The following is a post/rant/PSA about a new method some (namely SUP) are using to spoof their server latency in Garrysmod. I hope to inform everyone and hopefully receive some clarification from a dev/staff member about whether this is OK.
tl;dr: For those that don’t feel like reading GMCHosting/SuperiorServers have found a new method of spoofing game server latency using BGP anycast. They are faking server latency/ping by replying to source queries from the point closest to the client on their network instead of replying from the actual server itself. Mirror servers but with extra steps.
The Technical Details
From my cursory research so far Superiorserver’s primary DarkRP server is based in Dallas, TX under GMCHosting who is using Psychz for their backend/peering. Curiously enough people in the immediate network vicinity of Los Angeles, Ashburn, or London seem to get a solid 15ms ping to this server in gmod regardless of being very far away from Dallas. Conversely when joining the server your ping in status or netgraph will skyrocket to 200-300ms. This is because GMC has routers/POPs in these locations as seen by their rDNS records:
208.103.169.1 dal-gmchosting-ddos-router
208.103.169.2 lax-gmchosting-ddos-router
208.103.169.3 ash-gmchosting-ddos-router
208.103.169.4 lon-gmchosting-ddos-router
What appears to be occurring here is GMC is announcing SUP’s server IPs from these locations (208.103.169.12 as an example) using anycast. Normally this is a very good network practice and helps cut down on network latency by establishing a fast direct path to the actual server (Dallas in this case). However GMC has taken a very clever and interesting extra step. When making an A2S query to SUP’s server listed above the POP/router appears to catch the request and reply itself instead of the actual source server making the reply.
What this in turn does is it leads the client to believe it has a very low ping to the server when in reality the ping is most likely in the hundreds and you do not discover this fact until you have already joined. You are only seeing the ping to the POP.
The big server men conglomerate strikes again in this fierce latency arms race. Tune in next month for “Mirror Servers 3: Revenge of the System”
Shame that all the money and effort being poured into spoofing/re-routing could be used to just open more legitimate servers and invest in a method to connect different server nodes into a cohesive experience.
I'm torn on it - I think it's going to be an issue when Australian servers, US servers, UK servers & every other country has the same ping on the server browser. Because ultimately, that's how it'll end up if it's allowed to continue.
The justification you'll be given for this is that it's required for the DDoS mitigation - which is partially valid. This was spoken about in this thread already
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Mirror Servers 2: Electric Boogaloo
