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Comcast Gunning for NAT Users
phillymjs writes: "A co-worker of mine resigned today. His new job at Comcast: Hunting down 'abusers' of the service. More specifically, anyone using NAT to connect more than one computer to their cable modem to get Internet access- whether or not you're running servers or violating any other Acceptable Use Policies. Comcast has an entire department dedicated to eradicating NAT users from their network. We knew this was coming since this Slashdot article from two months ago, but did anyone think they'd already be harassing people that are using nothing more than the bandwidth for which they are paying? It makes me very happy that my DSL kit arrived yesterday, and I'll be cancelling my Comcast cable modem early next week." Earthlink and Comcast have both been advertising lately their single-household, multi-computer services (and additional fees) -- probably amusing to many thousands of broadband-router owners, at least until the cable companies really crack down.
How exactly are they going to do this?? I mean NAT isn't really something you can look at it. The same ip is beind used just by different systems behind the NAT server.
Does anyone have any info on exactly how they plan to do this?
How would they go about doing this, being that NAT makes all data coming in and out look as if it was coming from a single IP? They could try to look at bandwidth, but you could easily make the case that you were just downloading a lot from one pc. What practical techniques can be used to detect NAT, and what can be done to avoid them?
Brandon Tallent
How do you even detect NAT?
There's this which describes a way to find webservers behind NAT, but what about the general case?