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Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers? 46

Posted by Cliff from the blocked-ports-and-bandwidth-caps dept.
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?
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Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers? More

Restrictions That @Home Places on Their Customers?

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  • Broadband Restrictions (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26, 2000 @01:17PM (#600493)
    I am in Australia, and the broadband providers here have even more restrictions. You can only connect two other machines via NAT, no servers, etc. 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". Somehow I don't think that is going to happen. What we need is a totally free and noncommercial internetwork for the people. You would just share the costs. 10 or 15 100BaseT cables along the streets. I have heard of some small towns doing this. Anyone got the URLS? David Findlay nedz@bigpond.com

  • Upload caps (Score:3)

    by adamsc ( 985 ) on Sunday November 26, 2000 @03:27PM (#600494) Homepage
    The single biggest restriction: transfer rate caps. 1.5-2 years ago, my transfer rates peaked at 10Mb in / 5Mb out; these days it's usually 1-2Mb in / .012Mb out. The worst part is that that 12KB cap is a hard limit; while the only server I ever ran (back when they allowed you to I had my personal web and email servers) probably transfered 5MB per day, I used to really like the ability to transfer large (10-100MB) files between home and work.

    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.
  • but they haven't noticed yet, and i have it set up so it's not likely they will, unless all of a sudden tons of people start hitting it (which isn't gonna happen...there's nothing on it for them to go to). Mostly mail, but also some web and ftp. I think it's ridiculous that they even try to stop people from running servers (after all, you're paying to connect to the internet...you should be able to do whatever you want with the bandwidth you're paying for). Also, me running my mail off my server makes it so it actually uses less bandwidth for them, and is much more convenient for me (able to use procmail, etc).

  • Some @home providers don't give a flying fsck what you run, but block SMB by default (a Good Thing to help prevent stupid people). Some won't cap uploads appreciably. A couple of the @home affiliates (mostly major telcos with more clout than Excite) let you run servers without problems.

    Either way, I've got mine in writing.

  • Upload caps are the worst thing ever. I'm paying twice the monthly I used to and I get about twice the upload speed. Now, I'm not even trying to run any servers. All I want to do is tansfer some large files from my box at home to my box at school (where I have a fractional T3 connection). Instead, I find the file on the net and download it from there... often from 24.* addresses at a descent speed. A friend of mine who's had his cable modem for years used to upload at 5+ Mb/s until they started caping uploads. Now, he can't even play Quake 3 with his friend down the street. If DSL were avalible in my area, I'd get it in a second. Take my advice, stay away from @home in the SF bay area.
  • I also live in the San Diego area, yet instead of a 12kb upload mine top out at 40-50kb and my friend who has had @Home since '95 (When @Home was introduced into his neighborhood) gets 40-50kb also. I know someone who was running a server (Warez) and was using lots of bandwidth (50 users x 50 kb) at a time. Cox@Home gave him a warning and that was the end of it. Cox@Home says that you can't run servers, yet they only scan for NNTP every 20 seconds (or so it seems). P.S. - Never install their software if you run windoze. It contains software monitoring and all kinds of other junk. Even the installers tell users not to install it now. -Daniel

  • Re:I run a server off @home... (Score:3)

    by adamsc ( 985 ) on Sunday November 26, 2000 @05:36PM (#600499) Homepage
    I'm just amazed nobody has realized that arbitrary restrictions annoy people. My mail or web server probably use several orders of magnitude less traffic than a single person playing something like Quake online.

    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.
  • Curious - your upload cap must have been grandfathered in. They won't sell a 40KB/s service at any price; the best they offer is 24KB/s on a business place which is absurdly over-priced (~$500/mo IIRC).

    (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!)
  • I don't think it was modified. I have a program that is supposed to remove the cap, but I have not tried it yet. My modem was brand new, right out of the sealed box and I have not modified it at all. There are differences in the modems @Home uses. The White CyberSurfer modems have a high cap, same as the SURFboard. But I have heard that people with the Black CyberSurfer modems have low caps and slow service.

    -Daniel
  • With the ever-growing masses of ignoramuses getting cable and home DSL, just stop and ask them "why are you switching to cable (you retarded aoler)?" and they'll answer "For mp3's, warez, movies and <whisper>porn</whisper>". The other half of the problem is that the ISP's don't want to spend bazillions of dollars upgrading and extending their fragile little networks. They just want to cash in on the added subscribers and tell them "Well it's faster than 9600 baud, which is the highest speed the phone company guarantees". I get 16kb upstream (but more than enough downstream - avg 350kb/sec), that amounts to about 1 megabyte per minute. Add a little cynism and I'd be better off burning a cd and mailing it home than trying to ftp it. Why are things like this ? because these retarded ISP's need some way to impose their unjustified 10x price hike for commercial access (which really isn't commercial quality to begin with).

