Author Topic: Comcast Packet Shaping? Does it hurt AHII? (Read 359 times)

REP0MAN · « **on:** November 01, 2007, 09:21:33 PM »

Hey Skuzzy,

I was reading about the Comcast fiasco with Packet Shaping and Comcast's vigilant battle against Torrent users and I recalled you saying that this practice is causing issues with AH? Is that the case? I'm not very well educated to shaping. What issues does it cause with gaming, most notably AHII? I'm curious.

Thanks!

For you Comcast sufferers....

REP0MAN · « **Reply #1 on:** November 01, 2007, 09:49:11 PM »

I've answered my own question.....

"The Sandvine application reads packets that are traversing the network boundary. If the application senses that outbound P2P traffic is higher than a threshold determined by Comcast, Sandvine begins to interrupt P2P protocol sequences that would initiate a new transfer from within the Comcast network to a peer outside of the Comcast network. The interruption is accomplished by sending a perfectly forged TCP packet (correct peer, port, and sequence numbering) with the RST (reset) flag set. This packet is obeyed by the network stack or operating system which drops the connection."

CTD.....

Sorry to waste bbs space for my own educational gain.

DerHelm · « **Reply #2 on:** November 02, 2007, 12:56:17 AM »

Here's the thing about that.

They could be shaping any traffic. This device does deep packet inspection. As far as we know it's only shaping P2P bit torrent right now. But you are looking at one shady ISP here.

A few months ago a company like Sandvine aproach the ISP I work for. Over and over again, pre meeting, durring the meeting and after. Their number one pitch was about how they could do indiscriminate traffic shapping for aggregate bandbidth to lower you 95 percetile.

Their second was how they could do it to P2P traffic. More over meaning anything that goes threw it. Hell it can tell what IRC network you are on, what server you connected to and what channels you are in.

I don't see Comcast passing up it's key feature. They have in so many actions shown that they are more will to cripple customers connection than to just flipp'n buy more bandwidth.

So with that being said, if they have that feature enabled, then you could be experiencing higher latency at any time their bandwidth reaches a specified quota on any of their providers.

wabbit · « **Reply #3 on:** November 03, 2007, 01:42:46 PM »

So far comsuck hasn't affected my Aces High connection. I guess I'm lucky, (for the time being).

Of my 7 home pages, only the main one has been working for the past three weeks though. The others all want me to accept cookies just to browse the pages. Comsuck says they're working on it, and it will be fixed in a few days...
(of course they've been saying that for three weeks...)

(change of subject...)
I'm currently looking for a replacement ISP. Anyone have any good things to say about Copowi or Dish Network's new internet connectivity?

Wabbit

REP0MAN · « **Reply #4 on:** November 03, 2007, 02:54:58 PM »

Satellite internet connectivity is going to plague you with far more problems that Comcast ever will.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by "7 of your home pages" but cookie enablement is client based and not something that Comcast has anything to do with. Comcast supplies a connection to the internet. It is your choice of where you want to go and where you want to accept cookies from. If you have a decent grasp of how to handle cookies, I can't imagine why you are not accepting them. Aces High BBS makes you accept cookies to keep you logged in. I know they aren't out to get me with their cookies.

Packet Shaping is only targeting large bandwidth users (currently over 300G or so per month). Comcast is trying to save bandwidth while at the same time trying to play to the RIAA and other Copyrighting bullies to put a dent in the loss these companies, artists and media outlets loose to P2P sharing and other methods of file sharing. I can see where the die hard AHII flyer could find themselves with an issue, maybe towards the end of the month, but this would include a lot more information transfer than just AH alone to be the issue.

Is it right? I don't think so. But Comcast can do what they want and I doubt the FCC is going to do a dang thing about it.

DerHelm · « **Reply #5 on:** November 04, 2007, 05:56:03 AM »

Yeah, Sat is going to get you no where for gaming.
You ping will be worse than dial up in Japan!

