Weird UPC Problem

PotBelly

I am using upc(chorus) about 6 months now and I in the north dublin/Swords area.

I have the cable modem plugged into a switch which I have my Laptop, Printer and X360 and Ps3 plugged into.

I was surfing grand all evening and when I turned on the X360 to Play, it would not sign into live. Tried the PS3 and the same thing, no PSN

I am still able to use my laptop fine.

I also tried my eeepc in the switch and I am getting the SID/username and password page from upc. weird.

I reckon there might be a shortage of IP addresses :-)

I dont want to try the port on the switch which this is plugged into just in case I lose everything.

I also tried resetting all the equipment, but no joy there.

Also the 360 and PS3 cant go online at same time(they use the same cat5)

Anyone else experience anything like this before, with some equipment working and others not?

dub45

I am no expert on networking but if you are really just using a switch then you havent a hope of all the equipemnt working out of it as you need a router for more than one item with any modem (afaik!)

You have given the answer yourself:

I reckon there might be a shortage of IP addresses :-)

Buy a router and live happily ever after.

And far be it for me to defend UPC but your problem has absolutely nothing got to do with them.

paulm17781

As dub45 said. Get a router that's capable of NATing. Most routers now have a 4 port switch built in, if not, you have a switch. Your problem is your cable modem is sticking an IP address to one device. Rebooting the modem each time you want to use a new device will fix it.

PotBelly

I think you misunderstand, this has been working fine for the last 6 months.
It stopped working last night.

The reason I use a switch is that I don't want wireless, and its hard to find a good router which does not have wireless.

As well as the complication of using a router. I have used routers for years and between the static IP and port forwarding for each piece of equipment, switches are just easier.

I have set up this type of thing for several friends and it works fine even today.

You have to remember that this is cable broadband not DSL.

RangeR

PotBelly wrote: »

I think you misunderstand, this has been working fine for the last 6 months.
It stopped working last night.

The reason I use a switch is that I don't want wireless, and its hard to find a good router which does not have wireless.

As well as the complication of using a router. I have used routers for years and between the static IP and port forwarding for each piece of equipment, switches are just easier.

I have set up this type of thing for several friends and it works fine even today.

You have to remember that this is cable broadband not DSL.

IP Routing doesn't care if it's DSL or cable. You need a router. I have no idea how you got away without one for 6 months but facts are facts.

Unless you were only using one device [powered on] at a time?

You can get non wifi routers [or just disable the wifi on a wireless router].
Also, without a router [or firewall] you are open to all sorts of crap from the net. Don't rely on software firewalls.

PotBelly

RangeR wrote: »

IP Routing doesn't care if it's DSL or cable.

I did not mean the IP routing was different, What I was getting at was that with dsl you have an option of a modem/router in one where as with cable you don't have that option. As well as you cant access the settings in your cable modem.

I dont know what BB you have yourself but you should have a go at using a switch with cable. I got it all back working with the switch and its flying.

UPC issues all devices with ip addresses through the cable modem.

As listed above the only real device on the system worth protecting is my laptop, and I have taken precautions on that. The other devices are 360/ps3 and printer.

LOL I even have my network printer working on this system.

vibe666

PotBelly wrote: »

I dont know what BB you have yourself but you should have a go at using a switch with cable. I got it all back working with the switch and its flying.

no, not at all, you really shouldn't. or anyone. ever.

for all intents and purposes, with no router creating a private firewalled LAN for your connected devices the ntl modem is leaving every byte of information passing around your network open to whoever might want to take a look at it and making every one of your devices publicly visible on the internet without any hardware SPI firewall to protect them.

you say there's nothing worth protecting but do you really think that is the case?

every time you print something to your printer the information you send to it passes over the public internet and could be captured by someone. did you ever print off credit card details, or booking confirmations?

if you don't like wireless and can't find a good router without wireless then buy one with wireless and just disable it in the configuration.

what really scares me is that you think this is okay and you've actually set the same thing up for other people and they probably think they're fine. :eek:

i think you have some phone calls to make.

oh, and your sig is a year out of date.