    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.
  • Luckly DMCA does not apply to ISP contracts. Just regular old contract law. Which is how it should be. There is no copyright to protect with ISP service, since there is no copyright material. The kill/misuse clause has been in all ISP contracts from the begining. If you don't like the standard contract, try to negotate for a better one (or better yet form a consumer union and try to get a better one.) By not forcing them to give uptime (which should be required in the contract you sign) it is your own fault that the connection stops working.
  • This is sort of the attitude Bell Sympatico has, but they only give you 1mb/s down and 128k/s up... But they don't care if you run web servers or what have you, the only thing they say about it is don't ask them for help, but that just seems obvious.

    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.
  • Well, they can't know how many machines you have behind a NAT (I think). In any case you could have one of the two machines itself be a NAT router for N others, thereby adhering to the letter of the (stupid) restriction.

    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).

  • That's exactly what happened here. >1MB/s in / 500KB/s out in the first year (I signed up within the first 2 months), dropping to 200KB/s in / 12KB/s out for 2 years so far.
  • ...the phone company putting a payphone in your house. You can make all the outgoing calls you want, but you can't receive calls.
  • You seem to be missing something here though. Commercial customers, particularly ones that *depend* on internet access, can, will, and do hold ISP's liable for expenses associated with blackouts. This is a huge liability for an ISP, and one that comes with a price. Also, the ISP can anticipate higher traffic on a business account. High bandwidth "consumer" accounts were intended for speed more than filling hard drives, although many people do use it for MP3's, warez, etc as you mentioned. This is also why consumer broadband is often asymetrical, that is most users download far more than upload.

    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.

  • Caps in (and around) Toronto, ON, Canada (rogers@home):

    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.

  • 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]:

    • Advertising of products and or services of any type is not permitted on Residential Road Runner accounts regardless of transmission medium used, including but not limited to, email, news groups, web services and chat services.
    • Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.
    • Advertising of products and or services of any type is not permitted on home pages for Residential Road Runner accounts.
    • The hosting of Gaming servers of any kind is prohibited on Residential Road Runner Accounts. This includes, but is not limited to Quake servers, etc.

    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.

  • I too just stumbled onto this. For whatever reason, one can suck all the bandwidth possible by using Napster, Mojonation, gnutella etc...but try a legitimate application such as VNC, and forget it.

    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.
  • My uploading bandwidth seems to have rested solidly around the 120KB (not Kb) range now for a while and hasn't shown any signs of getting slower, but I've heard lots of people speaking of how they were just one day out of the blue capped from their 100k or so speed down to 12k.
  • Everytime I fire up ye olde news client, I get a scan from authscan.blah.home.com. I assume rather than simlpy blocking the port they choose to scan you and should a hit be detected, they shall let you know about their displeasure in the matter. I've not noticed any sort of scanning on any other port so I can only assume that if there is something else they feel that strongly about you *not* doing, they've simply blocked the port out. For the record, I'm able to contact my other computer which is on my network using a different ip address. And I'm able to do it over the internet, not just through the local ip address.
  • I wonder if they screwed up and forgot the
    ip classless
    and
    ip subnet-zero
    directives in their router configuration :-)

  • 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.

  • Has anyone noticed a decline of service once a new location matures?

    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.

  • 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>

  • What the hell is a V4? aren't most 4 cylinders not V's? 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.
  • I'm not sure about other areas but I know my RoadRunner account has ports 137-139 blocked. No great loss.
  • I never read the law myself, but isn't port scanning illeagal now???
  • I ran into the same problem when I used to have @home. My friend and I (both on @home) couldn't ping each other's PC's. A quick traceroute revealed it to be a routing error in @home's network. I tried calling tech support, but got lots of confused idiots trying to tell me to change my proxy settings, re-install Windows, etc.

    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!
  • Optus@Home in Australia doesn't restrict the number of NATted machines.

    They don't allow servers, although AFAIK they don't block ports, just scan you and kick you off.

    Tom
  • The entire sitation is insane, I run my domain off my Charter cable modem, because there is nothing else available where I live. Well I could have a T1 or the like, but the price of that is just insane. I have not noticed them blocking or restricting any ports(My mail server, news server, Web server, ftp server, Unreal server, etc work), but the speed they provide me is insanely slow. I recently moved here, where I came from I had mediaone(AT&T, whatever they are called today) on the exact same equipment(same model of 3com cable modem, the one that looks like a shark fin) I got 1.5Mb down and 300-500Kbs up, consistently. With charter most days I am lucky to get 250kbs in either direction, and until the day they came to install it I had no idea that they only say that they "can" reach 500kbs or so, and don't even say it WILL got that fast. I explained to them that 500kbs will barely enable to me to work from home(my company will soon allow me to work from howm via VPN) and that they really should look into improving the service or loose customers(Unfortunately in this area, Near Worcester, MA they have alot of us over the barrel, the verizon COs are to far away, most are in non-residential areas, to support DSL) I inquired of a friend on a local planning board about Mediaone providing needed competion, but was told that subject has already been brought up and dismissed before, once AT&T took over... IN Short the situation sucks! Needed, better Bandwidth, at a reasonable price, anyone out there listening, and want to help out a lost soul in the Auburn, ma Area

  • 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 first :)

    No 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.

