can someone target your modem and flood it?? :\

hey all experts; i've been experiencing 'semi-random but mysteriously too-coincidental' outages lately with my net connection... without boring with all my tech/investigative details and calls to comcast, everything seems to be in proper order and should be working fine.

what it boils down to, it seems, and what i suspect, is someone/s managing to target my cable modem, and 'flood it' dos-attack style in some fashion, locking up my connection. (happening frequently after encountering persons exhibiting suspicious behavior in my shops inworld.)

you know what they say about being paranoid... and i do already have a collection of past thieves/griefers 'out to get me.' ;0 do you think my suspicions are valid?? if so, any possible solutions/protection i can get or set up?? thanks much folks!! :0

I'm getting that as well, but not only when I'm on SL. Same service provider. At least for myself, I don't see it as an attack.

Comcast pretty much sucks. Chances are you're getting eaten by their traffic-shaping methods (the same scheme that makes life hell for bittorrent users on Comcast's networks).

I have Comcast too. Every once in a while, usually when I'm in SL, my cable modem will just randomly stop responding and I have to restart it. Everything's fine when I restart it - until the next time it happens. I just live with it. Now I wonder if I should be paranoid!

Only partially related to the OP's question...I have Comcast and have absolutely no problems that I can attribute to SL usage.

does an instance of traffic-shaping -completely- cut off any incoming comms? seems unusual that they would simply completely deny any incoming traffic to a customer, even test-pinging up the google frontpage... it is a complete and utter dropout of any incoming comms, while outgoing seems to continue unfettered (until timeouts cut in).

resetting my modem/router chain does not always bring back service at those times (even for the recommended 'at least' five minutes). :\ calls to comcast during these outages result in 'no indications of any problems', with even their attempts at remote-resets not working. (and i would hope that, if i was getting the 'shape' treatment, that they would at least let me know while i'm on the phone with them while trying to fix the problem.)

they don't seem to have any problem with my housemate's hulu or youtube habits; no cutouts during those times. ;0 this is only happening at times of sl activity.

i don't wish to raise any unbased paranoia in others about their service... ;0 it certainly isn't unknown how sporadic net service can be these days. but i've eliminated every other possibility i can think of, including replacing the modem (and comcast/insight, to their credit, had previously taken extra steps installing repeaters down the road to insure the neighborhood had a good signal).

and if this was perhaps just a random sl bug, i would assume it would happen on a much more constant basis, without much rhyme or reason. as i said, this happens only when i'm a) inworld, most often at my place, and b) there are others there at the same time, acting somewhat suspicious (avoiding talking to me, even actively moving far away as i try to speak with them).

i guess there's the old bugaboo about those being able to trace off someone's ip from having radio or tv plugged into the media urls. :\ for testing's sake, i just cleared out my media urls at my place... guess i'll see if it continues much after that.

comcast (for the most part ;0) is not a problem; nor is my equipment; nor is general second life usage or even intensive web usage. so to reiterate my orig q... can someone, somehow, target your modem? even if to simply 'lock it up'?

I've had problems like that with both cable and DSL. Both times I had to spend months on it with the ISP, and in both cases it was a problem on their equipment that was fixed by a routine upgrade that eliminated the bad router/amplifier/what-have-you.

i understand - 'been there done that' lol. ;0 as i just wrote, comcast did amp up this end of the road over the past couple years, initially just to accomodate my service (though there are neighbors who probably are using their service now too). and though i have just switched modem boxes, it's one of their rentals, so i wouldn't put it past it being a crappy box.

but - but. my initial post still stands... suspicious inworld activity = modem 'lockup', and of a type the typical service call cannot fix nor account for. so the question is, 'can someone target your modem?' a yes/no on that question is really what i'm looking for. (maybe i shouldn't have bothered with the rest of the details. ;0)

If someone has your IP address, they can. The question is, how would someone get your IP address? The most likely way is streaming audio and video, or following tagged links in-world. You don't leave streaming audio or video enabled all the time, do you?

If you've been on other chat sites your ip might have been easy to get. In the old mIRC chat the ip was on everyones tag, some sites had it partly covered by a mask.

It's theoretically possible for someone to bombard your system with connections. They would need your IP address. While there are well-known ways finding it out in SL, the situation you describe doesn't sound like the usual approach. Still, it's possible that someone has determined it some other way, and then chosen to target you.

But that still doesn't mean this is your problem. What exactly are the symptoms that make you think it's modem lockup, as opposed to being at your router or system? Do any of these have logs that you could inspect?

