Ask Slashdot: How To Diagnose Traffic Throttling and Work Around It?

Posted by timothy on Friday August 23, 2013 @02:06PM from the watch-where-the-soap-bubbles-emerge dept.

Aguazul2 writes "I live in Peru and use OpenVPN to connect to my own Linux VPS in the UK for non-live TV. Recently the VPN connection has slowed to a crawl (5% previous rate). Further investigation shows that all connections to my VPS from Peru (even HTTP) are equally slow, whilst the rest of the 'net seems fine. My VPS host says they do no traffic shaping, and connections from Germany to the VPS are fast. This leaves the NSA and Telefonica (Movistar) as suspects. Could the NSA be slowing all VPNs to/from South America because of Snowden and Greenwald? A traceroute shows traffic going through domains with NYC in their name — are my packets being indefinitely detained in transit? Or maybe it is Telefonica and their Sandvine traffic management? Either way this certainly isn't network neutrality, especially on an 'unlimited' plan. Is there a way to tell for certain who is throttling me? If Telefonica have throttled traffic to/from that one IP address, what options do I have to work around it? It seems that separate connections are throttled independently, so can I multiplex over many UDP ports without having to hack OpenVPN myself? This is really frustrating, especially with two untrustworthy parties on the route. I wonder, is this kind of mess the future of the internet?"

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Re:NSA by whoever57 · 2013-08-23 14:49 · Score: 5, Interesting

People need to understand that it is paramount to the NSA that they are covert.

Indeed. When working for a company that sold telecom and networking IP blocks, we received more than one request for the receive part ONLY of an Ethernet MAC. The companies that enquired did not make test equipment, but were known for secrecy and selling to the US government. What possible reason does such a company have for an Ethernet MAC that receives only?

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The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
an incorrect theory, because port mirroring by raymorris · 2013-08-23 16:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

That may have been their theory, or it may have been they wondered if US gov was intentionally slowing VPN connections from that part of the world.
If the theory was that capturing data would slow it down, the answer is "no". For that, you'd use port mirroring. Where a switch or router would normally take data in on one line and output it on another, you set it to accept data on the one line and output it on TWO others simultaneously. The data still flows at the same speed. It just flows to two locations separately - the intended recipient and the government.