Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers? 46
David Hansen asks: "I want to see what problems other Slashdot users have had with @Home restricting their service. We all know that they block the SMB ports, and probably for good reason. But did you know that they won't let you access certain other machines on the @Home network? And why don't they mention any of this in their acceptable use policy? My mother and father are both @Home subscribers in the same city (different subnets). I have Linux boxes acting as firewalls in both places which cannot ping or otherwise contact each other. I can ping them both from an outside location. I discovered this and the SMB thing the hard way. What else doesn't @Home want us to do? Do other ISPs do this also? BTW, I can reach @Home users who are in other cities." I've noticed that ISPs have been filtering lots of ports in the event that users will put up servers. Do you feel that ISPs should make a list of ports that they filter available to their customers?
Broadband Restrictions (Score:3)
Upload caps (Score:3)
They've thrown away the huge lead over the DSL providers they used to have in San Diego; on the bad days the service feels worse than ISDN. I'd switch if anyone else offered service in my area.
Amazingly, they even enforce that 12KB/s cap on outbound transfers for business accounts. Pay them $300/month for a connection and you can get *twice* the performance of your old modem.
I run a server off @home... (Score:1)
It depends on your @home provider (Score:1)
Either way, I've got mine in writing.
Re:Upload caps (Score:2)
@Home Server Scans (Score:1)
Re:I run a server off @home... (Score:3)
Rather than whining about people running MP3/porn/warez servers and annoying all of the people who weren't abusing things, they could just set a daily or monthly transfer limit beyond which you'd need to switch to a different service plan. That's the really amazing thing - there's no way to remove the cap or get it set higher short of switching to another ISP. You'd think they would be interested in a way to get people to pay more for service they can easily deliver.
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:2)
(You can barely browse acceptably with more than a few computers at such low speeds and one of the selling points to the business plans is that you can run servers!)
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:1)
-Daniel
Problem is ... (Score:1)
Let me explain this with a metaphor : car sales. Say you have an old treacherous Toyota salesman with two brands of cars on his lot. One is the economy model, it's a V4 engine and no extras. The other is the luxury model, which is a V4 engine with gold-plated spark plugs and automatic everything. It's the same crap with better spark plugs that give you a 4% increase in raw horsepower (which will equate to cleaner gas consumption that might register on high-end monitoring gear). However the luxury model costs twice as much as the economy model. So you tell the guy "Hey! This is the same car. I'll just buy the economy model and add power windows, and buy the spark plugs at a garage on my way home.". He politely replies "You can't do that. If you buy this car, you'll need to sign this EUA that strictly forbids you to use better spark plugs. If you do, we'll charge you the difference for the luxury model."
That's what ISP's do. If you want the slightly faster pipe and higher-quality bullshit when you call tech support, you pay the huge bucks for their so-called "commercial" package. If you just take the home package and try to use it like a commercial pipe and they find out, they call it a "breach of license" and the law allows them to charge you full price or sue you for fraud, whichever is more rewarding to them. And now with all those nifty little backstabbing finely-printed DMCA clauses, they can legally laugh at you when you sign their horrible service contract that includes "I will not hold MoroNet liable for any inconvenience or interruptions encountered during the use, misuse or inability to use the service." and "MoroNet retains the right to revoke service to any entity who is suspected to be abusing the network and/or related hardware and software." Which means that although you pay them every month, they are absolutely not obligated to give you anything in return. It's just a mere "coincidence" that they grant you an IP address.
Re:Problem is ... (Score:1)
Re:Broadband Restrictions (Score:1)
Too bad they rely on PPPoE and the xfer rates are a bit slower than what I would like (especially the upstream). But otherwise they aren't too bad.
Re:Broadband Restrictions (Score:2)
Why can't we have a internet service that says "here's your IP number, here's 1.5 mb/s down and 0.5 mb/s up, do whatever you want with it".
Absolutely. If they're concerned about bandwidth problems caused by customers hosting porn sites or something, just have a limit on the bandwidth used per week or month that would never be reached in "normal" use, and charge a per-megabyte rate above that (or just cut them off).
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:2)
Restricting ports is like... (Score:2)
Re:Problem is ... (Score:2)
And yes, bandwidth really does cost ISP's real money. As much as I would hate to be a business paying 300+ a month, I would hate even more not having a choice than to pay 150 a month for my DSL connection just so everyone had the same privleges, and not having the option for a lower level, consumer account.
