Steam Datagram Relay (SDR)
Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) is Valve's virtual private gaming network. Using our APIs, you can not only carry your game traffic over the Valve backbone that is dedicated for game content, you also gain access to our network of relays. Relaying the traffic protects your servers and players from DoS attack, because IP addresses are never revealed. All traffic you receive is authenticated, encrypted, and rate-limited. Furthermore, for a surprisingly high number of players, we can also find a faster route through our network, which actually improves player ping times.
- Valve
gbans provides a few features to support SDR functionality:
- Fetching the correct FakeIP address. When updating the status via rcon, if the fake sdr ip has changed, it will be updated.
- If enabled, there is support for automatically updating DNS records as well via cloudflare API. No other providers are currently supported.
When you enable SDR on your servers, you lose the ability to do any sort of IP / CIDR / ASN based bans. You are limited to steamid bans since the clients are also given dynamic fake SDR addresses as well. The pros and cons of this should be weighed by your administrator before changing these settings.