing a lot with what they have. Steam alone is full of arcane features that I keep discovering. There's a lot of backend stuff. They're making games and hardware.
Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)
trumpdong 6 hours ago
The company makes $50,000,000 for every employee each year. It can afford more employees.
zipy124 6 hours ago
DanielHB 6 hours ago
The number of developers needs to grow log(n) to the number of users to handle all error reports. Valve is way under the log(n) of user.
mhitza 13 hours ago
My favorite bug family, that somehow to sneak in every time, is how their react frontend (or whatever the store runs) manages to semi-crash and the controller inputs are no longer recognized.
I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.
philistine 12 hours ago
That is the bane of my existence. Steam's UI is so slow to react due to its web roots, that I feel like people must be insane to think that Steam is somehow this great app. It's terrible.
I shop on GOG.
csande17 10 hours ago
NekkoDroid 5 hours ago
stackghost 13 hours ago
Valve famously has a very flat org structure so it's possible that that problem just isn't sexy enough for someone to pick it up on their own, without being told by a higher-up.
I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.
sph 12 hours ago
People keep blaming the flat org, as if conventionally-organised companies never had any bugs or never focused on very visible and marketable features rather than bug fix.
In fact, the flat org allows a random person to work on a niche bug management doesn’t seem to care about, which wouldn’t be possible if you had a boss breathing down your neck.
PeterHolzwarth 13 hours ago
They say they have a flat structure. People who have worked there, despite some axe-grinding, indicate otherwise.
formerly_proven 11 hours ago
chandler5555 13 hours ago
interesting, people speculated that Street Fighter6 went from P2P to relay a few months ago on one of the updates. never wouldve thought it would be actually a valve issue
sammy2255 12 hours ago
Is this a bug on Valve? Or is it simply a case of "My ISP is fucking with my internet traffic and they won't admit it please help me"
bigibas123 8 hours ago
Reading the github thread points to a case of: "My country's governemt mandated it's ISPs fuck with my internet traffic, but steam P2P stuff used to not be affected but now is" across mutiple countries. People have found it works again if they roll back some of steam's dlls so Valve can probably fix ir.
12345hn6789 3 hours ago
@dang, title should be updated:
`Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries`
picofarad 14 hours ago
Hm, I have always wanted to use this to play couch co-op remotely but is this even the same "service" that provides that?
Looks like they tracked it to a steam update in March, and there's a workaround for at lest 3 games that involves all players copying steamwebrtc.dll to the game's ./binaries folder.
gafferongames 5 hours ago
Paging Fletcher Dunn
patspam 12 hours ago
I blame Bricks and Minifigs
wook__ 13 hours ago
As SteamOS user for years i can say "typical Valve"
gacgacgac 13 hours ago
My unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta give the parasite its due" and we believe them and comply.
It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent?
Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.
usea 13 hours ago
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.
Scroll_Swe 20 minutes ago
Developers, like gamers, are the most oppressed people.
faidit 11 hours ago
Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.
applfanboysbgon 9 hours ago
> just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country
This is just what you tell yourself to feel comfortable about living as a beneficiary of the empire. From the perspective of those invaded, there is no difference. Do you think in Vietnam they thought "I'm glad it is a democratic nation dropping dropping 7.5 million tons of bombs on us and raping our villagers, it would be so much worse if they were authoritarian!". Do you think in Cuba they think, "I'm glad it is a democratic nation that is blockading our entire economy, condemning us into poverty". Do you think in Iran they think "I am glad it is a democratic nation that assassinated our leader and bombed our school"?
faidit 3 hours ago
CursedSilicon 12 hours ago
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee
Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games
And yet. Steam persists
fc417fc802 11 hours ago
I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
CursedSilicon 9 hours ago
dontlaugh 7 hours ago
Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
antonkochubey 3 hours ago
brador 8 hours ago
The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.
kotaKat 5 hours ago
> Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee
https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game.
Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.
jfim 8 hours ago
The Epic store is horrendously slow though. I bought a few games there but in practice the client is just so slow that I avoid it if I can.
astlouis44 12 hours ago
Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here:
koolala 11 hours ago
What lets you host Monkeyball like that. Are you going to port Xonotic to WASM?