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

Having the stream turned on on your own land shouldn't be an issue, unless you have set up an open radio script to let people change the media URL of the parcel. The issue is that when you enter a parcel where the media URLs are under the control of the attacker, the attacker can see you attempting to connect to their stream in their log file and get your IP that way.

The thing that caught my attention about the problem of the original post is that I've been trying to put patterns to my disconnect problems, and some of the replies in this thread are making me wonder if I had the source of my problems pinpointed all along.

Comcast is my provider. I have had several technicians out to my house troubleshooting my connection problems. The first technician took at look at my cabling, and determined that all the cabling in my house was done by an amateur who set up a convoluted cabling network with bad equipment. And that had a ring of truth; my cabling was done by an electrician, who is a great electrician, but also advanced in age and probably not up-to-date on cabling for sensitive digital media. That technician replaced most of the splitters in my house, and also called the home office to boost the signal in my area generally (he said a lot of people in my area were having signal strength problems). When he was done, my cable internet connections worked pretty well for a while.

Then the connections started failing again. I had another technician come out. He did something to boost the strength of signal, but said that my problem was that the internet connection went through too many splitters. He didn't fix my problem.

I've been trying to find some way of determining a pattern in my connection losses. They seem more likely to happen in the afternoon (like the 2 - 4 pm range) and then much more likely in the evening (in the 7 - 11 pm range). Those time periods seem like times when a lot of people around me might be firing up their internet connections. Also, a disconnect is more likely when I start up something that uses a lot of bandwidth. Merely opening the internet browser doesn't do it. Opening up SL will cause a disconnect during that first in-world rez process. Firing up the music stream (I mean streaming it out of my computer to my Shoutcast server) seems to cause a disconnect.

When a disconnect happens, I reboot the modem and router. Usually, the connection comes right back after reboot. Sometimes it's stable after reboot; sometimes it will go fifteen minutes and then lose again.

I had never read about bandwidth traffic policing before. I do know that Comcast recently started doing things to limit use of bandwidth. If the traffic policing is able to knock a modem offline, that just sounds so much more likely as a cause of my problems than my cabling just working sometimes and not working others.

:0 nope, no open-entry script like freeTV, got my own set up... however it has an extensive list of di/sky.fm urls in it. so, i know it's a long shot, but a) i don't know what 'powers' a contributing dj gets with them, perhaps enough to look at any/all stream listeners of any of the stations, and b) i doubt they would 'screen' or monitor their djs enough to know who's been bad or good.

long shot, i know, but it is the weak link in the whole media chain. we can all vouch for the lab - we can even vouch generally for di/sky, but i doubt they or anyone can provide complete vouching for every stream dj they have (and wouldn't that be a very attractive place for a 'serial griefer/thief dj' to try to get themselves a gig?). anyhoo i'll be seeing if killing my streams is enough to control the situation...

:0 actually if they are finding you having 'weak signal strength', that's valid - went much up and down that bend a year or two ago. and as i say comcast was nice enough to run extra boosters down the road to accomodate. but in the end, it turned out my modem was pooching out (it was a used freebie they were handing out way back when for attracting starter accounts). eventually i went ahead and added on their monthly modem rental instead, and have had very solid performance since then. you might want to try a new modem, if you hadn't yet! :0

and, as someone commented upstream, 'traffic shaping' would -not- completely knock out your line; apparently only the specific torrent or video stream, but not your entire connection... so yah, definitely sounds like tech probs for you, probably that modem.

yes, not uncommon anymore to see 'traffic jams' late afternoons and weekends... cablenet is a 'shared resource,' so depending on how many neighbors you have also using the same service, that can happen. my own little outages lately have come at times far outside of the usual traffic windows though, and along with what i consider suspicious inworld activity, i'm having to 'sniff the smoke' as best i can to find the source of the fire.

for my own op, all these factors had been eliminated though... not to sound like a special case. ;0 though i'm quickly devolving into just being a 'case'!! ;0 lol... 'we all go a little mad sometimes.' keep ya posted, if any more eventful probs, now that i've turned off my media streams...

My comcast internet has gone out 5 times in the past 7 days, which is a first. The tech on the phone said something about a weak signal to my router?? But restarting the cable modem is what fixed it every time.

Now i am wondering if i need a new router.

I had one of the support center idiots tell me to get a new router. The next week, a field tech blamed it on the wire running down a heavy treeline. He said when the wind blew the trees it caused little cracks in the insulation and caused the outages. Might have been something to that, usually when the spring winds hit I would have many many connection problems. But this year, after the icestorm destroyed most of the trees along that fence row, no problems at all.

I have a free radio script thing that's pre-programmed with all sorts of internet radio links. I got it from a friend who sets them up and passes them out to his friends. It's set to no mod. Normally I just have it playing a techno-jazz station. Is that an issue?

EDIT: Clarification added.

It does not seem likely that anyone at a bunch of random non-SL-related sites would be conspiring with someone in-world to track people.

The past couple weeks or so, maybe a bit longer, I've noticed things taking so long to rez, other players telling me i am wisp forever and to re bake alot, so i figured I'd turn on my Lag-o-meter on, (HELP TAB) and watch it.

Let me say, I have DSL (ATT) switched from Comcast after my last horrific hurricane problem, (3 weeks no cable) and paid them a bit extra ($5 mo) for faster access since I do feel I need it for SL. For the first time since I've been playing SL, and that's been almost 5 years, i am seeing my network connection showing below par. This happens about every 2 minutes for about 5 seconds each time.

Now i don't know if SL can detect this better now, or if it is on the SL side, but its getting irritating, and I'd like some answers before i call ATT and raise hell. Feed back would be appreciated from anyone else that's been experiencing this lately, thanks!

i have also noticed today, trying to adjust my network max bandwidth, that i'm getting hellaciously more redbar at my normal setting (800); moving up or down only seems to make it worse, but atm even my normal setting seems to get very, very frequent redbar punching up every few seconds... :\ maybe prolly recent client/server updates, a little out-of-whack.