[nycbug-talk] Proof that road runner sucks?

[michael]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:19:26 -0500
Max Gribov <max at neuropunks.org> wrote:

> So my cable connection is really slow. Calling Road Runner is
> pointless, because ive already turned off and on my cable modem.
> So i decided to tcpdump on the wire directly from cable modem to my
> laptop. Heres some interesting tcpdump..
> 
[snip]
> 
> we can see arp requests by rr.com router for someone called
> cpe-68-174-122-163.nyc.res.rr.com. OK i can understand that, even if
> it makes those requests several times a second making my connection
> crap. What i dont understand is how mindspring.com got there.
> Obviously, im lacking knowledge of cable networks to comprehend
> something this crazy. And more to the point of why rr sucks:
> 
[snip]
> 
> look at the times of those arps. Now consider the fact that their
> network is doing this all the time, at least today - dozens of arp
> requests per second.
> 
> I guess besides complaining about paying for crappy service, can
> anyone shed light on why would i see so much arp traffic, and why
> would there be mindspring arp traffic?..
> 
> Just venting, really.. happy holidays!


I noticed the same thing here, when I first got my hookup.  There was
a lot of mindspring and earthlink arp traffic.  I just did a quick dump
this morning (I dumped with -n to prevent dns traffic) and found around
1000 arp requests in 60 seconds.  A little grep, awk, and sort shows
that it is concentrated to only a few sources.

I also found (well, google found) that we are not the first ones to
notice and it is not specific to our geography.

Background Internet Packet Traffic through Home Cable Connections 
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
August 5, 2004 
http://tinyurl.com/37e2ap


[shrug] whattayagonnado?

-- 

michael