The cookie dealio you are having could be alot of things these days.
It could be on your side , but if this just sarted happening recently...
It could be a any number of devices used to account webtraffic to your account for sale, insert/replace ads on sites, even the Sandvine, anything not configured correctly and/or isn't correctly handeling you IP packet header correctly. If it's really bad, you could go to http://www.ipchicken.com and see the IP of the actual device doing it instead of your IP. If that happens some Engineer should get fired.

The Packet shapping itself that was just put in is meant for bit torrent customers. I can't say enough about how shady they are about this.
They said it was to stop people from seeding since it's technically you can't use you connection as a hosted service. But it's BS. Comcast is a mostly inbound traffic user. To stop you from seeding will not make any difference on their bill. No tier 1 bandwidth provider changes you on inbound and outbound, only the higher of the 2 on a 95 percentile. So the only way to save money is to stop you from down loading.

But the packet shapping isn't for individual abandwidth consumption. They have a different system for that, and your bandwidth limits vary from location to location. People have been fap'd. You can google "comcast limits" and see the horror stories and even news articles done on that. You shoudl be able to find one about info on your area depending on where that is. This will effect you gaming if you do to much of anything, then try to game. (assuming you aceed your invisable un document limit)

But the Traffic shaping I am bettign they are doing effects every one via the Sandvine. Basiclly, at any given Core Router where they connect to teir Teir 1 provider, they set a traffic limit. If they did this via the router you would get packet loss after the packet queue is exceeded. But with a Sandvine and the like, it is for the most part retards you packet info several ways (including packet queueing and holding downs and fake spoofed info) to where ever you are requesting data. This will effect you gaming once that that limit is hit till the current aggregate traffic in your area goes down.

Your best bet Wabbit is to find out what is available in your area first then from there figure out which is best by a few things.

multihomed Tier 1 providers.
Decent Peering (Places like google, youtube, some thing that shows they are in a good data center with a good meet point)
No traffic limits!!!
Not reselling connections (Like how you can get Earthlink cable via Time Warner, it's just Road Runner, cept you call some one else for support and use a different mail server)

Perk Points for not out sourcing.

Just make sure you don't go off the opinion of one person who says "I've never had a problem with ..." Picking an ISP for you is a lot like picking up on a chick. Some people standards may not be the same as yours.

wabbit · « **Reply #6 on:** November 04, 2007, 12:09:02 PM »

The cookie problem is due to comsuck messing with their home page servers. The real problem is I will not accept cookies, (except session cookies from sites I TRUST, like Aces), for any reason.

I'm aware of the problems with sat-based isp's. I'm just looking for anyone's experience with them more out of couriousity, then to switch to them.

I was hoping someone out there has had experience with Copowi. The advertise 'net neutrality', but their current pricing is expensive when you compare the speeds (256k) to other isps, running much faster speeds for only $5-10 more.

My main problem with comsuck is that they are now forcing all customers into loading and using flash to access their main page, and for customer's to access their account settings.

I have absolutely no use for flash, and don't want it on my system. I don't want to have to deal with LSO's, (ie; flash cookies), or flash-based advertisements. I see no savings in using flash to host vids, over other formats. I compared flash vids with non-flash vids, and there was only approximately 1mb's difference in most cases. It doesn't appear to load/play any faster, and because of LSO's, can be abused easily, especially since most people don't even know flash is saving LSO's on their systems, or what to do about them.

I just wish they would fix their home page servers so I can access my other pages. Comsuck gives each user 7 email addresses, and for each address a certain amount of separate home page space. At present only the home page space for my main email address is working without cookie acceptance. It was down for a week but they finally fixed that server. The others will come back, or so comsuck claims, but three weeks downtime is a bit long...

Note:

For you Firefox users that use flash, but want and easy way to manage LSO's (flash cookies), there is an extension called 'Objection' that looks like it would do the job for ya, along with using the flash 'settings' app. It doesn't appear to be listed on the main mozilla extensions page, but I found it here:

http://objection.mozdev.org/

It also looks like the author is getting ready to stop updating it, so you might want to save a copy of the 'xpi' locally, just in case.

Wabbit