Comments on: Cut Off From The Outside World

By: mike

mike — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:28:50 +0000

Spence, how many times did you get alberts computer infected with porn viruses? or was it just Alan? Yeah right spence, you are the biggest porn user of them all…

(I have no verifying information about my false claims.)

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:37:49 +0000

Yeah, actually, he didn’t really volunteer that information, I had to ask very specifically what they were seeing on their end that resulted in them suspending the service.

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:59:16 +0000

Hey Chris. What a long and well-written comment. It’s surprising to me that the tech would even tell you what your computer was actually doing. I didn’t think you would ever hear the words “ARP lookup packets” come from a Rogers phone tech.

They always spout off the same stuff about using P2P programs, blame it on LimeWire, etc, without really giving you much help. They told us we had a virus and they mentioned some things about running a virus scan, checking the registry and possibly having to reformat the computer, without giving any indication what the real problem or solution was.

In our case, we actually did have a virus/trojan. Don’t leave your parents’ computer unprotected, kids…

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:50:00 +0000

I had a similar issue with Rogers probably about a year ago. I never got a warning call, they just suspended the service over the weekend. Given that I was running Rogers’ provided Norton Antivirus, I was suspicious. I called them up and they told me my computer was sending out weird ARP lookup packets like 200 every second, so they shut me off. The moron on the phone went on to tell me to that it could be from P2P Software like Kazaa and other things – which I didn’t have installed. Being able to give me no other information about these packets I was supposedly sending, he suggested I format the computer and then reinstall everything and then call them back and they’d remove the suspension. I pretty much told him I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to, as I ran a business using that internet connection and couldn’t afford 3 days without internet.

Knowing how long this would likely take, I said that I would unplug everything from the network and only reconnect once I had resolved the issue. He made me agree to some pretty hefty clause treating me as though I was intentionally trying to attack their network with some DNS requests but finally restored the service. I then spent the next hour or two with a copy of Ethereal systematically killing off processes until the ARP packets stopped appearing in the logs. The culprit in the end was the mDNSResponder (Bonojour Network Service) that ships along with iTunes and some other software. Its supposed to keep those ARP requests inside the local network, but was for some reason broadcasting them out across the internet. I uninstalled it, reconnected to the net and crossed by fingers.

The fact that Rogers didn’t have a log of what these specific packets looked like, and couldn’t tie them back to a piece of malfunctioning software was pretty ridiculous. I’m sure they forced a lot of customers to needlessly wipe their computers as a result.

In the future, ask them what the exact issue is, packets and otherwise, and make sure to have a packet analyser on hand to disconnect, and track down the problem.

By: Spencer "too much porn" McCormack

Spencer "too much porn" McCormack — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:07:15 +0000

Sounds like somebody went to the wrong porn site.