GTA 5 Download via Rockstar Social Club disconnects PPP

Hi all.

If anyone can shed any light on these issues, I'd be very greatful.

I've been trying to download GTA5 via the Rockstar Social Club game client for nearly 2 weeks now and I've had my ISP (Aquiss) looking into this for the past week. The Social Club game client actually disconnects the PPP session I have with my ISP, my router stays in sync with the local exchange DSLAM but my Internet connection is completely disconnected for about 10 seconds. It then reconnects and continues downloading. After the Social Club game client causes a number of these session drops (it takes about 30 mins) the BRAS considers my Internet connection dead and disconnects my router totally until I call my Aquiss and they get BT to flex the line allowing me, once again, to connect to the internet.

I didn't have a problem downloading the first 40GB of game data, the final 20GB has been a nightmare due to the constant PPP disconnects and thinking there was something wrong with my router or local exchange hardware. Aquiss Broadband (great guys) have been troublehooting with me over the weekend and today, after a couplet of attempts at downloading GTA5 again, I realised there is something seriously wrong with the Social Club game client. I've been doing some testing and found that my connection remains stable if I encapsulate the game data connection within a VPN tunnel and let the remote side of the VPN deal with any problems. As soon as I disconnect the VPN and resume the download I observe a PPP session drop.

Does anyone have any info or knowledge about this? I was totally unaware that an application had the capability to disconnect a PPP session.

Thanks in advance.
Rick

Edited by deleted (Mon 27-Apr-15 17:05:10)

Probably just a case of a small NAT table in the router, and this causes a software error and as part of the recovery router restarts the PPP session to break and rewrite the NAT table.

More powerful router with more memory and larger NAT table may avoid this

Thanks for the response, MrSaffron.!

My firewall (separate hardware) handles translations for my connection, the router is not doing any NAT or PAT it's simply a transition from the outside interface of my firewall to a DSL connection. (I have a /29 public IP block, the router routes everything to the firewall)

What initiates the PPP session?

The router is generating the PPP.
I've tried looking at the PPP session info including subscriber stats etc but it means little to me.

meant to mention last time that I have an 8mb 20CN circuit on an EO line.

In which case it is possible that the NAT in the firewall device is the issue, or even if just a firewall and NO NAT i.e. devices are on full public IP it is possible that it is getting swamped.

Similar has happened before with game download services that attempt to utilise P2P type distribution mechanisms, no idea if their software is doing that.

Does the Social club app use p2p to download the game?

I've no idea if the Rockstar Social Club client is using P2P, I might open up packet tracer later and see if I can find out. I might be able to tell on my ASA's logs.

I don't understand why the routers PPP session would drop i.e.
*Apr 27 15:15:13.008: %DIALER-6-UNBIND: Interface Vi1 unbound from profile Di0
*Apr 27 15:15:13.012: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface Virtual-Access1, changed state to down
*Apr 27 15:15:13.016: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Virtual-Access1, changed state to down

Then, 30 seconds later:
*Apr 27 15:15:39.456: %DIALER-6-BIND: Interface Vi1 bound to profile Di0
*Apr 27 15:15:39.460: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface Virtual-Access1, changed state to up
*Apr 27 15:15:40.108: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Virtual-Access1, changed state to up

This ONLY occurs when I resume the GTA5 game download via the Social Club client. The firewall is fine during the download and doesn't blink.

I download A LOT of stuff (~500GB per month) I've consumed huge amounts of torrents, dowloaded massive amounts of data from Steam, Origin, UPlay, Battle.net and multitude of other places and this has never happend before in over 8 years.

Thanks for all responses.

In reply to a post by trikki69:

I don't understand why the routers PPP session would drop i.e.

You don't have enough information to see *why* the connection goes. Only that it does.

Googling for "%DIALER-6-UNBIND" gives a few sites with people having problems. I'm not sure you see many solutions in them, but you do see a lot of suggestions for turning on a variety of debug options.

I've seen at least these:
- debug ppp nego
- debug ppp authen
- debug ppp packet
- debug pppoe events

From these, you might get an indication about which direction initiates the termination, at least.

This ONLY occurs when I resume the GTA5 game download via the Social Club client. The firewall is fine during the download and doesn't blink.

I've no idea if the Rockstar Social Club client is using P2P, I might open up packet tracer later and see if I can find out. I might be able to tell on my ASA's logs.

That all suggests that *something* about this download is triggering a fault, in either the router or the firewall, or is otherwise causing one of them to run out of resources.

An alternative path might be to contact the club to find out if they have a way to de-tune the client.

In reply to a post by trikki69:

I was totally unaware that an application had the capability to disconnect a PPP session.

They can't, directly. All they can do is offer traffic, perhaps lots of it, or stop offering traffic.

But in any reasonably robust implementation (and Cisco kit probably counts as that), a fault, or running out of resources, shouldn't just kill the router (or the firewall), leaving a brick - no BSOD's allowed in robust equipment!

Instead, you'd expect a proper path to recover communications - dropping PPP, and starting again is precisely the right thing to do in a "controlled" recovery environment.