What Is GFL's Network?

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello,

 

As of March 2019, GFL is now running its own network using Anycast. @Dreae and I started planning this project out in early March of 2019 and as of March 23rd, 2019, the network is running successfully in-front of our game servers on our new dedicated machine. This comes with many benefits such as being able to use our own IPv4 block and with Anycast, this allows us to absorb and filter (D)DoS attacks at the PoP server level which increases overall (D)DoS protection. With us owning the network, we can most of the time influence routing with BGP communities and so on! This means we have a good chance at fixing sub-optimal routes our players get to our PoP servers. We are still exploring the world of BGP routing and there's a chance we'll find better methods to correct sub-optimal routes, though.

 

We have leased a /24 IPv4 block (256 IPs) and have ownership over this block. The IP block is 92.119.148.0/24. The good thing about owning an IPv4 block is we will own it as long as we pay for it (the block itself is only $56.00/m). If we need to switch physical hosting providers, we can do so without an IP change since we control which hosting providers use this IP via BGP. With that said, our Anycast network forwards traffic from each PoP server (Point Of Presence) to the physical hosting provider itself using @Dreae's SRCDS packet filtering system on Linux which is open-source and can be found here. Therefore, we don't technically need a physical hosting provider that supports BGP sessions unless if we ever get rid of the Anycast network itself. Thankfully, our new physical hosting provider supports BGP sessions either way. Therefore, if we were to remove our Anycast network, we will be able to use our IPv4 block with them directly.

 

This is by far the best project I've ever worked on personally. I haven't seen any other standard gaming community literally own their network like we are doing. With the said, @Dreae and I have been learning a lot from this project and there is so much more to learn! This is definitely helping further advance my networking knowledge. We will be posting a public guide at some point outlining how we did all of this for under $200/m along with some advice/tips we found on the way. No ETA on when this guide will be released publicly.

 

With the amount of on-going changes with routing and networking, this network will need active monitoring and maintenance most likely. This is why we're having a form where clients can post sub-optimal routes they find via trace route/MTR to our PoP servers.

 

All in all, this is a big addition to GFL. I also want to thank @Dreae for all he has done for this project! He has put many hours into creating the packet filtering software running on our PoPs, giving me advice on the network setup in general, and helping with BGP routing/BIRD configuration.

 

If you have any questions, feel free to reply.

 

Thanks!

[JGuary55 707 / 14,056]

Yay!!! Congrats! We doing big things! GFL is going to be the biggest community EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and best

[TheJitFace 699 / 18,125]

Good job guys! GFL is going to be bigger and better. 

[Le Quack 130 / 3,588]

Great work! Definitely something that puts us above other servers! This is great 

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

We are still looking for results from trace routes! Especially since we unannounced IX peers to fix our routing from our physical server to the Dallas PoP.

 

 

Thank you!

[Guest]

Oh yeah daddy

[Sierra5 2 / 134]

Nice job. Seems a fair amount of complexity underneath what could seem like "just another gaming community" - that complexity looks like it's bringing a lot of benefits from the posts I've read.

By the way, did you consider adding your AS to PeeringDB? I see a lot of them are on there.

[Sierra5 2 / 134]

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether a new thread was warranted for my small comment.

[John Jeez Man 556 / 12,193]

1 hour ago, Sierra5 said:

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether a new thread was warranted for my small comment.

Anyone has the ability to make a post.

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

On 5/1/2021 at 1:31 PM, Sierra5 said:

Nice job. Seems a fair amount of complexity underneath what could seem like "just another gaming community" - that complexity looks like it's bringing a lot of benefits from the posts I've read.

By the way, did you consider adding your AS to PeeringDB? I see a lot of them are on there.

I haven't looked into PeeringDB much, but have heard of it. I will check it out later and add our network's ASN to it!

 

Also, I believe it's fine posting a comment like yours on these type of posts regardless of age, especially since this thread is pinned and the only general thread in the networking forum. Like you said as well, it was a small comment.

[Smish 1 / 166]

Any chance you remember where you leased your IP's from as thats an amazing price.

[Liloz01 1,252 / 19,269]

17 hours ago, Smish said:

Any chance you remember where you leased your IP's from as thats an amazing price.

it's from: https://www.prager-it.com/services - hope this helps!