how to unshape a shaped account

Bona Botse

Bona Botse

A little insight goes a long way
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i think i have discovered a way of "unshaping" a "shaped" 30gb adsl account. okay, so i have a 30gb adsl account from all you can eat right? so i decided let me see how much faster an unshaped account would be than a shaped account with respect to p2p, voip, torrents, etc, so i got an axxessafrica 4gb unshaped account for just the rest of this month. now when i used the unshaped account there was a helluva difference (torrents average before=20kbps after=70kbps, on a 1mb line). but the miracle happened when i went back to using my shaped account: the rates that i got with the unshaped account were still prevalent with the shaped account! i am still achieving unshaped bandwidth with a shaped account! woo hoo!:D
 
coincidence buddy :)

The 2 networks is completely different, unless you got a magic 30gig unshaped saix account ;-)
 
Enjoy it imajin! That is what the internet SHOULD be like :)
 
I'm not an expert on this, but if Telkom wants to shape the accounts, why don't we use them to our advantage. Set all file-sharing to use port 80 (browsing). Find any game servers that use none standard ports, then mail them and ask for standard ports and explain why. It would make shaped accounts better than unshaped.
If everyone used standard ports then Telkom would have to get back to doing what they should, shaping themself:D
 
Prometheus said:
I'm not an expert on this, but if Telkom wants to shape the accounts, why don't we use them to our advantage. Set all file-sharing to use port 80 (browsing). Find any game servers that use none standard ports, then mail them and ask for standard ports and explain why. It would make shaped accounts better than unshaped.
If everyone used standard ports then Telkom would have to get back to doing what they should, shaping themself:D
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Won't help. telkom do not only do port prioritisation, but also packet inspection. That is what causes the latency and makes shaped accounts useless for gaming. Their packet inspection software actively blocks/delays P2P packets, so it makes very little difference if you use port 80 or not.
 
arf9999 said:
Won't help. telkom do not only do port prioritisation, but also packet inspection. That is what causes the latency and makes shaped accounts useless for gaming. Their packet inspection software actively blocks/delays P2P packets, so it makes very little difference if you use port 80 or not.
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How exactly do they inspect a packet, and if a packet is encrypted then how can it be inspected.

btw: I thought packet inspection (sniffing) was illegal under the ECT act without a court order. Are monopolies suddenly excluded from obeying the law or do they actually have a court order for every account?:confused:
 
Turbo_Aspiration said:
I guess they could argue that they examining packet headers only and ignoring the payload
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I suppose, but if it's really true then they really don't know what type of packet it is.
 
Im sure u can see what type of packet it is by looking at the header and yes, i guess u need to unwrap the whole packet to get to the header. which begs the question.. how do these "unshaping" proxies of Clipse and MrBEEP work?
 
Turbo_Aspiration said:
Im sure u can see what type of packet it is by looking at the header and yes, i guess u need to unwrap the whole packet to get to the header. which begs the question.. how do these "unshaping" proxies of Clipse and MrBEEP work?
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They use SSL encryption or the port associated?
 
You don't need to unwrap the whole packet to "get to" the header. It's a header. It's on top. It also only contains the sender and destination information and possibly a checksum afaik. Any isp looking at the body without a court order will be in violation of the ECT act.
 
but if you've opened the ip and tcp/udp layers, surely its just a matter of byte offset to get the body instead of the header? But i guess theres the difference between seeing and looking
 
Another thought just came up. If telkom does indeed inspect packets and in doing so cause the latency, then there would also be a latency with browsing on a shaped account, which there isn't. Shaped accounts are indeed faster for browsing than unshaped accounts from what I have heard so far.
Is there anyone that could try out this self-shaping and post us the before and after results?
 
Prometheus said:
Another thought just came up. If telkom does indeed inspect packets and in doing so cause the latency, then there would also be a latency with browsing on a shaped account ...
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More than likely port 80 traffic is redirected to a local / Telkom Squid farm, which should negate the latency caused by packet inspection.
 
oober said:
AS far as I remeber the latest torrent clients support encryption to bypass all the packet shaping etc.

I think the latest azureus has it now.
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They support encryption, but not to bypass packet shaping. It's mainly to throw off the RIAA so they don't know what you're downloading.
 
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You probably got better/more seeds along the way. It just happen to be when you switched accounts. A good torrent program will let you see (the quality of) the swarm.
 
Well people using that encryption report that they get higher speeds.
The topic also says "Avoid traffic shaping".

There is that added bonus of the RIAA not being able to see what is being shared yes :D
 
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