Re:Upload caps (Score:2)
up: 64 kbytes/sec
down: 375 kbytes/sec
I just spent an hour on hold to find this out -- http://rogers.home.com/help [home.com] doesn't seem to mention this anywhere.
RoadRunner (Score:1)
As far as I know, my RoadRunner service isn't currently blocking any services. My OpenBSD firewall gets regular hits on all the good ports.
Here are the snippets from their policy [rr.com]:
The policies are pretty bad, but it seems like they adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude in practice, at least locally. I've only heard of one person getting kicked off RoadRunner and he was running a ftp server with MP3z or warez.
Forget VNC for @home users (Score:1)
It makes absolutely no sense to me. They disclaim away all possible liabilities from have an insecure box, but take these measures?
I suspect it has something to do with residential vs. commercial offerings. While this is all hypothetical, I'd guess that for some fantastically huge monthly sum, you can get 'business' level service which is actually usable for something other than the internet staples: porn and music.
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:1)
NNTP (Score:1)
Cisco Misconfiguration? (Score:1)
ip classless
and
ip subnet-zero
directives in their router configuration
Re:Problem is ... (Score:2)
Let me explain this with a metaphor : car sales. Say you have an old treacherous Toyota salesman with two brands of cars on his lot. One is the economy model, it's a V4 engine and no extras. The other is the luxury model, which is a V4 engine with gold-plated spark plugs and automatic everything. It's the same crap with better spark plugs that give you a 4% increase in raw horsepower (which will equate to cleaner gas consumption that might register on high-end monitoring gear). However the luxury model costs twice as much as the economy model.
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay.
Or a Camry masquerading as a Lexus. Or a Maxima masquerading as an Infiniti.
Or, my personal favorite and mercifully discontinued, a Cavalier masquerading as a Cadillac (Cimarron).
Remember the good old days when there actually was a difference between the el-cheapo model and the real thing? When a 1971 Valiant and a 1971 New Yorker shared an alternator, a starter motor, and that was about it? (Having said that, I love both those cars; my Valiant's *grill* would trash anything on the road today, and that's without even pulling the 4,900lb 21-foot-long 7.2L V8-powered New Yorker Brougham out of the garage. Acuras, beware: or else I'll stuff your silly little car in my trunk.)
Then, I pause for a second, and think forward to the 1980s. The K-car masquerading as a New Yorker. My big-block 440 cubic inch V8 trembles, stumbing away momentarily from its normal silky-quiet power and smoothness as the thought crosses my mind. The bad karma surrounding the 1980s New Yorker has forever tainted the memory of the world's largest non-limousine passenger car.
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:1)
Definitly, I moved in about three months ago to a nearly empty apartment complex. As it's started to fill up I've noticed my speed dropping over time till it's about 90% of what I started with.
Re:I run a server off @home... (Score:1)
Yeah, well, their techs are probably all just MCSE's ;). Get 'em some CCIE's and they'll turn things around.
<note>This wasn't seriously meant to offend any of you MCSE's out there.</note>
Re:Problem is ... (Score:1)
Re:RoadRunner (Score:1)
Re:NNTP (Score:1)
Might not be a restriction (Score:2)
It might not be an even @home plot against peer-to-peer sharing, it might just be plain old-fashioned incompetence!!!
BTW, I now use Sprint BroadBand direct (wireless). I'm getting much better speed and reliability than I had with @home for about the same price!
No NAT limit on Optus@Home (Score:1)
They don't allow servers, although AFAIK they don't block ports, just scan you and kick you off.
Tom
Re:Broadband Restrictions (Score:1)
Re:The problem is you're clueless about cars (Score:1)
Haven't you ever seen an Acura Integra? It's just a Prelude. Same whiny little engine with half the cylinders missing and pointed the wrong way in the engine bay. Huh? Please tell me you're a troll.
Nope. I'm one of the most devoted automotive fans you'll ever meet.
Actually they have the same number of cylinders and point the same way in the engine bay.8/2=4. Half the cylinders missing. One half of the "V" sliced off, at that. Ugh. Like a mastectomy.