PotBelly

So what you are saying is that anyone who directly connects to a modem is leaving themselves open to all kinds of attacks??

That means the every isp is purposely exposing every customer to the wild of the internet.lol

With this system there is no network.

Forgetting the the printer element, I cant see how this is any different than someone using a dsl modem and plugging one pc directly into it. Your just plugging in several to the one point.

vibe666

PotBelly wrote: »

So what you are saying is that anyone who directly connects to a modem is leaving themselves open to all kinds of attacks??

yes they are if they are using a dumb modem with no firewall.

PotBelly wrote: »

That means the every isp is purposely exposing every customer to the wild of the internet.lol

no it doesn't because *most* ISP's don't supply you with a dumb modem, they usually supply a modem/router combo device which does have a firewall, such as the netopia that eircom provide or others.

BUT in the case of NTL, yes, they are. but on most packages they give you their wifi router too.

even if i was setting up a connection for one PC i wouldn't just connect it directly to the modem, it just doesn't make any sense when you can get a good router with wifi and spi firewall for 40€.

you're just asking for trouble. you do know that there are virus's and trojans out there that are able to disable software firewalls don't you?

PotBelly wrote: »

With this system there is no network.

YES there IS a network, just not a private one. it's called the internet, maybe you've heard of it? :rolleyes:

what you have done is make all the devices connected to your switch directly part of the internet. if there was no 'network' you would not be able to print to the printer from your laptop. what you have done is no safer than me having my network printer directly connected to my modem and you haveing your laptop connected to yours and me letting you print stuff off on my printer over the net. for all intents and purposes, everything is right out there in the open.

PotBelly wrote: »

Forgetting the the printer element, I cant see how this is any different than someone using a dsl modem and plugging one pc directly into it. Your just plugging in several to the one point.

you are exactly right, but you are saying it like it's a good thing and it really isn't.

think of it like living in a house. each device you have is one of the rooms in that house. right now, your front door and every door aside from your laptop 'room' is wide open. do you really think that a software firewall running on your PC as a locked door on that room is adequately protecting your 'house' from potential intruders?

for example, your ps3 or xbox, do you have any data on them? are you confident that they are not accessible across the 'network' you have added them to?

have you ever had someone come round to your house and connect to your network with their pc to copy files to and from your PC? that data would be passing unencrypted over the internet.

you have one very flimsy layer of protection on only one part of your 'network' and you think this is a good idea?

hightower1

PotBelly wrote: »

I think you misunderstand, this has been working fine for the last 6 months.
It stopped working last night.

The reason I use a switch is that I don't want wireless, and its hard to find a good router which does not have wireless.

As well as the complication of using a router. I have used routers for years and between the static IP and port forwarding for each piece of equipment, switches are just easier.

I have set up this type of thing for several friends and it works fine even today.

You have to remember that this is cable broadband not DSL.

Have you directly connected the consoles to the modem and not use the switch? I work for an ISP and the amount of times people tell me "but it was working yesterday" and because of this it must be the network? It makes very little sense, like blaming the road for your car breaking down simply because your car was working yesterday lol. Sorry a bit off topic there, bypass the switch and connect direct using say the xbox to the modem, dont forget to reboot the modem once you do this, if you can get onlne there you've isolated the issue to the switch. A shortage of ip addresses is very very rare and would effect all subscribers nation wide.

PotBelly

vibe666 wrote: »

yes they are if they are using a dumb modem with no firewall.

no it doesn't because *most* ISP's don't supply you with a dumb modem, they usually supply a modem/router combo device which does have a firewall, such as the netopia that eircom provide or others.

