After exit, cannot load secure webpages (https) until reboot

[SpaceRedleg]

Every time I exit the game, I lose the ability to access secure webpages (https:). I check Internet Options, and all of my SSL, etc. settings are unchanged.
A reboot fixes the problem.

If I am streaming Netflix, etc. on my second monitor, the current movie or show will finish (it doesn't cut off when the game exits), however I am unable to start another stream if I change webpages/click secure links.

Is there some 'port' or whatever getting closed by the game on exit?

Thanks for your help!

[Permittivity]

Can you provide some more details? What operating system are you running? What browser are you using? Can you still access HTTPS using a different browser? Are you playing the game multiplayer or singleplayer when this happens?

The game should certainly not be changing any sort of global game state.

As for ports, connecting outbound to sites does not involve any particular ports being opened or closed. One thing that does matter is that there is a maximum number of simultaneous connections that you can have based off the total number of dynamic local ports available. If you want to check that, then on Windows you can do that from an administrator command prompt with the command "netstat -ab" to print all current connections. You'll probably have a hundred lines of output or so if everything is normal. Tens of thousands would be a problem. If there are a ton, you can see what process created all of them.

[Permittivity]

A few more questions I thought of:

What is the exact error you get when trying to access https pages?

Are you playing the game via Steam? The Steam overlay has a browser which could potentially be a vector between the game and browser behavior. Can you still reproduce the problem if you disable the Steam overlay?

Is it really necessary to reboot? What if you log out and log back in? It's possible some process is left running when the game exists, and logging out should be sufficient to take care of that.

[steinio]

Did you try to access goggle via https after a Factorio session or only tried to start a Netflix movie?

I guess it could only a Netflix and DRM via hdmi problem when Factorio quits and the monitor state gets changed.

Please try to replicate without Netflix involved.

Greetings steinio

[SpaceRedleg]

Tech Specs:
Alienware A-51-R2
Intel Core i7, 3.30GHz
16GB
dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780's (2x DVI outputs from the computer...no HDMI connections.)
Windows-10 Pro 64

Actions taken to duplicate this problem today (from power-up):
Launch Factorio (thru Steam), Load Game (single player), save game, then exit after less than 1 minute (completely out).

Attempt to connect to https://www.google.com with 4 browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge):

Internet explorer:

“Waiting for google.com” in tab… (spinning circle, until timeout…)
Then:

“This page can’t be displayed
• Make sure the web address https://www.google.com is correct.
• Look for the page with your search engine.
• Refresh the page in a few minutes.
Fix connection problems (button)”

Second attempt w/ IE:
Same thing, but times-out with:
“This page can’t be displayed
Turn on TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, and TLS 1.2 in Advanced settings and try connecting to https://www.google.com again. If this error persists, it is possible that this site uses an unsupported protocol or cipher suite such as RC4 (link for the details), which is not considered secure. Please contact your site administrator.
Change settings (button)” (but I confirmed all settings are correct.)

Google Chrome:

This site can’t be reached
http://www.google.com unexpectedly closed the connection.
Try:
• Checking the connection
• Checking the proxy and the firewall
• Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED
Check your Internet connection
Check any cables and reboot any routers, modems, or other network devices you may be using.
Allow Chrome to access the network in your firewall or antivirus settings.
If it is already listed as a program allowed to access the network, try removing it from the list and adding it again.
If you use a proxy server…
Check your proxy settings or contact your network administrator to make sure the proxy server is working. If you don't believe you should be using a proxy server: Go to the Chrome menu > Settings > Show advanced settings… > Change proxy settings… > LAN Settings and deselect "Use a proxy server for your LAN".

Firefox:

“Connecting…” with spinning circle in Tab, then stops with completely blank white screen.
(same response for http://www.google.com – non-secure)

Edge browser:

Appears to work today, and also with Netflix, though this is not always the case (as it is usually Edge that I use to connect to Netflix, and previously it did not connect.)

FYI – went back to IE and others to see if something changed after Edge worked, but get the same error/no response from the others still.
At no point during this test did I have any browser or steam windows open during gameplay...just Factorio.

Thanks for the help and let me know if you need more data!

If you think this is a Steam problem, I will go check their Tech Support forums, but Factorio is the only Steam game that does this to me...

[torne]

Do you have any security/antivirus software running? My first guess would be that you have some security program which is trying to examine all network traffic and is getting into a bad state after it sees some network traffic caused by Factorio.

[SpaceRedleg]

McAfee, provided by the Department of Defense for home use - definitions up to date. Let me see if I can disable it after playing and then try secure web connections again.

Edit: Disabled McAfee Firewall and Realtime protection (the only two settings I could effect), with no change (still couldn't access https://www.google.com)

[RaumSchnee]

I did a bit of internet searching for you, and i leaned a few things:

1: things like Firefox check TLS settings for part of the HTTPS security checks (see:https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/se ... or-message)

2:WIndows 10 has been having some TLS and RDP issues intermittently, with no obvious solution(that I leaned about)
(see:https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/co ... ery_stuck/)

3: Fatorio has some custom networking protocols, definitely for packet transfer, and i susptect for authentication with Factorio servers.
(see:https://wiki.factorio.com/Multiplayer)

I suspect that when Factorio starts up, it checks the master Factorio server for updates/news/whatever. When it does this, it would implement their networking protocols. normally, those protocols would release when Factorio exits, but with Win 10 having issues with networking(#2), its possible that those custom protocols are sticking in the OS, and when an internet browser tries to use the network port, the Factorio protocols get mixed in, and so HTTPS cant verify the connection, and so blocks the connection. Rebooting works because the OS loads clean networking protocols.