We've been experiencing outages every few weeks, for which the symptom is that most of the modem connection lights go out. Most recently, the modem was unable to lock onto the downstream frequency, but previously, the modem was unable to complete the upstream ranging. These are hardware issues which, as far as I know, couldn't be caused by anyone operating remotely. I attribute them to ongoing maintenance work due to large amounts of winter snow and ice damage in the area.

I'd expect that a denial of service attack would be far more likely to lock up at the router/firewall/system level than at the modem. And these systems should have logs that you could inspect to see if they're exhibiting DoS attack symptoms.

Comcast is well known for playing these kinds of games, though I think it's always been torrent-related in the past and I've never heard of them actually doing something that causes the modem to need a hard kick. At least in the past, they were injecting reset packets into torrent streams which would break that one specific connection - not the whole system.

I certainly wouldn't put it past Comcast to mess with SL traffic but this could also be something like a flakey router somewhere between you and LL..

edit: and, if you really think you specifically are being targetted by somebody, you should release/renew your IP address, turn off streaming media (audio and video) in SL and see if the problem still happens. The way to release/renew your IP depends on what kind of hardware you have - if you posted the router model number, I'm sure somebody could type up a walk-through.

Two quick questions:

1. Do you have a static IP address or a dynamic address? (if you don't know, I can guide you through that)

2. Model of modem/router

Rock

Unless it's a business connection, it will be DHCP address. Those still rarely change though, since most people shut down their computer when they're done but leave the modem/router up..

On SL, I occasionally encounter this, there are some things that I know if I do them in world, that my modem will get flooded. By SL.
The most common situations where I get this are:
-leaving the map (not the minimap) open for longer than ~30 seconds, especially when I have all those nifty tracking options (events, hubs, avatars, etc.) enabled
-selecting many prims at once. I'm not sure at what amount this happens. But selecting the entire Eifeltower in paris 1900 will disconnect me, lol
-resizing objects that consist of many prims, like some prim-hair. I can rotate or move it without problem, but when I resize it, it's an instant disconnect from my modem
-changing the texture on a lot of prims at once. Again, instant disconnect.

The odd thing is, these last two only disconnect me when I'm the one doing the editing. Having someone else or some script right next to me doing the exact same thing may cause a lag spike, but it's not flooding my modem.

I've had quite a few things disconnect me. Opening profiles in a laggy crowd, teleporting, even moving too many spaces at one time. Usually, I am walking forever, even off the map and then I realize I am disconnected. It's pretty annoying. But that is the least of my computer worries right now.

So yeah, your not alone.


P.S. You know your addicted to SL when your computer overheats cause you spend too much time on it.

Great. I have had service technicians out twice to diagnose the mysterious reasons why my connection would just randomly stop and then be available again ten minutes later. Both technicians have blamed the wiring in my house.

Can you run a new cable from the demarc (there's usually a 2-port junction with a service loop on each side) to your modem, with no splitters?

It could well be the wiring in your house. Or Comcast playing games with your connection. Or a problem at LL. Or a problem anywhere between your place and LL.

Unless you're having the exact same problem as the OP, it's best to create a new thread. There are many, many bits between your keyboard and the SL.

I really couldn't run a long a cable through the house to do that. I would more likely have to move my modem closer to the demarc (so that's what it's called) and set up my computers to wireless. Which I've considered, but it would just a be a pain to deal with, and I guess I'm waiting until the disconnects become so annoying that I try something else to deal with them.

I'm a big fan of running physical cables through the attic instead of using wifi, but that may just be because I'm an old fart.

Then there's two old farts in da house. Cables are the only way to play if you are on SL.

Also: Traffic shaping is the new hot skill in ISP tech teams. You can expect to find wierd stuff going on all over the place mainly because the Cisco men are fiddling about to see what happens when they play with the traffic.

Meh. I see no difference in performance or reliability between wired and wireless. YMMV.

/me agrees, if you have a really good signal.

If you don't or if you have really cheapo network gear, SL will likely be unhappy with it.

(sorry there, i had to crash back out after a late night of it ;0) - yes yes yep, lol turned out once i made a quick log-back-in to kill my media urls, i had left my music option active and hadn't noticed... although i rarely turn on the stream, i guess that doesn't matter, as long as you've got the option turned on.

had previously always kept the options turned completely off, thanks to the past alerts about it - guess i'll see if that helps! :0 and i'll probably put out a sign to alert customers (and remind myself ;0) of this problem. if these psychos are going to continue just hanging out at my place just to try causing probs for me and my visitors... grrrr!! ;0 (ready to use words not commonly acceptible anymore in forum ;0)