ntl traffic shaping/blocking ports?

CyberGhost

Has anyone experienced some slow downs with ntl lately? my emule started acting up, I changed ports and it's still says "ports unreachable" and constantly drops connections.

tman

I'm getting full whack (700KBps+) out of torrents at the moment, using a random high port for those...
are you using a router at all?

CyberGhost

Under further inspection, turns out to be my router(started working when I turned upnp on), sorry! false alarm

christophicus

What is upnp should I turn it on for my ntl connection?

CyberGhost

It stands for Universal Plus and Play, it's a feature in routers, it automatically and correctly forwards ports between LAN computers and WAN(when a request is received from WAN/Internet, it directs the signal to the correct computer on your LAN, you don't have UPnP on or manually directed ports, the signal won't know where to go, and you'll have connection problems, not all programs need forwarded ports, but most P2P programs do), so you don't have do it manually, if you are directly connected with modem only, you are fine!

Lots of places recommend turning Upnp off for security reasons, but for some reason my router won't forward ports when I enter them manually, so, have to turn it on.

Snake Plisken

No there is deffo a problem with NTL and torrents, my upload speeds for the last 2 weeks have drift down to 2 or 3 kb's a second I've checked everything Port forward is set up correctly but speed for uploading is crap, download seem to be the norm (crappy 4.5 meg max on a 6 meg service)

Snake

christophicus

Have you put an upload limit on your client app?

Big Chief

ping times on uk servers 20-39, must be doing something better recently.. are we still routing through amsterdam?

must check that infact...

Big Chief

1 12 ms 5 ms 21 ms 10.92.32.1
2 21 ms 14 ms 7 ms 089-101-162073.ntlworld.ie [89.101.162.73]
3 17 ms 10 ms 8 ms dbln-t2core-a-ge-2-2-0-0.aorta.net [213.46.165.9
]
4 24 ms 44 ms 28 ms nl-ams-rc-02-pos-2-0.chellonetwork.com [213.46.1
60.17]
5 26 ms 39 ms 22 ms uk-lon01a-rd1-ge-7-0.aorta.net [213.46.174.33]
6 32 ms 21 ms 22 ms 213.46.174.126
7 18 ms 26 ms 26 ms te1-3.cr05.tn5.bb.pipex.net [195.66.224.29]
8 27 ms 35 ms 21 ms g1-1-6.ar01.tn5.bb.pipex.net [62.72.140.142]
9 29 ms 24 ms 22 ms ge-0-0-0-3801.jolt-gw.cust.pipex.net [212.241.24
1.14]
10 23 ms 20 ms 28 ms secure.jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65]

Trace complete.


no more routing through holland ^

wonder how long it will last for this time though

fatherdougalmag

Amsterdam still there:

4 24 ms 44 ms 28 ms nl-ams-rc-02-pos-2-0.chellonetwork.com [213.46.160.17]

christophicus

O well at least the ping times are fairly good.

Snake Plisken

Hi Nope I've checked that upload is unlimited... Also tried Bit Tornado same issue.

Snake

christophicus wrote:

Have you put an upload limit on your client app?

christophicus

Im getting ****e torrent speeds againn.

DemonOfTheFall

Well I confirmed last week that they're blocking port 119 for newsgroups in evenings, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're blocking or shaping torrents.

christophicus

Hmm this is very disturbing news indeed. Any chance you can take a look adn download a torrent?


EDIT: I have actually been getting a steady 550 KB/s now with my torrents for about 10 mins now . SO either they stopped shaping at 12.40 or they never were. not tonight at least.

Snake Plisken

Is there any way to see what ports they are blocking? I've tried various different ports on my setup with no joy? This UPC crowd are a shower of w@nkers

Snake

OfflerCrocGod

christophicus wrote:

I have actually been getting a steady 550 KB/s now with my torrents for about 10 mins now . SO either they stopped shaping at 12.40 or they never were. not tonight at least.