As for actually helpful advice for you, I don,t have any. Maybe if you could manually reset the networking possesses(via task manager) it could fix it without a full reboot.

(Also, I'm not a network engineer,just a hobbyist programmer. If someone with real experience wants to sanity check my thoughts, it would be appreciated)

[94m3k1n9]

I suspect that when Factorio starts up, it checks the master Factorio server for updates/news/whatever. When it does this, it would implement their networking protocols. normally, those protocols would release when Factorio exits, but with Win 10 having issues with networking(#2), its possible that those custom protocols are sticking in the OS, and when an internet browser tries to use the network port, the Factorio protocols get mixed in, and so HTTPS cant verify the connection, and so blocks the connection. Rebooting works because the OS loads clean networking protocols

that's nonsense. applications use tcp/udp connections, everything on top of that is handled by the application, not the os. whatever protocols factorio uses on top of that cannot interfere with protocols used by other applications in a way you describe and it shouldn't be able to interfere with them in any other way either.

[RaumSchnee]

Like I mentioned before, I am not a network engineer, so you could be right.From what you understand of networking, what do you think is causing SpaceRedleg's problem?

According to my knowledge, TCP/UDP are the packet transport Layers, used by any Application. The applications then have their own layer. Each layer verifies transport of data according to the layer it resides in.

350px-UDP_encapsulation.svg.png (10.82 KiB) Viewed 5659 times

if a UDP/TCP packet gets corrupted mid transport, the UDP/TCP protocols would resend the packet, since the system is designed to do that. (that's what check-sums do!)If the packet gets through just fine, TCP/UDP hands the data in the packet to the application.

What the application does with it is indeed irreverent to the transport layer protocols 94m3k1n9. however, what if the packet, with the data intact, had the data: "Hello World!" (abstract, but it will get the point across) when an application gets the data, it will decode it in whatever manner it was programmed to do. say "Hello World!" was the instruction to start a multiplayer server up for Factorio. if factorio got that message, things would work great! But what if Chrome, or IE got that message. They wouldn't know what to do with it. They are not programmed to decode Factorio networking.

Now, when you write a piece of software for a computer, you don't write it so that it shares system resources. you write it like it has full use of anything in the computer. The OS 's entire job is to allow all those programs assess to the same piece of hardware if they need it. That is what multiple processes does. the programs don't all run at the same time, they run in little pieces, in order. that means that anything an application does, needs to go through the os to get to hardware, via the API

I suspect that, the API being used by Windows 10 (see site #2 in my last post) is getting stuck somehow. its sending Chrome and IE packet data with the Factorio Interpreter, rather than the Chrome or IE interpeter. And when those packets get to the web server, the HTTPS system has no clue what they are, and discards them as an insecure connection, thus causing SpaceRedleg's Problem



(Also,If you are a network engineer, i would love a detailed explanation of why i am wrong. If i have that detailed explanation, I can learn something new, and be able to help people better next time)

[Mr. Tact]

*ugh* Thanks for giving me nightmarish memories of my last Cisco exam...

[94m3k1n9]

I have no idea what might be causing his problems, edge cases like that are usually hard to figure out, especially if you don't know how to reproduce them.

While you were right on the packet resending part with tcp, udp does not take care of that on its own. Tcp connections have a state within the protocol, udp is stateless. This can be useful e. G. When you transmit video, if you miss a packet somewhere you usually would rather have a broken image shown for a fraction of a second rather than stopping the entire playback (especially on a live feed). You can of course implement a system to handle that on application layer.

To provide a way for the OS to know which application should handle a packet you use ports in the communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_(com ... etworking) should give you some details on that.

[SpaceRedleg]

Raum, et al,
Thanks for the analysis, and Raum I suspected the same type of thing. Thanks for digging up some resources.

One crazy thing today...I booted up, and first thing I used IE to read this forum post, and through a combination of hitting "Reply", realizing I wasn't logged in, and then hitting "Login" while IE was still spinning on "reply", the network suddenly locked up similar to when I exit the game. I wonder if "factorio.com" is getting flagged as hazardous or suspicious by my AV, Firewall, router, CCleaner, or some random Windows thing?

Who knows. I'll just keep rebooting until a patch causes it to start working. Like Raum, I am a part time hobbyist programmer (Started with BASIC in 4th grade, then Pascal, C+ in HS, and did my first 3 years of college as a Computer Systems Engineer, but that was in 1990. lately it has been dabbling in JS with Screeps, and learning some Python and trying to get smart on Linux again...though slowly. Studying now for my Net+, and looking at class dates for CCNA and then CISSP maybe...but it's a slow road for an old dog who has been in the Army for 22 years and spends 12 hours a day in the basement of the Pentagon...)

Thanks again for all the help!

[Permittivity]

I went and talked to a TLS subject matter expert today about this problem. What I found out is that Chrome and Firefox have their own HTTP and TLS stacks and do not use the Windows ones that IE and Edge use. That means that a bug impacting all browsers cannot be in the actual HTTPS code itself.

All browsers share the same OS TCP/IP stack, but that doesn't seem a likely culprit as outgoing HTTPS connections are indistinguishable from HTTP or other network connections so far as TCP/IP is concerned.

You should check your proxy settings. A bad proxy is the most likely vector for something that would impact all browsers and would distinguish between HTTPS and HTTP. As you have already surmised, you should look closely at any security software that might be setting itself up as a web proxy to look at traffic.