Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I've stayed away from wireless providers because of the burst rates vs. the long term rates. Perhaps your ISP is using equipment from Motorola/Netxnet which would give you those sorts of rates (it's a pseudo WiMax implementation).

Etheric started with Trango gear, not sure what they're using now.

Anyhow, one thing to be aware of in speed tests is that they test very short terms speeds. It fools a lot of us who have Comcast. Comcast has a burst mode as well and I test out at 25 Mbs but my speeds after the first 15 to 20 MB are max'd at 8 Mb/sec.

There's no soft cap or throttling of traffic on Etheric that I've observed. I've seen sustained downloads of 1.1-1.3 MB/sec from servers for extended periods (when the other end is fast enough). Then again, I'm paying quite a bit more than mainstream broadband rates (though I've no regrets).

I'm fortunate enough to have a choice of service providers where I'm located. I wouldn't touch Comcast with a barge poll personally. Terms of use aren't acceptable to me, and the standard of service would drive me crazy. Then there's the filtering, blocking and throttling they do - like the phone company telling me what kinds of conversations I can have on 'their' phone. And yet no egress filtering of known worm/virus traffic.

I was using DSL for a while, but ended up with two lines, from different providers. Outages were common enough I couldn't count on one, and I'd have to escalate a couple of levels of CSRs before I could have an intelligent conversation about the problem ('unplug your modem for 30 seconds sir', 'oh, so you're not using a single Windows XP PC with no firewall? then that's not a configuration we support, sir').

Anyhow, it's late and I'm drifting far off-topic...

-- Paul

[MaxH]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

I wouldn't touch Comcast with a barge poll personally. Terms of use aren't acceptable to me, and the standard of service would drive me crazy. Then there's the filtering, blocking and throttling they do - like the phone company telling me what kinds of conversations I can have on 'their' phone. And yet no egress filtering of known worm/virus traffic.

Great quote there, and an even better point. When I find bots signing up for some of the vBulletin and phpBB boards I run (and you can always tell by the way the info is filled out), the domestic IPs are often Comcast's. I'd bet if they simply did some better screening, they wouldn't have to worry about people using too much of the bandwidth for which they signed up.

[NA9D]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Paul,

Sounds like you have a great provider. That's awesome. Wish we had stuff like that here. I'm stuck with Comcast Business. They have way better terms than the residential services, but still not as good as what it sounds like you have!

Good to have you here..

[PaulC]

Re: Outbound (uplink) traffic shaping

Sounds like you have a great provider. That's awesome. Wish we had stuff like that here. I'm stuck with Comcast Business. They have way better terms than the residential services, but still not as good as what it sounds like you have!

I'm lucky, no doubt about it. It's not all roses, but they definitely care about the service they're providing to their customers. I hope they remain successful, I'd hate to go back to some huge uncaring ISP.

Good to have you here..

Thanks - nice of you to say so

Great quote there, and an even better point.

Thanks

When I find bots signing up for some of the vBulletin and phpBB boards I run (and you can always tell by the way the info is filled out), the domestic IPs are often Comcast's. I'd bet if they simply did some better screening, they wouldn't have to worry about people using too much of the bandwidth for which they signed up.

With the number of subscribers these huge ISPs have, they could easily spot an abnormally large number of connections all hitting the same IRC server, and chop off the control channel at its source. Doesn't matter how many bots in your botnet if you can't issue commands to them

But they're not even doing the basics, like nuking well-known worm propagation traffic. The Snort project has done the hard work of figuring out and distributing the signatures, so there's really little excuse. It comes off as a complete disinterest in the wellbeing of their customer's machines, and by extension, poor net responsibility.

Maybe I'm crazy, but in my opinion known malicious traffic should never leave their network. Just think of the upraw if some major corporation had the same attitude - let thousands of infected machine run loose on their network, doing nothing to prevent their activities, and largely ignoring external problem reports? The CIO would be fired within days, and never find another job in the field. Why isn't someone like Comcast and SBC held to the same standard by their customers? or an even higher one?

To use another phone analogy: If there were a phone company that did nothing about abusive anonymous phone calls you received from random phone numbers every 5 seconds, day and night, how long would they have your business? how long would other phone companies continue to accept calls originating from their network?

I wonder if the various security-related government organizations have put any thought into what kind of threat a large botnet poses. Passively, that's a great way to break cryptography. Actively, it could saturate any internet-connected service at will. And not just web sites or email servers; with the rise of VoIP, it's starting to be possible to attack the public phone system in the same way. Suppose someone found a vunerability in the Cisco VoIP system widely used by corporations? or cracked the security of that OOMA product just launched?

Ok, enough ranting. This has nothing to do traffic shaping or Vudu in general. Whatever you do, don't ask me about credit companies and identity theft

(related subject: check out http://dshield.org - they accept and process firewall logs, and provide aggregated info back. They also have a 'fightback' service that emails abuse reports to the NOC of a given netblock for machines seen attacking multiple targets. free service.)