Same engine? Uh uh. Different displacement, different casting, different mounting points... same manufacturer though, that's about it.Different casting? Oh, that's news to me. Okay. I recind the "same engine" bit. But if the engine is still transverse-mounted and only four cylinders, it's not a real man's car.
You can't performance drive a front-wheel-drive car. Why is it that most cop cars are rear wheel drive? No torque steer! No MacPherson strut effects on your ackerman angles! Predictable behavior when you lose traction on one of your drive wheels!
The advantages of front wheel drive are cost of manufacture, weight (primarily for fuel economy reasons), and disposability (hit a curb, write off the car). Not reasons to be proud of a FWD car.
I've only seen one transverse-mount rear-wheel-drive car, and that was the Pontiac Fiero.
Besides, I've never seen a real man driving *any* Honda product.
Let's face facts. You hang around a good biker bar, or something like that. You won't hear conversation like "Ugh! Wow! He must be a tough dude. Look at his '94 Civic!"
"Ugh! Wow! He must be a boring, disposeable accountant! He's in a 1971 Hemi Cuda!"
And neither of them have the ever popular "V4" touted in the original post<grin> I let that one slide, too.
There are differences between the normal and marquee manufacturers. Significant ones in some cases although they could be termed luxuries, but if you want 'em you gotta pay for 'em. The Cimarron debacle... well I think Cadillac would prefer if that wasn't ever mentioned again.Whole-heartedly.
If they'd simply called it a Cavalier with the optional heated leather seats, I don't think anyone would have cared.
Actually, my daily-driver 1976 Dodge Ram has heated leather seats. They come in very handy in Toronto winters. (They're out of a 1997 Lincoln Town Car - I had to ditch the truck's bench, it was wrinkling my suits.)
My current car very well might fit in your trunk but you gotta catch it firstNo problem. A Chrysler 440 out of the box will easily haul a New Yorker in the 14-second range. (Remember, this is before Corporate Average Fuel Economy and emissions laws!) Lightly modded, I've seen a '72 New Yorker (different grill and tail lights, but that's about it) blow the doors off a Buick Grand National. And Grand Nationals are fast - my advice is that you should avoid challenging them at stoplights.
Further, keep in mind that my car gets just over 6 miles per gallon. The engine runs under thermostat almost all the time (except when I crank the Mopar Airtemp A/C on a hot day), the exhaust blows under 15 PPM hydrocarbon, so all that gas is going somewhere...
Old tech doesn't mean slow tech. These aren't computers. ;)
(It's a *lightly* modded NSX... not the fastest thing out there but still pretty fun)."Modded" = "tuned by" stickers all over it? Heheheh.... Wanna race my truck for pink slips? I've got a buddy who runs a scrapyard, after I blow your doors off, I'll take your car, run over it with the front end loader, toss it in the back of my truck for winter traction, and then take on your buddies.
Big stereos and stickers do not a racecar make.
If you're in the Toronto area, you also want to stay away from 1980 Chevettes, too. I've shoehorned a Buick 3.8L V6, TH-350, and Ford 8.8" diff with 4.91 posi into it. It pulls a solid 12.3 on the 1/4 mile, and it looks dead stock. You wouldn't want your girlfriend to notice that the rusty old Chevette you thought you left at the stoplight was still beside you.
(Speaking of sleepers, this is being typed from a Pentium-II 350 on an Asus motherboard that has been stuffed into a "Triton 8 MHz TurboXT" case, connected to an old NEC MultiSync 3D, and has a Compaq Deskpro 286 keyboard attached. No one will steal it...)
I love surprising people.
Re:Problem is ... (Score:1)
Yeah, well, that's cool and all, but I love taking on these silly little V-Tecs.
You could blow away my baby, a 1974 Valiant Brougham. She's got a Slant-6, weighs less than 3,000 lbs, gets about 30 miles per gallon, and I take her on long scenic trips. About as fast as a new Taurus, it gets up to speed fast enough on the highway, but it's not a performance car. Your power to weight ratio is better than my Valiant's.
My 1976 Dodge Ram gets 7 miles per gallon, my 1971 New Yorker does 6 miles per gallon. Both blow under 25 PPM hydrocarbon on a (voluntary) dyno emissions test. (Yeah, they're expensive, when I punch the gas, I can see the gauge moving - but I like 'em, and I can afford it.)