It might just be that they are traffic shaping during "rush hours" and then removing traffic control in the late hours/early morning. Get your torrents in the middle of the night then to get the best speeds.

ct_roy

something is definitely going on with our good friends in ntl.

my pings have been going crazy this eve (from super fast to super slow - through amsterdam sometimes, staying in dublin others - plus no correlation with dub/amsterdam and good/bad pings)

i also think they must have started meddling with p2p traffic - up to 2 weeks ago my torrents were normally quite stable and consistent

where as now it's next or near impossible to grab anything over 100mb over the course of an evening

where as previous you could pull down 300mb in 2 hours no probs

Bob24

ct_roy wrote:

i also think they must have started meddling with p2p traffic - up to 2 weeks ago my torrents were normally quite stable and consistent

Same here, it was fine +/- 10 days ago and now it is very slow. I also think they are doing nasty things.

But isn't transport encryption in bittorrent supposed to prevent traffic shaping? I tried to enable it in Azureus and I can see most of my connections are encrypted, but it hasn't improved the situation ...

Peanut

Bob24 wrote:

Same here, it was fine +/- 10 days ago and now it is very slow. I also think they are doing nasty things.

But isn't transport encryption in bittorrent supposed to prevent traffic shaping? I tried to enable it in Azureus and I can see most of my connections are encrypted, but it hasn't improved the situation ...

There are a number of different ways for the ISP to prioritise traffic, they could use something like "give x amount of bandwidth to known protocols" and give scraps to the rest etc. i.e. you can still degrade torrent speed without actually recognising what it is.

bushy...

Peanut wrote:

There are a number of different ways for the ISP to prioritise traffic, they could use something like "give x amount of bandwidth to known protocols" and give scraps to the rest etc. i.e. you can still degrade torrent speed without actually recognising what it is.

Finally a bit of sense , " blocking ports " wouldn't make much sense , and sensing p2p might get expensive , cheapest option is to let what you know through at full whack. Kinda like bouncer on the door theory

DemonOfTheFall

It really isn't a bit of sense though. That tactic hammers games/voice comms/everything else that isn't web or email. And if it comes to it, people will just start using port 443 for their torrents.

christophicus

why thank you for letting us know that thatport works for torrents. Why did you say if it comes to it?? is that port used for something else aswell?

Bob24

christophicus wrote:

why thank you for letting us know that thatport works for torrents. Why did you say if it comes to it?? is that port used for something else aswell?

For HTTPS. However you don't chose the port used by the other peer, and they could filter incoming https connections but no outgoing ones (ie filter it when other people use that port to connect to you but not when you use it to connect somewhere else so that your have no problem to access HTTPS we servers), which would make using that port useless because the other peers will be filtered when they try to connect to you, and you can not choose the port you use for outgoing connections.

I find it kind of ridiculous though to filter everything but well known protocols (HTTP/FTP/POP/... are definitely not the services requiring the best QoS)

Dariukas

Snake Plisken wrote:

No there is deffo a problem with NTL and torrents, my upload speeds for the last 2 weeks have drift down to 2 or 3 kb's a second I've checked everything Port forward is set up correctly but speed for uploading is crap, download seem to be the norm (crappy 4.5 meg max on a 6 meg service)

Snake

my upload speed for last 5 days can't get over 5kb/s it used to be 50kb/s with no probs before...

christophicus

My upload speed is hitting 50kB/s no problem

Peanut

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

It really isn't a bit of sense though. That tactic hammers games/voice comms/everything else that isn't web or email. And if it comes to it, people will just start using port 443 for their torrents.

Of course it's an arms race that no-one can win, however more standard services usually tend to be more well defined in terms of packet headers etc., so it can be easier to positively discriminate against them by inspecting packets.

That said, it will never be possible to traffic shape perfectly as any given protocol can usually masquerade/tunnel as something else.

christophicus

I have just opened up Utorrent and done teh port check. Im not getting any downstream of upstream and the port test says the port is blocked. I have not chacnged any settings and utorrent was working fine last night.

Dariukas

maybe your local address keeps changing ? from time to time it happens to me for some reason , so each time i have to change setting in router

christophicus

Hmm utorrent is working for me now. I didnt change anything.odd.

Snake Plisken

Well my upload speed is still piss poor, On Tuesday evening it was hitting 50kb but ever since its gone back down to a max of 8kb's a second, now I know your seeding speed depends on how many seeders and Leechers are on the torrent, but I'm seeding some of my own torrents on private trackers and and there is only 2-3 max leechers, and I"m still getting crap speed. Downloads are fine, So why would they hit uploads???

Snake