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Network Measurement Tool Detects Reset Packets

Posted by kdawson on from the getting-it-on-record dept.

kickassweb writes "If you think your ISP is sniffing packets, or worse yet, sending reset packets to stop torrents, there's now a beta Network Measurement Tool to detect them, courtesy of Lauren Weinstein of the Net Neutrality Squad. It's released under the LGPL, and runs under Win2K, XP, and Vista. Quoting: 'While the reset packet detection system included in this release is of interest, NNSquad views this package as more important in the long run as a development base for a broad range of network measurement functionalities and associated communications and analysis efforts.'"

7 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. RST blocking? by Applekid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IANANG (I Am Not A Network Guru) but, what harm could happen if, say, all reset packets were just ignored and dropped by the network stack? All the hubbub about figuring out if your ISP is sabotaging you seems less useful than just blocking the shanangans and moving on with your life.

    --
    More Twoson than Cupertino
    1. Re:RST blocking? by cduffy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Without RST packets, how are you supposed to know if the remote host is legitimately closing the connection?

    2. Re:RST blocking? by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Assuming that you have a device capable of doing so, which I doubt many SoHo router/firewalls are, then there are not too many issues with dropping RST packets, and none of the them are show stoppers. It'll take a little longer before your web browser or whatever can determine that the remote site is genuinely down or otherwise refusing connections but that's about it from the "end-user" point of view. If you have a Linux proxy box however, then IPTables is perfectly capable of doing this for you, and can even do so in a sensible way - ie. just for BitTorrent traffic, just to pick a protocol at random.

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      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  2. Re: Network Measurement Tool Detect Reset Packets by CogDissident · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well yeah, but having a tool where you can have joe-average download it, press a button, and get all upset at Comcast has much more value.

  3. Re:tcpdump? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, probably. I know you can do this with Wireshark, and wireshark and tcpdump both use libpcap.

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    My blog
  4. Re:Grammar? by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From The Site:

    Please let us know if you're interested in coordinating on ports to other platforms, such as Linux, BSD, and Mac, or embedded hardware (e.g. WRT54G router).

    Special thanks to John Bartas for all of his diligent and continuing work on this software for NNSquad. So, I would assume that its just the one guy working on it (at the moment) which would explain why its Windows Only, its probably his chosen platform.
  5. Throttling should not use RESET by redelm · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Not that [ISP] managment have ever been known for great intelligence, but throttling connections via RESET is just plain dumb. The client will just retry and extra data transferred.


    The correct (and difficult to detect) way of throttling is by delaying ACK packets a few ms. Then normal TCP congestion control does all the nice throttling for you.


    The ethics of throttling are a different matter: one side says they've been promised unlimited, and the other wants to be fair to all customers.