Despite the stickers, your car isn't "Powered by Honda". It's powered by *gasoline*. The more you can mix with air and then burn, the more power you make. More displacement = more power. Period. Sure, you can get more power out of a drop of gas than I can - that's not in contest - but it's an incremental amount more. These aren't computers, car engines are a fairly mature technology and nothing really important has happened since the 1950s with the advent of the hemispherical combustion chamber. 2.2L vs. 6.6L? My smallest V8 is a full three times bigger than your engine. Your whiny little four-banger is a fly caught in my air filter.
While neither is a vintage musclecar, both of them have big-block V8s. 6.6L and 7.2L, respectively. The truck weighs in at 4,469lbs (with fuel and driver). The New Yorker comes in at 4,900 lbs, again, with fuel and driver.
Both of them have greater than 9.0:1 compression ratios, from the factory. Both of them have >270 duration cams, from the factory. Both of them have blown the doors off all sorts of real musclecars, let alone silly imported "tuned" riceboxes with big stereos, "Euro" (urinal) wipers and chainsaw exhaust tips.
I like to flick cigarette butts into those upturned exhaust tips. The water that puddles in your muffler puts them out very nicely.
efficiency which yeilds 200 hp out of that "whiny little"Good for you. You may put 200 brake horsepower out your crankshaft, 6,000 RPM, probably with a whopping 50 foot-pounds of torque at that. I put well over 200 SAE net horsepower out at my tires in a vehicle that weighs merely twice as much. At 3,500 RPM, and with over 300 foot-pounds of torque. Who wins? I do. No contest.
@home security issues (Score:2)
Routing issue probably (Score:1)
Re:NNTP (Score:1)
Who needs Cable or DSL ? (Score:1)
Oh, Earthlink is now starting to block port 25 on outgoing connections, so you can't connect to any SMPT server other than earthlink's. A few other ISP's are doing this too.
Re:Talk about irony (Score:2)
Absolutely. That is a definite FWD advantage.
Your disposable cars are that way because they're uni-bodies, not front-drive.Oh yeah, monocoque construction makes a car a lot tougher and more expensive to repir.
But so does front wheel drive.
If you hit another vehicle, for example, your engine, transmission and differential are all involved. Not to mention the usual basics like radiator, steering, etc. Because the drivetrain is crammed into a tiny space rather than spread out under the car, it's a lot harder to fix.
Further, because most of these front wheel drive cars use MacPherson strut suspensions - which are simple, compact and cheap but have little room for adjustment after a collision - you generally end up with a damaged car that can't be made to track properly without welding in new inner fenders and strut towers. Most rear wheel drive unibodies (and full-frame cars) use double-A arm front suspensions, which are a lot bulkier but have more linear movement in all planes as well as being a lot more serviceable after damage. Instead of attempting to change a bent strut tower, you generally end up changing a bent upper control arm.
It's very difficult to get the necessary energy absorption for crashworthiness with a body-on-frame.Rest assured, I'm well familiar with unibodies. Consider that three of my vehicles (my 1974 Valiant, my 1971 New Yorker and my 1980 Chevette) are unibody.
As for vehicle safety, what you say is true. But I prefer to avoid hitting things. If I've had even one beer, I don't get behind the wheel (but I'd be legal to 4). While I own a cellphone, that is never turned on in the car or truck. Never. My stereo is never cranked up loud enough to prevent me from hearing the rest of the traffic around me, my vehicles are always in top mechanical shape, and I always concentrate fully on the task at hand. And if I'm feeling sleepy, even if I'm only ten miles from home, I'll pull over, flip down or across the seats, and take a nap.
My driving record? Flawless. Ten years, no accidents or moving violations. And yet I drive a long way to work every day, taking a freeway that is second busiest in the world (after only the Santa Monica Freeway) and have for a number of years. And, this despite the fact that I've been known to shred my rear tires into clouds of smoke every now and then.
So, what if someone cuts me off?
Nice thing about a vehicle that won't buckle - surrounded by a sea of vehicles that will buckle - is that if some jackass in a Prelude cuts me off and I hit him, I'll win. He'll absorb my impact. I'm sure he'd do body damage to my truck, but I doubt he'd do much structural damage. Even if he did, I'd fix it in an afternoon with a hyrdaulic ram to straighten the frame back, my MIG welder to gusset it if there was any sign of fatigue, and then a quick tweak of the eccentric bolts on my upper control arms that set my camber and caster.
