Steam Download Tools

[NZWonka]

Hey there sorry guys new to this,
So what you are telling me that I joined telstra because they had unmetered steam downloads,  So now its stopped???
I do not think thats fair at all  if that is the case

NZWonka

[simcore]

Hi NZWonka,

No, TelstraClear's unmetered Steam Content Server has not stopped, however, Valve/Steam have changed the way that at this present time, roughly 30% of their total content library is delivered, which bypasses their own third party content server network (which TelstraClear's server is a part of).

This is unfortunate, but there are steps you can take as we have advised that prevent you from downloading titles which are not unmetered, and avoiding any unwanted contribution to your usage pack.

We are waiting on Steam to make some changes to their content server software, but in addition to that, we are looking at other options that keep it convenient for customers. I do not believe any other ISP in New Zealand currently provides the HTTP delivered Steam content unmetered, but if you are unhappy with the situation and felt you've been mislead, then please contact me further via PM and I will be happy to discuss your contract and the terms you joined us under.

Cheers.

[NZWonka]

Hi there I use steam limiter and works fine, but for past couple weeks it does not work.   but there are steps you can take as we have advised that prevent you from downloading titles which are not unmetered???
Sorry what steps do i do as not that good with computers if you have to get inside them ( if you know what i mean )

do we have a time frame for this to be fixed???

thanks Les

[dissss]

Steam Limiter appears to be working fine for me - if I choose an http only title like Portal 2 it'll just sit there at 0 bytes/s



Also if you're seeing 1.5MB/s + then chances are content is coming from the TC content server - the http stuff is slow by comparison

[NZWonka]

I know some are but not all the good games like witcher 2  and others which is over 18 gig. Seems all the new ones are not on there list,
 portal 2  is a value game so would be very surprised them not having that open.
Steam limiter works i know  thats not the problem.

[simcore]

Hey Les, sorry, what is your issue?

Try sending me a PM and I'll assist.

[Milkbot]

I tried out the Steam Limiter and at first thought it wasn't working when the first 5 games I tried didn't work. It wasn't until I tried TF2 that I realised it's just that telstra's content server was severely underpopulated.

Are they working on this?

[.osiRiS]

TelstraClear don't have any input on what gets populated on to the server. More and more content is coming across http rather than from the TCL server.

[Arnifix]

Connection timeout with TCL Steam Content Server. 18 days remaining his month. 16 gigs remaining this month.

So far getting this response for Dota2 and Orcs Must Die 2.

[csquirrelrun]

Hard Firewall-Rule
Blocks only non TelstraClear Content Servers, does not block http file system

Here is a quick run through of how to only use the TelstraClear Steam Content Server using a Firewall rule. These steps are translatable to various operating systems, (including OS X) which include an inbuilt firewall. Be aware, this will not block Steam's http file system, the titles of which are not available on the TelstraClear Steam Content Server.

Has there been a change in this? Since the start of the year I have used the Firewall rule and it's worked for pretty much any game I've downloaded (with a few exceptions where I simply turn it off and go back to using metered servers). I've been away for the past 2 months and when I came back a couple of days ago I began to download a number of new games I'd purchased while I was away. Today I double checked my usage and it would appear as though all the content that I had downloaded had been metered :/ There goes 75% of my monthly usage...

Is this because the games I've been downloading are being delivered with the http system? If so, does that mean in future I should be using the Steam-Limiter?
Cheers.

[.osiRiS]

Yes that is correct, I would use Steam-Limiter from now on.

[Citysoldier]

Anyone smart enough to make something to force it to telstras content server rather than the metered http system?

[toofast]

Nigel's Steam limiter program does that.

[csquirrelrun]

Yes that is correct, I would use Steam-Limiter from now on.

Ah nuts. It would have been nice to know about the change before I used up 30gb of my 40gb cap

[Citysoldier]

Nigel's Steam limiter program does that.