BUT in the case of NTL, yes, they are. but on most packages they give you their wifi router too.

even if i was setting up a connection for one PC i wouldn't just connect it directly to the modem, it just doesn't make any sense when you can get a good router with wifi and spi firewall for 40€.

you're just asking for trouble. you do know that there are virus's and trojans out there that are able to disable software firewalls don't you?

YES there IS a network, just not a private one. it's called the internet, maybe you've heard of it? :rolleyes:

what you have done is make all the devices connected to your switch directly part of the internet. if there was no 'network' you would not be able to print to the printer from your laptop. what you have done is no safer than me having my network printer directly connected to my modem and you haveing your laptop connected to yours and me letting you print stuff off on my printer over the net. for all intents and purposes, everything is right out there in the open.

you are exactly right, but you are saying it like it's a good thing and it really isn't.

think of it like living in a house. each device you have is one of the rooms in that house. right now, your front door and every door aside from your laptop 'room' is wide open. do you really think that a software firewall running on your PC as a locked door on that room is adequately protecting your 'house' from potential intruders?

for example, your ps3 or xbox, do you have any data on them? are you confident that they are not accessible across the 'network' you have added them to?

have you ever had someone come round to your house and connect to your network with their pc to copy files to and from your PC? that data would be passing unencrypted over the internet.

you have one very flimsy layer of protection on only one part of your 'network' and you think this is a good idea?

It is obvious from your post that you have no real knowledge of networking and you are just adding to the scaremongering that all the software/hardware companies use to sell their products.

I use Linux

Jesus man, your post is like reading the packaging of a belkin router.


Hightower1 - Thanks for the input. That was one of the first things I tried, to see if I could isolate the problem to a specific piece of hardware, thats why I posted.

All the other device would not work when I plugged them directly into the modem, even after several reboots, but the laptop would still work fine.

It was strange, is all

hightower1

Thats very odd indeed? The modem will assign a dynamic ip to anything directly connected to it should that be a laptop, desktop, console etc. The modem itself is pretty think, its only a bridge so will only assign an ip, gateway, dns etc. In turn it sends back the mac of the attached equipment.

Give UPC a call, direct connect the xbox for example, reboot the modem and they should be able see if the xbox gets assigned an ip and its mac address returned? If it sends back its mac address thats great but when it does this it should also send back the assigned ip address for confirmation, if they can see the mac address and no ip that should narrow it down for you.

UPC modems as I said are only bridges and because of this dont contain firewalls and wont need ports opened. The only thing I can think of is to run a speedtest on www.upc.nl/speedtest and see if your getting what you should on a direct ethernet connection to the modem, if not it might be some kind of noise/jitter issue on the line. The laptop browsing my not have a noticable change in terms of establishing a connection but if sony's home or xbox live are registering a lot of jitter,lag or high ping times because of noise on the connection they may not be allowing access?

Sorry for the length of the post but I hope it helps.

PotBelly

It is all working fine now. It must have been a glitch in the system.

A little off topic - A neighbour of mine reported download speeds alot higher than 20meg yesterday.

It could be they are working on the system or upgrading it(hopefully).

Maybe that was the cause of the problem.

I am just glad it worked itself out and I didn't have to ring them.

PotBelly

PotBelly wrote: »

It is all working fine now. It must have been a glitch in the system.


Maybe that was the cause of the problem.

I am just glad it worked itself out and I didn't have to ring them.

Ive had the same glitch too mate, fixed itself :pac:


UPC dug up my road last week, today i am hitting 19.1Mbps/2.4MBps on newsgroups pretty much a flat out my 20Mb connection. Possibly could do 20+ very soon.

vibe666

PotBelly wrote: »

It is obvious from your post that you have no real knowledge of networking and you are just adding to the scaremongering that all the software/hardware companies use to sell their products.

actually, working in IT for the last 14 years and currently doing 3rd level server support (global scope) for one of the largest IT services companies in the world gives me a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.

