[PLUG] VOIP and Comcast

[Dan Young]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Randal L. Schwartz
<merlyn at stonehenge.com> wrote:
>>>>>> "Randal" == Randal L Schwartz <merlyn at stonehenge.com> writes:
>
> Randal> Just a heads up for local folks... starting a few days ago, I appear
> Randal> to be blocked on Comcast for all torrent traffic.  Just tested it with
> Randal> the latest ubuntu distro seeded from ubuntu.org, so it's not about
> Randal> "blocking illegal content".  I'm on the west side, and I'd be curious
> Randal> to see if it's just me, or if others are also noticing this.
>
> Randal> The symptom is that Transmission (on mac) reports "status 0" when it
> Randal> tries to contact the tracker.  Normally, this is "status 200", so I
> Randal> imagine that Comcast is doing deep packet inspection, recognizing the
> Randal> tracker payload, and somehow replacing that with an empty response.
>
> I tracked it down.  Turns out that up until the recent comcast update,
> ipv6 travelled safely through my router to the nets.  Apparently, that's
> now blocked, and the tracker had an ipv6 address being advertised, which
> breaks if ipv6 isn't actually working.  My solution was to turn
> off ipv6 on my laptop... when I get more time, I'll also turn it off
> in my router so I'm not advertising v6 connections internally.

I realize that this wasn't l7 twiddling at Comcast in this case, but
this may be interesting to other users.

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic:
http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest-mlab.php

-- 
Dan Young