Steam Connection issues when using a Cisco router

A little while ago I was Steaming about Steam, and the fact that I was having permanent issues trying to connect to the service, and that the only way I could authenticate was by using a customer VPN and having that VPN connection as the default gateway. I tried a lot of troubleshooting and had come down to the conclusion that the issues were caused by aliens, or possibly as a result of the third world “rural” (thanks Chorus!) broadband we have out here.

However it seems that’s not the case – the issue is with my Cisco 857 router and their Cisco express forwarding (CEF). This was revealed to me while talking to my friend Ben who immediately recognised this issue within 20 seconds of me explaining the symptoms. Ben, you need to read my blog in future to speed up this process :)

So if you’re a Cisco router owner (as I said, mine is a Cisco 857, but if anything this is probably an IOS bug rather than a model specific issue) and are having issues connecting to the Steam service then it could be time to pull out your IOS reference manual or find your nearest expert in the CA$H LINE INTERFACE and disable Cisco express forwarding.

What does it do you might ask? Well:

CEF is mainly used to increase packet switching speed by reducing the overhead and delays introduced by other routing techniques. CEF consists of two key components: The Forwarding Information Base (FIB) and adjacencies.

Or, you could sit around and wait until one day you read a patch note such as "fixed issue where steam client fails to connect on cisco 857 running 12.4(15)T4 when cef is turned on" in your next IOS update.

Lessons learned:

• I should remember that despite being awesome, even Cisco kit has weird bugs
• Developers should remember that writing some super obscure modification to an authentication protocol probably seems like a great idea at the time, but really, you’re just being a dick
• I have some super smart friends

Tags: Gaming

 Print | Posted on Thursday, July 21, 2011 10:18 PM |