Network Measurement Tool Detects Reset Packets

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.'"

Comments

RST blocking?

[Applekid]

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.

Re:RST blocking?

[cduffy]

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

Re:RST blocking?

[Zocalo]

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.

Re: Network Measurement Tool Detect Reset Packets

[CogDissident]

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.