Unibody is stiffer than a frame; this gives better drivability.Depends on the frame. Compared to an I-channel or C-channel body on frame, for sure. But most of the finest luxury cars today retain a body on frame, using a box-section frame. The penalty? Gas mileage.
The benefits of a full frame, which kept them around for so long? The structural members are fractional inch steel plate stampings, not thin sheet measured in gauge. Less corrosion. Less metal fatigue. And the structural integrity of the car is more dependant on sheer quantities of steel, rather than the shape imparted into the metal by a stamping press.
Tangible benefits? You see a lot more 20-year-old Caprice Classics, Ford LTDs and other full-frame vehicles driving around than you see of 20-year-old Fairmonts. Easier to fix, too. And it makes sense to make a car last. The environmental cost of making a car is a lot more than the gains of replacing it at half of its average lifespan with one that is only incrementally cleaner and more fuel efficient. So it makes sense to take good care of a good, solid car, keep it well-tuned, and maintain it.
Other benefits? Cost to the manufacturer. One basic frame can be readily adapted to serve a large number of vehicles. Chevy S-10 and Astrovan shared a frame, for example. Easy to redesign a car based on slapping new body panels onto the existing rolling frame.
It's nearly impossible to get rid of squeaks unless the whole car is welded together. Again, this means unibody.Or good body-to-frame mounts.
It's even more difficult to get rid of road noise with a unibody's welded structural members carrying every vibration to the passenger compartment. Don't you get sick of listening to your wheel bearings when you're on the highway? Body to frame mounts damp that.
Not to burst your bubble, but judging from your past posts your opinions are set in concrete and facts are nearly irrelevant to you anyway.Ahhh, yes, I know who this is: it's the self-proclaimed automobile expert speaking from the depths of his many hours spent watching Shadetree Mechanic. Afraid to post from your user account? Can't afford the karma of an off-topic debate? I can.
Listen, I was wrenching on cars 15 years ago as a kid. I've worked on everything from Tercels to (once) a Testarossa. My roommate and best friend of 11 years works at probably the world's foremost professional automotive restoration shop.
While I'm neither a professional mechanic nor am I an automotive engineer (but I am an SAE member, go figure...), I know that you're neither one of those things. I've written columns in automotive magazines from Car Craft to Car and Driver. You, sir, are simply someone who spells better than most, perhaps could manage to change a fanbelt by the side of the road, and has been incensed when I insulted your idea of a fine automobile.
Unless you can actually come up with solid facts - not those refutable by any freshman level high school automotive class - I think you really should sit back and not comment, lest you continue to display your ignorance and short-sightedness.
Re:And your problem is... (Score:2)
Anyone with any experience in engines knows that 200 horsepower at 6000 RPM implies 175 foot-pounds of torque. In other words, either you are the sloppiest so-called engineer on the face of the earth, or you're a troll.
Horsepower is torque measured over time.
The measure of time, in this case, is RPMs.
You do the math, brainiac.
And there's more than one way to measure horsepower. I suggest you avoid the glossy ads in the car magazines: to look impressive, those are generally in *brake* horsepower.
Serious calculations of engine power are always done in torque at a specific RPM or kW of output energy; horsepower is way too vague. And if you have to use horsepower, use SAE Net. It's a lot less vague.
RR Austin (Score:2)
--
Re:And your problem is... (Score:2)
Crankshaft power into a brake is power, period
No, that's not where the automotive measure of "brake horsepower" is from.
That's the measured or calculated force required to stall the engine. Essentially, the reciprocal of all the output power of the engine as well as the inertia of the rotating/reciprocating mass.
Sorry, *you're* wrong, and I'm done debating with you, I've got better things to do. Like driving worn-out valve guides out of a cylinder head.
Re:I run a server off @home... (Score:2)
I do know that they scan a lot of ports. They look for FTP a lot, NNTP even more than that.
I think their reasoning is that, since they don't guarantee you all of the bandwidth you can get, you can't take advantage of that. Of course the real reason is so they can sell anther service called @Business or some crap.
Re:Upload caps (Score:1)
Re:Upload caps (Score:1)
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:1)
Re:@Home Server Scans (Score:1)