How to Work Around Broken Port-80 Routing?

Dr. Zowie writes "My ISP places an opaque (intended to be transparent) web proxy between me and the rest of the world. It is causing me problems due to misconfiguration or misdesign. My question is twofold. On the micro level, what can I do in the short term to work around the broken routing (in the long term, I switch ISPs if it's not fixed)? On the macro level, what can we as a community do to prevent breakage of the net on a global scale by poorly designed routing hacks?"

Dr. Zowie continues: "I use a regional ISP with otherwise-very-good policies. However, they seem to be intercepting anything that comes from my home net on port 80, so that they can ``transparently'' cache web requests based on the payload of those packets. The proxy seems to work rather well in most cases: I never noticed it until I started using OpenNIC. Then I found that some web pages that should have resolved OK through the OpenNIC system failed even though routing on different ports worked OK.

"I did some experimentation using ``telnet'' on port 80 directly, and found that packets are being routed based only on the payload regardless of the original destination address: I can (for example) retrieve the Slashdot front page by using ``telnet www.google.com 80'' and asking for "http://www.slashdot.org http/1.1". The tech support folks seem to be stonewalling me: the main contact tells me that the behavior is "not broken" even though it clearly violates RFC 1812, the standard set of rules for IP routing.

"The practice of ``transparent'' proxy routing seems to be growing more widespread. It appears to break the internet standard in a way that works for most folks for now, but that breaks port 80 usage in general. Looking ahead, this breakage seems like a growing nightmare waiting to happen. At the very least, I expect more instances of my particular problem to appear as folks give up on the corporate hegemony of ICANN. More insidiously, transparent proxy routers break the layered nature of the internet protocol and restrict the flexibility that made it work in the first place. One would hope that such proxies would at least act like routers when the fancier proxying fails, but at least my ISP's doesn't. What about your ISP's?"

Comments

My Experience on ISP with faulty service

[Jucius Maximus]

I used to have an ISP that, although they allowed you to have your own site (on their webspace,) loading the site was just damn SLOW for anyone who tried. It was much faster if the pages were hosted somewhere on another continent compared to an ISP with a server in the same city.

The thing is, they probably won't listen to problems like this, or your proxy issue in most cases. But I found a way to make them listen to you:

Phone them up saying that you want to cancel the service. Mention something about their web hosting being broken. They will probably say that they will have a management person phone you back to confirm the process.

When they do phone back, for me, the call was like "Hello, there was a call eariler about a slow connection?" And at this point you have someone on the line who is interested in helping you, has power in the organisation to really fix things (because they're management or a senior tech) and they want to get your issue fixed to they don't lose your business. And THIS is when you really try to explain what's going on.

This was my experience. Perhaps it will work for you.

Re:corrections, suggestions, etc

[Phroggy]

Tech support people are lazy, however, in some cases, and may just opt to cancel you.

Au contraire. Tech support people are tired of listening to customers whine about problems that tech support people cannot fix. If customers have unreasonable expectations, and refuse to listen to us, it's far better for the company if they just cancel service and go elsewhere (becoming somebody else's problem).

Also, non-chalance about canceling service is sometimes the best way to make customers understand that we really are doing our best to help them, and we're not just blowing them off. Sounds weird, but here's an example:

Customer has a problem with their DSL service. We've identified that the problem lies with the phone company. Phone company has given us a commit date of Tuesday by end of business day for repair to be complete. For whatever reason, the customer feels like they've been dragged around, and their service isn't getting fixed. Customer says if they're not up and running by 9:00am Monday morning, they're cancelling service.

Customer expects us to bend over backwards to get them up and running by 9:00am Monday morning. We can't. There is absolutely nothing we can do. It's out of our hands. Customer needs to understand this. Customer will have the same problem at any competing DSL ISP, but we're the ones who have identified the problem and are getting it fixed.

We respond by repeating to the customer that we have been given a commit time of Tuesday by end of business day, but that we cannot guarantee that the issue will be resolved by then. We then offer to the customer that if this is unacceptible and they'd prefer to cancel service, although we'd hate to lose them as a customer, we'd be more than happy to transfer them to someone who can take care of that.

This has the effect of making it clear to the customer that we really mean what we say. Usually, they shut up, keep their account, and let us do our jobs. Often, they'll ask to be transferred to get the account cancelled, then hang up during the transfer.

The alternative is to offer the customer incentives to try to convince them to stay with us, such as offering a free month of service, or a credit on their account. This costs us money, and gains nothing - if the customer has the expectation that we're willing to give him free service, he'll try to take advantage of it in the future. Far too many ISPs have failed for this very reason.

At the last few ISPs I've worked for, nearly all my coworkers have been genuinely interested in helping the customer, and we've been fortunate to have management that allows us to do so. I understand that at some companies this is not the case; those are obviously the ones to avoid.

Sorry for ranting. Getting back on track: ultimatums like "if you don't fix this problem, I'll cancel my service" sometimes are a good idea. That will tell you whether or not you can get the issue resolved. Be prepared to actually cancel, because if they can't resolve the issue, that's what will happen. If they can but just don't want to, threatening to cancel may just be the incentive they need to get it done.