PotBelly wrote: »

I use Linux

funny that, so do I, but I'm not naive enough to think that it makes me immune to everything on the internet. are you?

people have been finding bugs and security flaws in linux for a long time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. yes, linux is more secure than windows, but it isn't infallible.

PotBelly wrote: »

Jesus man, your post is like reading the packaging of a belkin router.

no, my post is someone with more experience than you telling you that what you are doing with your own set up is plain old wrong and what you are doing with the set ups for other people is just totally reckless.

there's a lot of smart people on here and plenty smarter than I am, so if I was talking bullsh*t someone is more than welcome to call me on it, and yes, in the past it's happened and when I'm wrong I'm always the first to admit it.

if someone other than yourself wants to call me on that then fair enough, but simply looking at the way you have described your set up tells me you know very little about what you are doing, despite what you seem to think.

you came here looking for help and advice, but when you got it you didn't want it and I'm sorry about that, but I'm not trying to sell you something you don't need and i have nothing to gain (or lose) from trying to help you.

Kensington

PotBelly wrote: »

It is obvious from your post that you have no real knowledge of networking and you are just adding to the scaremongering that all the software/hardware companies use to sell their products.

I use Linux

First off, Linux has some pretty major security flaws, it is most certainly not hack proof or rock solid secure.

Second, it is your post that suggests you don't really have any idea what you are doing, or moreso how risky it is. I agree entirely with Vibe666 on what he's written.

What you've done is set up everything you have on your network onto the public internet. Every device gets what knows as public IP address. That means anyone, from anywhere in the world, can have full, unrestricted connectivity to whatever you have on your network. Secure? Hardly...

On the other hand, normal DSL setups, have a NAT router, and the difference is that the router gets the public IP address, and all the devices on your network receive another, completely seperate, private IP address. So you have the public internet one side, which everyone can see, and your private network on the other side (with all your devices) which only YOU know about.

The router then handles translating between public and private IP and vice versa. Much safer, because if I try to connect to your public IP address, I just get the NAT router. Whereas in your case, when I try to connect to the public IP address, I get direct connectivity to the device you have connected to that particular address.

Furthermore, the one huge benefit of NAT is, because the NAT router doesn't know which device I want to get at on the private side, when I attempt to connect to your public IP, it simply drops the packet I send to it. So I can sit here trying to make a connection to your router public IP for hours, and I get absolutely nothing. Basic security right there. Eircom, BT, Smart, UTV - you name it, they all give customers NAT routers now (mainly because they all have wireless facilities on them these days).

OP, for security sake, pick yourself up a NAT router. At the moment your cablemodem can issue up to four (yes, four!) public IP addresses, but UPC may well decide to limit this to one at any time in the future which will completely knock out your nice public network - it doesn't make sense as to why they issue more than one IP anyway...

kaimera

even the crappy white wifi router ntl provide free with some of their packages is better than your current setup OP.

wifi can be disabled on any wifi capable router...

as been said, NTL don't provide more than one public IP address so unless you're not telling all about your setup something is seriously ****ed up.

was open to correction on that; wouldnt have thought a ISP would give more than one public IP

UPC dug up my road last week, today i am hitting 19.1Mbps/2.4MBps on newsgroups pretty much a flat out my 20Mb connection. Possibly could do 20+ very soon.

DOCSIS 3.0 cable standard and a new cable modem for higher speeds I believe. Rumours of 50Mb this year.

paulm17781

Actually, I think UPC do provide 3 addresses. Putting computers on the internet is a bad idea unless you know what you're doing. This is why we have firewalls, to block access to everything except what is critical and using NAT to hide it.

OP, seriously change your set up. You're doing more harm than you realise.

ksl19

PotBelly wrote: »

It is obvious from your post that you have no real knowledge of networking and you are just adding to the scaremongering that all the software/hardware companies use to sell their products.

I use Linux

Jesus man, your post is like reading the packaging of a belkin router.


Hightower1 - Thanks for the input. That was one of the first things I tried, to see if I could isolate the problem to a specific piece of hardware, thats why I posted.

