Re: Naughty Comcast

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > I took that to mean they were injecting RST packets, ala the great
> > Firewall of China.
>
> RST packets do not work that well to reduce bandwidth consumption
> because the client immediately tries to establish a new connection
> (maybe to a different host, but still).  You need to do something that
> stalls the connection by confusing the TCP at one end.

Yes and no.  For the current generation of P2P applications, sending the 
RST packet on connections across peering interfaces tends to "encourage" 
the P2P application to find other peers on the same network.  Stalling the
TCP session active, eventually still uses up the networks external 
bandwidth.

Of course, this is why inter-provider connections use TCP MD5 keys.  If 
the P2P programmers had read their history, they wouldn't have this 
problem :-)
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