Battlefield 3 – PunkBuster breaks!@#$%

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January 25, 2012
by Michael McNamara in ,

I’ve been a big Battlefield fan ever since Battlefield 1942 and the mod Desert Combat. I really enjoyed Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, so I was expecting a lot from Battlefield 3 when it was released late last year. While the graphics and basic game play are truly amazing the team work aspects of the game seem very much an after thought which is very disappointing. In the initial release of the game you couldn’t manually select which squad you wanted to join, a feature that’s been in every Battlefield game since the beginning of time. And where was the in-game voice communications? A feature that revolutionized PC gaming was gone and replaced again by a solution that seem to be an after thought, ESN Sonar. With all those issues the game has still been a lot of fun, however, recently it seems that hacks and cheats are becoming spoiling the fun.

Which leads me to the current issue facing Battlefield 3 players. PunkBuster appears to be broken and is preventing a large number of Battlefield 3 players from enjoying the game. Players are getting kicked from server almost immediately after joining. Here’s an example of the log message you’ll find on the server side;

PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab
PunkBuster Server: RESTRICTION: player1 (slot #2) [1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) 75.111.11.111:3659] Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab
PunkBuster Server: Kick Command Issued (RESTRICTION: Service Communication Failure: PnkBstrB.exe driver failure (PnkBstrK.sys) ffab) for (slot#2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx player1
PunkBuster Server: Lost Connection (slot #2) 75.111.11.111:3659 1610dac7419406201db5a46fxxxxxxxx(-) player1

It didn’t take too long until I stumbled across a Battlelog post from EA/Dice that acknowledged there was an issue with PunkBuster. There was an article on PC Gamer that alluded to some issues around hackers potentially injecting unauthorized bans into the ban lists that are streamed from PBBans and GGC.

Several Game Service Providers (GSP) posted the following note on their sites;

We are hearing reports that GGC / PBBans are being exploited and many players are being incorrectly banned by an exploit in the streaming process. We suggest customers disable using the GGC / PBBans banlists until this is resolved.

There was also a recent blog post from EA/Dice where they claimed they were going to start clamping down on the rampant hacks and cheats that are pervasive throughout the multiplayer servers. It looks like they might have broken something when they started clamping down, let’s hope there’s a fix soon.

You can try updating your installation of PunkBuster but this time around it appears that the problem is somewhere in the cloud. Sorry!

What game(s) do you play if any?

Cheers!

Updated: Friday January 27, 2012 – apparently the PunkBuster problems have been resolved.

Web Goes on Strike!

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January 17, 2012
by Michael McNamara in

I know this is short notice but this site and the discussion forums will not be available on January 18th between 8AM and 8PM (GMT -5). We will be participating in the online protest to stop the Internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA. We’ll be joining some big name Internet sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Cheezburger Network, WordPress, Mozilla, Destructoid, Gog.com, Namecheap, Imgur, Electronic Frontier Foundation and thousands of blogs and web sites.

I apologize in advance for the inconvenience but we need to put a stop to this legislation.

Visit here for more information…

Cheers!

Asterisk Now with Avaya IP Phones

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January 15, 2012
by Michael McNamara in ,

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around connecting Avaya (legacy Nortel) IP phones with third-party SIP capable call servers. I’ve personally toyed with Asterisk on a number of occasions and have always been impressed so I recently setup an Asterisk Now installation (AsteriskNOW-1.7.1-i386.iso) on a CentOS 6.2 KVM host so I could re-test the interoperability between the latest version of Asterisk (v1.6.2.20) and the 1100 and 1200 series IP phones from Avaya running SIP v4.0 and SIP v4.3 respectively.

The installation was pretty straight forward, however, there were a few small issues that I had to deal with. Initially I was unable to connect to the server and found that the firewall was enabled, so I had to disable the firewall with the following commands, service iptables stop, chkconfig iptables off. I was also getting a weird error in the FreePBX gui when I tried to apply the configuration;

exit: 126
sh: /var/lib/asterisk/bin/retrieve_conf: Permission denied

…this turned out to be an issue with SELINUX, so I had to edit /etc/selinux/config and disable SELINUX (a reboot is required for the change to take effect). Once I did those few steps I was ready to create some extensions so I created 1001 and 1002 and set their password (secret) to ‘abc123′.

The Avaya (legacy Nortel) IP phones can be provisioned from a TFTP server so I installed a TFTP server on my Asterisk server using yum install tftp-server. Then I enabled the TFTP server with chkconfig tftp on and finally I had to restart xinetd with service xinetd restart. I placed the files I needed in the /tftpboot directory including 1220SIP.cfg, 1120eSIP.cfg and users.dat (these filenames are case sensitive on a Linux server – if you use a Windows server such as TFTPD32 then the case is not an issue). I configured my local DHCP server to offer DHCP option 66 (TFTP Server) and I was off and running. The 1220 and 1120e both booted, download the provisioning files from the TFTP server, and connected to the Asterisk server. I entered the username and passwords and I was logged in and running in seconds placing calls between the two handsets.

I had to refer to my original post on the forums on what settings I needed to disable the extended license;

http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info/nortel-ip-telephony/disabling-features-from-extended-feature-set-on-ip-deskphone/

Here’s what the configuration files on the TFTP server looked liked, the 1220SIP.cfg file contained the following lines;

[FW]
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO
VERSION SIP12x004.03.09.00
FILENAME SIP12x004.03.09.00.bin
PROTOCOL TFTP

[DEVICE_CONFIG]
DOWNLOAD_MODE FORCED
VERSION 000200
FILENAME users.dat

[DIALING_PLAN]

The 1120eSIP.cfg file contained the following lines;

[FW]
DOWNLOAD_MODE AUTO
VERSION SIP1120e04.00.04.00
FILENAME SIP1120e04.00.04.00.bin
PROTOCOL TFTP

[DEVICE_CONFIG]
DOWNLOAD_MODE FORCED
VERSION 000200
FILENAME users.dat

[DIALING_PLAN]

The users.dat file contained the following lines;

DNS_DOMAIN local
SIP_DOMAIN1 asterisk.local
SERVER_IP1_1 192.168.1.10
SERVER_PORT1_1 5060
SERVER_RETRIES1 3

VMAIL 5000
VMAIL_DELAY 300

DEF_LANG English
DEF_AUDIO_QUALITY High

ADMIN_PASSWORD 26567*738
SSH YES
SSHID admin
SSHPWD admin
# Settings to disable extended license
MAX_LOGINS 1
USB_HEADSET LOCK
EXP_MODULE_ENABLE NO
ENABLE_SERVICE_PACKAGE NO
IM_MODE DISABLED
AVAYA_AUTOMATIC_QoS NO
VQMON_PUBLISH NO
SIP_TLS_PORT 0
ENABLE_BT NO

I did have to re-configured the 1220 to AllAut before it would honor the settings in the TFTP provisioning file.

Cheers!

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