Steam library on NAS, only games with anti-cheat won't run.

[HotSauceFart]

Hey guys, thanks for helping, so short story short, I grabbed a nas and mapped a network drive, giving myself full access and admin privileges.

 

I've installed my steam library on there and runs games no problem, unless they have an anti-cheat, they won't run. This happens regardless whether or not I'm the only one using the nas.

 

My best example would be ARK, I've installed it plus all of my mods, when I run it I get an error saying "Failed to launch battle-eye". However if I choose to run it without anti-cheat/battle-eye I can start and get into the game fast with max settings in 1440P, I've tried many games that use EasyAnti-cheat and they just claim that the anti-cheat is not installed, I've tried re-installing and verifying the files.

 

Is it some kind of firewall issue? Can someone help me get these games running, it's only games with anti-cheat that won't run.

 

I'm using an Asustor 1104T with 4 x 2tb SSD in RAID 0

Qnap QSW-1105-5T-US 2500mb switch

CAT 7 ethernet cable

ASUS XG-C100C 10G network card

WIN 10

[Aragorn-]

how is the NAS drive mounted?

 

over CIFS/SMB?

 

Some software wont like "drives" mounted via CIFS/SMB as they dont act like real storage devices. It would make sense that something like anti-cheat might act oddly running from a drive that doesnt really exist....

 

You could try mounting via iSCSI?

[Alex Atkin UK]

Are you unable to add more storage to the computer itself?  It makes zero sense to run modern games off network storage (smaller indies and retro games can be fine) as its way way slower than local storage.

 

The exception being iSCSI because that's a virtual drive interface which is pointless if you are able to just install them into the PC anyway (its not a network share, it mounts to a single PC at a time), its designed for servers where storage is are separate physical boxes.  I'd use USB storage rather than iSCSI anyway if you need the drive(s) external to the PC, iSCSI is for when you have a LOT of drives.

I regularly do file management over the network and locally, I will remote into my server for large folders as its just painfully slow over even a 10Gbit network due to the overhead of the network protocols, you get very low IOPS over a network and this is what you want to be high when playing games, not just bandwidth.

[zipspence]

20 minutes ago, HotSauceFart said:

Hey guys, thanks for helping, so short story short, I grabbed a nas and mapped a network drive, giving myself full access and admin privileges.

 

I've installed my steam library on there and runs games no problem, unless they have an anti-cheat, they won't run. This happens regardless whether or not I'm the only one using the nas.

 

My best example would be ARK, I've installed it plus all of my mods, when I run it I get an error saying "Failed to launch battle-eye". However if I choose to run it without anti-cheat/battle-eye I can start and get into the game fast with max settings in 1440P, I've tried many games that use EasyAnti-cheat and they just claim that the anti-cheat is not installed, I've tried re-installing and verifying the files.

 

Is it some kind of firewall issue? Can someone help me get these games running, it's only games with anti-cheat that won't run.

 

I'm using an Asustor 1104T with 4 x 2tb SSD in RAID 0

Qnap QSW-1105-5T-US 2500mb switch

CAT 7 ethernet cable

ASUS XG-C100C 10G network card

WIN 10

So I am just stating the semi obvious here even though the two guys ( @Aragorn- and @Alex Atkin UK) have talked specifically about the file mounting process which could be a big factor in this. Anti Cheat software is hardware based. So specifically, Battleye has stated that they do not support VM's which in this instance I would think that something like ARK over a NAS would be classed as a VM to them. So in the long and short of it, most anti-cheat software will look to the machines LOCAL instance of the game as well as all of the local hardware to perform its checks for hacks. If anything is even remotely off about how something is stored/launched/other programs, the software will block the online play purely due to them not checking off all the boxes for how they want to see something stored. NOW this considered, you might be able to get around this by having the NAS use USB vs ethernet for linking it to your system. But in any case if the game is not stored local I believe that most anticheat softwares will flag a NAS as an "abnormality" and not allow online play. Remember, they are looking for their "checkbox" list to be filled to ensure nothing funky is going on, specifically if something isnt how they want to see it, they dont have to allow it. 

[xbgt1]

On 1/12/2023 at 8:43 AM, HotSauceFart said:

Hey guys, thanks for helping, so short story short, I grabbed a nas and mapped a network drive, giving myself full access and admin privileges.

 

I've installed my steam library on there and runs games no problem, unless they have an anti-cheat, they won't run. This happens regardless whether or not I'm the only one using the nas.

 

My best example would be ARK, I've installed it plus all of my mods, when I run it I get an error saying "Failed to launch battle-eye". However if I choose to run it without anti-cheat/battle-eye I can start and get into the game fast with max settings in 1440P, I've tried many games that use EasyAnti-cheat and they just claim that the anti-cheat is not installed, I've tried re-installing and verifying the files.

 

Is it some kind of firewall issue? Can someone help me get these games running, it's only games with anti-cheat that won't run.

 

I'm using an Asustor 1104T with 4 x 2tb SSD in RAID 0

Qnap QSW-1105-5T-US 2500mb switch

CAT 7 ethernet cable

ASUS XG-C100C 10G network card

WIN 10

I do this same setup and have run into this more recently (last year?) You can easily correct this by going into disk management and select action and creating a new VHD. Select your NAS and mount it as say D drive. I highly recommend to only put your anticheat games and not your entire library here since I seem to have slow writes once it got too big (2+tb) but reads are full speed. I'm working on correcting this now.

[xbgt1]

2 minutes ago, xbgt1 said:

I do this same setup and have run into this more recently (last year?) You can easily correct this by going into disk management and select action and creating a new VHD. Select your NAS and mount it as say D drive. I highly recommend to only put your anticheat games and not your entire library here since I seem to have slow writes once it got too big (2+tb) but reads are full speed. I'm working on correcting this now.

It might even be ideal to put each game on it's own drive. Also each restart you have to go into disk management and reconnect it but a basic script can fix that for you.