 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/steam-limiter/yjXbGTKnlzQ

This is Nigels message from July.  I am running steam manager to get Telstra's content.  To be clear I'm wanting to use telstras content server which will be unmetered.  Any game using the new http content system will download via that and wont be unmetered regardless if Telstra has them in the content server.  

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2109493&page=8  This forum thread list games using new system though there is no one post with all updates.

[simcore]

csquirrelrun, can you PM me your account number along with the date the usage was incurred and I'll take a look at what I can do for you.

Cheers.

[Mokoshina]

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/steam-limiter/yjXbGTKnlzQ

This is Nigels message from July.  I am running steam manager to get Telstra's content.  To be clear I'm wanting to use telstras content server which will be unmetered.  Any game using the new http content system will download via that and wont be unmetered regardless if Telstra has them in the content server.  

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2109493&page=8  This forum thread list games using new system though there is no one post with all updates.

Well this would very much explain why I have 7 games in my downloads that are just doing nothing... Is this going to be upgraded at any time telstra? Or is there essentially no point to even trying for these newer games?

[Nigel Bree]

Is this going to be upgraded at any time telstra?

Probably not, because this is a classic kind of coordination problem between the NZ ISPs.

In other markets (South Africa and Australia) where local Steam servers are popular, the majority of market players have steam servers which are unfiltered, and thus can and do serve HTTP content for the new CDN while having unmetering arrangements for their own customers  - and since almost all the ISPs in those markets run unfiltered, there's no reason why any new server anyone stands up in that market needs to be filtered either. That's the good market equilibrium.

Now, we don't know "officially" why Valve have probably decided to require unfiltered servers, but if you look at how things work technically we can observe that in their HTTP CDN, the server selection is done almost completely by DNS lookup - including filtered servers in the result sets from their DNS servers could cause serious problems for Valve's customers if they return a filtered server to someone who isn't going to be able to access it.

[ There is a separate mechanism in their HTTP CDN that could allow filtered servers to be used rotation, but it's going to be tedious for Valve to use it for this and Valve probably have no real interest in spending more of their money and staff time on something as spectacularly unnecessary as allowing ISPs to play these kind of childish games. ]

Here in NZ part of the use of filtered servers is (like the generally anti-customer approach taken by local ISPs to peering arrangements) a way of ensuring that the very limited resources that ISPs want to devote to hosting a server are delivered only to their customers, without yielding any benefit the customers of other ISPs. That's a counterproductive thing to worry about, and of course once unfiltered servers start appearing (i.e. someone takes on the externality of supplying other ISPs customers) then the natural game-theoretic equilibrium is for everyone to run unfiltered servers, at which point the externality becomes pretty much a non-issue. But in the meantime, because of that externality, the first servers to appear were filtered and thus we've ended up with that as a market equilibrium.

The fact we face is that the NZ ISPs have all independently voted for a beggar-thy-neighbour market equilibrium where everyone runs filtered servers so everyone's customers suffer. Unfortunately that's a stable equilibrium, so unless a provider brave enough to break the current dysfunctional market state comes along we're probably all out of luck no matter what ISP we're with.

[Mokoshina]

Probably not, because this is a classic kind of coordination problem between the NZ ISPs.

 If thats so then I feel telstra need to make it clearer exactly what is going on with steam and the un-metered claim they make when its only for a small portion of games now. At least let the customers know whats going in more openly than in a forum that you have to find, something a little more offical.

[simcore]

In other markets (South Africa and Australia) where local Steam servers are popular, the majority of market players have steam servers which are unfiltered, and thus can and do serve HTTP content for the new CDN while having unmetering arrangements for their own customers.

Can you cite any evidence of this? I have spoken with Valve directly on numerous occassions about these challenges, and simply switching the server to a non filtered server was not raised as a solution or method to deliver HTTP content from our server.

Everything Valve have indicated infact servers that HTTP content only comes from their official master servers, and is not currently available using the third party content server software.

I'd love for you to prove me wrong however, as then I will have a new avenue to resolve this challenge and make things easier for our users.

