PSA: OpenSSL Connectivity Issues (FIXED)

[Packetdancer]

On 2023-02-13 at 6:20 PM, Trentgaming said:

Same here can only play with VPN, yet i'm being told its my ISP from support.

So, that "it's your ISP" is... probably not quite true, but also likely not quite false either.

A bit of elaboration, after some hasty investigation...

The endpoint in question (which evidently gets edited away by the forum software, so we'll just refrain from naming it here, but it IS listed in screenshots) is hosted by Akamai Technologies, a massive provider who handles load-balanced content distribution. (Hence the mention in earlier posts of "our network partners".) To quote from Wikipedia, who are gonna summarize more succinctly than my migraine-soaked brain can presently manage:

Quote

The company operates a network of servers worldwide and rents capacity of the servers to customers wanting to increase efficiency of their websites by using Akamai owned servers located near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai's domain name system to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content. Akamai's mapping system assigns each user to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms such as stable matching and consistent hashing, enabling more reliable and faster web downloads.

The short form of this being "when you look up an Akamai-hosted server name, it tries to find an instance of that server 'nearest' to you in terms of Internet topography, which hypothetically means you get the fastest possible connection to said server." This is why it appears to be tied to a user's ISP -- because which Akamai-hosted server you go to is dependent on the IP address making the DNS request -- and why a VPN can work around it; by virtue of coming out of a different endpoint, Akamai's DNS directs you to a different Akamai-hosted server. (And also why editing a hosts file could, hypothetically, work around it by just doing an end-run around Akamai's DNS.)

Without poking at how the Warframe-specific API in question is utilized, it would not surprise me if something happened to cause certain Akamai-hosted machines to not pick up a chain-of-authority update. (Or, alternatively, to pick up a chain-of-authority update early, invalidating certificates that are still supposed to be current for another couple of weeks; there is a scheduled chain-of-trust update for Windows due on February 28th...)

At any rate, depending on how they have those particular servers implemented... it's quite possible that whether or not you get the error is dependent on your ISP (while not actually being the fault of your ISP), and also could be outside of DE's ability to directly resolve if the issue is on Akamai's side and requires Akamai to deploy some fix/change.

(But "it's your ISP" is a very conveniently short way to close off a ticket...)

That probably does next to nothing to resolve anyone's frustration, if they're getting this error, but hopefully provides useful -- or at least, moderately interesting -- possible context...

[Justint88]

On 2/14/2023 at 2:49 PM, Revrand said:

Proton VPN, it has a free option. Only reason why I'm using it.

 

update, everything appears to be working fine on steam for me now. 

[Brynslustafir]

I submitted my support ticket more than 24 hours ago and have not received a response. Is anyone at DE paying any attention to this at all?