well what a month it's shaping up to be!

Steam has a swag of new games available now, most notably being et:qw which I've noticed has 'finally' become available this morning. All in all, I'd like to download 10gig of data today, though that's going to kill my cap.

I have noticed that GA and Node have Steam mirrors, and that data is free from these sources if you're a customer, but how does one force Steam to only use these mirrors?

anyone know an easy way to do it? I'm thinking this may turn into a long and involved manual discovery of unwanted ips that'll go into the block list in my router. I'd sooner avoid that if I can :)

You can't afaikdh. Wait sorry, that was torrets(sp). afaik you can't.

Steam is gay like that. Years ago there was a way to force teh GA content server, but im unsure as to whether that actually forced the server or just the content server image in steam.

just annoy trog, trog@qgl.org . trog loves emails

the last time this was talked about in a thread (on here anyway) it was mentioned the whole blocking of IP's - there isn;t a known way of getting your steam to connect to a certain content server, which is kinda lame.

Well lame for the bandwidth restricted, which all users in .AU are I guess..

You'd think after all this time they would have allowed some sort of 'select my content server' option - but this might see content servers getting hammered? who knows.

Well lame for the bandwidth restricted, which all users in .AU are I guess..

I think you mean quota, not bandwidth. They are not the same thing.

Also, not all users in .AU are equally affected. Internode has added all Australian ISP Steam content servers to their free-traffic list, so we don't have to worry too much about where the data comes from as long as it's not overseas.

theres no real way to set a specific steam server. just keep restarting steam until you get the content server you're after (should have the banner on the download bit)

whisper.ausgamers.com

GA's servers are 203.46.104.7 and 203.46.104.8.

And the client will connect on 27030-27031 ports.

allow 203.46.104.7 27030-27031 and 203.46.104.8 27030-27031 on your firewall and block the rest.

I'm going to use the GA cable connection from my very generous neighbour this arvo to dl all this stuff. He's cool with me bringing my laptop over so long as the content definately comes down without blowing his cap. So basically, I've got to filter out non-GA Steam servers at the router or hosts file level, which doesn't seem to work for some people I'm reading.

with the host file method, I notice that most people are just blocking via redirecting to localhost (127.0.0.1). surely redirecting other known steam server addresses to GameArena (203.46.104.7 and 203.46.104.8) could also work? or would Steam pickup on that and chuck a wobbly?

btw - cheers for the link Obes. It's detailed, but looks to be a solid method for the result I'm after

last edited by koopz at 11:32:25 10/Oct/07

last edited by koopz at 11:33:04 10/Oct/07

Don't bother setting anything up.

I grabbed the entire orange box off GA content servers without setting up anything.

If you find you're pulling down 800+kb/s you'll be on the GA content servers.
I think maybe a couple of hundred mb counted to my cap, probably a small bit of data that wasn't on the content servers.

But otherwise, it does seem to get the GA content servers for me every time.

From my experiences with steam and being a BP members, every time ive had to dl (dl'ed the whole orange box) and subsequent updates, it has used a GA mirror without fail. Easy to check as well when you go to CMD and netstat. It's always been (for me anyway) gamearena2 thats hosting the content.

Haha, download limit.

even if you always get the GA one atm, i would still set up the rules.