[Nigel Bree]

Can you cite any evidence of this?

That other ISPs are offering this? Both WebAfrica in South Africa - at steam.wa.co.za and steam2.wa.co.za and iiNet/Internode in Australia run their own HTTP CDNs with Steam game content at steam.cdn.on.net, and I've personally done HTTP game downloads from the WebAfrica ones as part of working with WebAfrica customers to get this right since early on their IIS configuration was wrong on their unmetered side.

Everything Valve have indicated infact servers that HTTP content only comes from their official master servers

Bear in mind that there are several separate things at play here; one is the operational arrangements that the ISPs doing this have with Valve (and precisely how much of the operation of these servers is ISP-managed versus something they've stood up physically but Valve really operate) and of course that's a business detail that I haven't asked for. Secondly is the question of precisely which specific HTTP-capable servers Valve are including in their DNS results for Steam clients to use, which can be a subset of the servers and which Valve can do whatever they like with.

For all I know they may not be actively including any ISP-specific HTTP servers in their official DNS results currently; that's a policy decision which they can look after on their own terms on their own time.

However, that both WebAfrica and iiNet run HTTP-capable servers and having steam-limiter point at them to force the issue has resulted in working game downloads is an empirical fact and has been for quite some time (although there are occasional hiccups with the WebAfrica ones).

For WebAfrica specifically, I've found their operations folks fine to talk to (I did quite a bit of messaging on their forums with WARob and WAJeff when this wasn't working for their customers earlier in the year) and it may be worthwhile for you to touch base with WARob specifically and perhaps compare notes about this from an insider perspective. One of the things I certainly know from my time at Symantec was that our customers would often be given wildly different stories by whomever their POC was, and it wasn't until customers contacted me directly as the actual guy who wrote the product that we could get both them (and the Symantec staff they had been talking to and were misinforming them) all working from accurate information.

[Nigel Bree]

By the way, I'll just toss in the side observation that since this is standard HTTP content delivered over regular HTTP, if anyone with any networking knowledge had spent 30 seconds looking at the question then it would be obvious that all that's necessary to efficiently offer Steam downloads over HTTP unmetered to customers is a bog standard HTTP cache like Squid. Of course, to make that work you still need something like steam-limiter to force the DNS issue so that the Steam client supplies the appropriate host: header, but then your customers absolutely have to be running something like that anyway.

[ I'll also observe that the only thing that varies in these kind of download systems is the manifests - the actual file chunks in these systems tend to be immutable because that's what make the underlying push-replication systems work efficiently behind the scenes, as in the likes of Akamai. Using a Squid cache instead of Valve's normal replication can't get the benefits of an Akamai-like private non-Internet replication network (although since Valve apparently aren't using Akamai and TC seem to have an active policy of not peering with anyone, I rather doubt you get that anyway), but given that the file chunks are immutable the retention policy of the Squid cache can be set so that it would seem to be exactly the same from a cost standpoint to TC as having an official server. ]

And this is true for any ISP in NZ, of course. That would be an unutterably cheap and nasty way of doing it, and it's still pretty customer-hostile compared to the good market equilibrium when we have ISPs freely peering locally hosted content like this. But it would work, and any NZ ISP could do it in a trice of they cared. The fact that none of them have bothered speaks volumes as to how important this is to ISPs.

[Bounty Hunter]

So I'm capped at home, and I cant install anything on uni computers, but I can download heaps of national data.

Ideas on how I can get gcf files legit?

[Oddball]

I've been using windows firewall to force telstra's server. None of the programs seemed to work for me.

And it was fine. But now it doesn't work... just downloads from some server in the US...

This is going to be a MASSIVE downfall.

[nain33]

So I've set up the firewall and I'm using SteamLimiter as well. Using TCPView the only place my current download (Saints Row 3) is downloading from is wlgwpstmcon01.telstraclear.co.nz. So this means I'm safe right? Or is there some hidden server which I can't see