  • If you're going to compare the Integra to a Honda, compare it to the Civic Si. The Prelude is far better than the Integra. I'd think that a /.'er would appreciate the efficiency which yeilds 200 hp out of that "whiny little" 2.2L I4. I know, petty post, but I love my car.

    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 has issues with too many wannabe hackers, so they lock down alot of things....unfortunately, when a hacker that is originating from an @home account is reported, they completely ignore it.. I usually get max 200kbytes downstream..... don't do anything as far as upstream.... also my NNTP downstream NEVER surpasses 80kbytes a sec.... might be a new cap in my area....
  • The SMB blocking (and Windows file sharing, for that matter) is quite obviously done for security reasons, and I can't say I blame them (@Home) for doing this, since the majority of their customers are not exactly tech savvy and have no idea how to secure their own systems. As for not being able to connect to other computers in your city, I've found that this is usually a routing issue, but not always on @Home's. Try adding a static route to the other subnet through your gateway - worked for me.
  • It's not a port scan per se, in that they don't go scanning your system for open ports. Because of the threat of a UDP last year (because so many @Home customers with insecure proxy software were letting spammers post through their news proxies), @Home initiated a network-wide scan for open news ports. To their credit, they have continued proactively searching for news servers to keep the hatches buttoned down, so there will be no further usenet service interruption threats to their subscribers. I have found dealing with @Home in matters such as this to be actually very pleasant. When I first installed linux, I had no idea what anything was and I accidentally killed sendmail's relay protection. Well, a large spam of about 12,000 e-mails got relayed through my machine one night (unbeknownst to me). When I woke up in the morning, I noticed my @Home connection was down, so I called tech support. I was immediately put through to the "Network security" dept who told me what happened, how to fix sendmail so it's not relaying anymore, and then asked me to please abide by the AUP and stop running servers and then they reconnected me to the network. I was totally blown away by the professionalism I encountered on their parts during this experience, so obviously (believe it or not) @Home does care about abusers of the network and keeping you secure.
  • Who needs all this high speed "broadband" crap. My "56K", errrr, normally 28.8 connection works fine for me. If I need to download some big piece of Warez, like say, Windows 2000, I don't mind leaving my computer on, downloading for 35 hours. Same with MP3's. I just leave my computer on overnight, and it downloads what I need.

    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.


  • ... and eliminating the drive-shaft tunnel, which does a lot to increase foot room.

    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.


  • 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.

  • RoadRunner in Austin, TX has a "no public server" policy. You can run a server, as long as it's password protected. I have had an ftp server running for months, but it doesn't allow anonymous access. I have not received any complaints from RR. I also run an SMTP server, but it only allows access from internal PC's. Plus, my firewall blocks all unused ports.
    --

  • 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.

  • I've been contacted by @Home in the past after leaving Napster running for several days in a row. They claimed that they had noticed "excessive upstream traffic" from my account, I suppose because people were grabbing up my MP3 collection. Regardless, I've left it up for long periods since then and they don't seem to notice.

    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.

  • Your posting is interesting, I work at @Home, specifically I manage the @Lab (or the server QA division) and I know intimately the internal workings of cable modems and your statement of sustained speeds of 5mps is very interesting... the current winner of the fastest modem contest is the Best data a2123 you may know it by another name, regardless this modem transmits a MAX of 4.8MBS and has only been in manufacture for three months. I have no idea how you were able to make you modem perform that fast, you should sell the secret ;-) As a technical side note the 8Mhz channel that Docsis cable modems transmit on can only transit a maximum of 39Gbs to the CMTS (cable modem Termination server or a router if you will.
  • Another Technical note: DSL generally is 128kbs up and down... if you post your Zip plus four I will take a look into your problem. Erik
  • Ok a little insight into Cable Modems and @Home 1. Cable modems are configured via a downloaded boot file and set using SNMP strings, none of this "Replace the chip" crap. The CMTS (Cable Modem termination server will not recognize your modem and grant an IP if the file does not configure it. 2. A cable modem is not even a modem at all it is a HFC router point. 3. Rate limiting is done on the CMTS and the Cable Modem. @Home is instructed by our cable partners to limit the speed as to our contract. They own the customer not us, I'm sorry. 3. Your QOS (Quality of Service) is dictated by your start date the cable partners set that twice a year and they are becoming stricter... again sorry ~E P.S. your talking about the SB2100 Vs. the SB3100, actually the 3100 transmits faster
  • PLEASE let @Home now this our ((*&*$) cable partners own the last mile and as such control the splitting and recombining of nodes. Your connection to the CMTS is through a 8Mhz channel that will carry 39Gms but if they don't split and add more lines on to congested areas the service degrades... The cable partners are required to uphold a level of service to customers of themselves and @home.

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