All the other device would not work when I plugged them directly into the modem, even after several reboots, but the laptop would still work fine.

It was strange, is all

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Your setup is completely unsecured.

Google 'Shiels up' and run the test. I'd be interested in what it reports!

vibe666

there was a UPC announcement last year sometime when they announced their 100mbps upgrades in the Netherlands that they would be updating all their territories to 100mbps by the end of 2009.

anyone want to bet that it'll be everywhere except ireland when the time comes? :mad:

PotBelly

Ok.....First of all, apologies to vibe666 for that antagonistic post. TBH I was just winding you up to get a reaction. From your sig at the time I guessed you had a back-round in IT and sarcasm does not translate well on these forums.

I was not quoting the linux line to say it was the be all and end all. I know it has weaknesses but I personally find it more secure than windows.

My original post was a question regarding networking and ups, I did not post my setup to ask if it was secure or not, but to give as much information as possible about the weird problem I had.

Although everything was back to normal a couple of days later, I am still curious why it happened.

After the massive response regarding my insecure system, I did a lot of research and I have to agree the system I was using was very insecure.
I did not realise the cable modems were just bridges and had no actual protection. I just assumed all those settings were hidden like everything else in the sci-Atl modems.

Going on what you all said and some independent research, I picked up a wireless router today, configured it(disabled the wireless and DHCP etc) and all is working fine.

So now I have modem > switch > 360/Ps3 + Router > Laptop + Printer.
I am going to leave the 360 and Ps3 in the switch - dont have to port forward /dmz and such.
So, my laptop and printer are on the new router.

I hope all this calms all your security worries :-)

Thanks for all the help

vibe666

PotBelly wrote: »

Ok.....First of all, apologies to vibe666 for that antagonistic post. TBH I was just winding you up to get a reaction. From your sig at the time I guessed you had a back-round in IT and sarcasm does not translate well on these forums.

yup, geek to the core and as easy to wind up as a cuckoo clock on swiss national winding day.

and you get me twice too, once doing it and then again cos when i read back what i wrote, i sound like a total cock and then feel like and idiot for sounding like that. double whammy! :P

anyways, hooray for de internets \o/, another home network saved from the dangers of non-NATtedness.

still think it's kinda weird about them giving out multiple IP's off the modem though, seems a tad odd to me.

EDIT: cool, a smiley on every line of my post. :cool:

p.s. don't forget to update your speedtest in your sig.

PotBelly

Yeh, Nostalgia - that speed test is the first time I ever got throttled by BT.:o

Downloaded over 350gigs that month and got flagged. I reckon thats why they wouldn't upgrade me to 24meg. Thats one of the reasons I switched to cable BB.:P

Then I find out they traffic shape torrents. :mad:

RangeR

PotBelly wrote: »

...Loads of stuff...

Good man.

vibe666

ditto.

only finding traffic shaping in the evenings though, overnight and during most of the day it seems fine.

tried encrypted transport and using random ports but they always seem to spot it.

I set up RSS feed captures in Azureus so most of my regular downloads (of linux ISO's obviously, nothing illegal ) are started automatically as soon as they become available, so even if they are released at 5am in the morning, they're quite often finished by the time I wake up.

i also set up the webUI for it too, so I can still manage my downloads remotely when I'm at work, inc. starting, stopping, re-prioritising and adding and removing torrents which is also very handy.

and I have a custom firmware on my router which tracks every byte of data passing in and out of my LAN so I can be sure to get the most out of my 250gb FUP limit every month without going over it.

kaimera

don't use torrents on ntl tbh.

link to a usenet account on bargain alerts and tbh, wow is all I can say.

vibe666

yeah, but that costs money and i'm tight.

kaimera

vibe666 wrote: »

yeah, but that costs money and i'm tight.

that's what she said last night? :P

vibe666

oooh, too easy....




...yore ma?