[MJM]

So here's the deal, I've got a 20meg with Virgin and of course it sucks (5meg is a highlight), because that's what Virgin does, it's a horrible ISP.
Eitherway, lately the house has been having problems with slow Internet and resetting the modem and router does the trick, but only for a while. I was guessing it was someone on the network. I don't do any downloading and I know the others do sometimes, but that's at night or early morning or such, but someone is obviously being a right arse about it.
So this time when it happened I hooked up straight to the modem, did a speed test and saw that it was just fine.

Then I looked at the modem's log and saw this:


I was just wondering if anyone can tell me what sort of app uses that many different ports? I am sure that this is what is causing the issues since this is what I see popping up in the log whenever there are connection issues.
If I can identfiy the program, it'll be a whole lot easier to point a finger because for whatever reason the housemate doing it won't admit it.

[serverguy]

Bittorrent or other P2P file sharing program (Limewire, etc)... alomost 100% sure. Thats why there all going to different IPs as well.

However, that should only be limiting your upload speed, unless there are incoming connections like that as well, which I am sure there would be.

What router do you have? The best way of dealing with it is going to be to get a decent router, load it with DD-WRT and kill of the Bittorrent. They will soon grow tired of 1.2Kb/S.

What could also be explaining your slow speeds is that if your router / modem is clogged up with all those Bittorrent connections, it will be unable to handle all the connections, hence why it crashes. Then you have to restart it.

[MJM]

Well, the restarting is more because who ever is running the torrent client or whatever requires some time to "warm" back up.
I think it is the massive amount of connection.

I have a WRT45G or whatever the linksys one is, but I believe my version to be incompatible with the custom firmware, but I'll check it out again, in case something has changed.
And yes, there are plenty of incoming connections as well.

The thing that gets me is that there are so many different ports. Shouldn't they all be on the same port? Back in my days...


Anyways, the more I can limit who ever is doing it, the better. My old d-link had a way of killing off a persons connection, but sadly the linksys doesn't seem to have that.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by MJM

Well, the restarting is more because who ever is running the torrent client or whatever requires some time to "warm" back up.
I think it is the massive amount of connection.

I have a WRT45G or whatever the linksys one is, but I believe my version to be incompatible with the custom firmware, but I'll check it out again, in case something has changed.
And yes, there are plenty of incoming connections as well.

The thing that gets me is that there are so many different ports. Shouldn't they all be on the same port? Back in my days...


Anyways, the more I can limit who ever is doing it, the better. My old d-link had a way of killing off a persons connection, but sadly the linksys doesn't seem to have that.

Nope.

Bittorrent works by using everyone's internet connection who has the file you want as a server.

So if you need parts A B C D E F and G and there are 10 other people with the whole file you want, you can get part A from one of them, part B from another, part C from a third, and so on.

The principle behind P2P is a fantastic one, but it's just a shame it is used for so much piracy as well.

The reason for all the different ports is that everyone runs Bittorrent on a different port, so you need to make connections to lots of different ports that people allow.

As for the router crashing, the reason is that most cheapy home routers only have the guts to handly 100 or so connections at the same time. When you delimit Bittorrent, it can make thousands of connections, and your router doesn't have the memory to handle them all, and it locks up and crashes.

You restart it, Bittorrent builds all the connections up, and bang, it crashes again.

The WRT-54G is a good choice, if you look at the top of this forum, there is a tutorial there saying which versions are good.

Then you could just limit P2P to such low speeds that it is pointless trying to use it and your bandwidth thief will just give up (and go to rapidshare instead...) lol.

[serverguy]

You're other option is to block P2P look ups with OpenDNS. That will cheese him off to the point of no return.

If you block all other outgoing DNS through the router, he will have to use the OpenDNS servers listen on your router.

[MJM]

The thing is, I wouldn't mind him using torrents if it didn't mess with everyone else.


Thanks for the advice, I'll try and figure out if my router is compatible.