PSA: If you are going to tunnel BitTorrent through SSH at your university...

[Mookow]

Originally posted by: Astaroth33
Heh.. he deserved what he got and more just from his attitude alone! :thumbsup:

Yeah. I dont like users with that sort of attitude, but usually you cannot justify throttling his connection just for being a dick, and as a general rule, I dont advocate screwing users just based on attitude alone. Giving their tickets a much lower priority is a much better way to handle that 😉 . However, when you are being a dick and taking 10Mbit... then you've just given me a good reason for playing with your connection, and it is something that I can defend if my boss asks about it.

 

[Mookow]

Originally posted by: thereds

Originally posted by: Mookow

Originally posted by: Xiety
lol... my ISP has every P2P port capped. I can't pass the 1kb/s barrier for BiTTorrent, Kazaa, etc., etc....

We dont limit those ports that badly, but we do limit them. Which is why he was tunneling via SSH.

How do you tunnel through SSH?

I'm not sure how he did it. I assume he was was using a BT client that is setup to allow this. All this traffic was going through SSH, yet he had a lot of instances of BT running, and nothing else was using SSH nor was anything using the CPU enough to run 3+Mbit of traffic.

 

[myusername]

How did you have access to the processes on a student's computer?

 

[Anubis]

there are programs you can DL that will tunnel SSH, you just set BT to use it as a proxy of sorts,

My school capped everything BT didnt work Kazaa went at 2k/s max, HTTP was limited to 600mb, never saw a DL over 200k/s upload was uncapped sweet 1.5mb upload
I started our DC++ hub, that was a godsend, small campus 2000 studens yet we had 10 TB on the DC++ server


what the hell is half duplex and full duplex?


on another note I did the same thing my freshman year, i pushed open a port and ran a remote FTP server, on 1 day i was useing 78% of all the schools bandwidth, crashed the network, they didnt like that
that just said not to do it again

 

[sygyzy]

You gotta admit that's pretty impressive of him to figure out tunneling through SSL. I have never heard of anyone doing this for Bittorrent.

Edit: Sorry, meant SSH.

 

[Rumpltzer]

Originally posted by: Mookow

Originally posted by: kranky
Who remembers the "punishment hub"? 🙂

Anyway, there have been enough threads here from people who feel that their school ought to provide them with unlimited bandwidth that I'm not that surprised at what you heard.

I was the guy who talked to the asshat running roughly 5 instances each of BitTorrent on three PCs. After I told him we didnt allow that sort of thing, he literally asked me "So what the f*** are you going to do about it?" It was actually rather amusing... like he didnt think we could stop him. Roughly 30 seconds later though, after I made a phone call, he was disabused of that idea when all three ports died. It's not like we are running a bunch of Linksys home routers in the closets, we can configure those Cisco's on a port-by-port basis. When we do decide to turn his connection back on, I think he isnt going to be allowed more than 10Mbit half duplex from now on. If that.

Yeah, I assumed you were the one who turned off his pipe from your original post. I agree with the comments about not giving him even that much bandwidth when he gets turned back on. I mean, I'm really vengeful. I'd wait a couple of weeks to turn him on, and then I'd only give him 56K.

How could he be so ignorant about the consequences?

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: myusername
How did you have access to the processes on a student's computer?

Sounds to me like he busted into his room and looked at his computer. By the fact that he new it wasn't in the system tray, etc.

 

[DrPizza]

I'm curious though... if you had asked him what he's doing with all that bandwidth, and he made up something and tried to sound like a moron, then what? Suppose he said something like "I'm working on processing physics data for some high tech project. I didn't realize the data took up that much bandwidth."

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
I'm curious though... if you had asked him what he's doing with all that bandwidth, and he made up something and tried to sound like a moron, then what? Suppose he said something like "I'm working on processing physics data for some high tech project. I didn't realize the data took up that much bandwidth."

"Can I see?"

 

[SP33Demon]

SSH?

I think half duplex is a one way transmission of data, like d/l, and full allows you to upload? Just a guess though.

 

[blakeatwork]

Originally posted by: SP33Demon
SSH?

I think half duplex is a one way transmission of data, like d/l, and full allows you to upload? Just a guess though.

Full duplex means you can send-receive at the same time.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Anubis
there are programs you can DL that will tunnel SSH, you just set BT to use it as a proxy of sorts

Of course, the next question is: where was he proxying to? SSH will get you through the network alright, but you need another machine of equal bandwidth on the outside of the nextwork, and at 10Mb/sec, that had to be one beefy machine.

 

[FoBoT]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
I would have port throttled that smacktard back to the dial-up age.

^^^

that would have been funnier because then he wouldn't know why it was happening and he would waste a lot of time trying to figure it out/troubleshoot it

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: Anubis
there are programs you can DL that will tunnel SSH, you just set BT to use it as a proxy of sorts

Of course, the next question is: where was he proxying to? SSH will get you through the network alright, but you need another machine of equal bandwidth on the outside of the nextwork, and at 10Mb/sec, that had to be one beefy machine.

the programs i have used all had their own set up, some of teh progies you paied for

teh one i used worked well, kazaa ran at 5k/s cause of teh schools limiting after teh tunnel i got 200k/s

 

[Platypus]

haha we just turn of their pic, we don't play around.

 

[yukichigai]

When I was at WSU it was a very different case. The IT department didn't hire network-familiar students to work there, almost categorically so. They specifically hired the students with the best "people skills", and thusly IT was staffed almost exclusively by the equivalent of an AOL Customer Service Rep. (pre-India outsourcing) There were very few controls on what went in or out, though there were some. (FTPs of all things) However these were blocked by a software proxy/firewall, (though we all had global IPs somehow) which we assumed was run on Win98. As such every 8~10 hours the computer would crash and reboot, taking down the entire dorm internet access for 2~5 minutes. However this didn't stop me from running 3 IRC Fservs and a Tribes Gameserver, with no noticeable slowdown in either my download or upload capacity. (or anyone else's for that matter) The only time IT even realized I existed was during some unpleasantness involving pingflooding, and all they did was say "don't do that again." (In fact, before that I had noticed some cap to my ul/dl, but after that the internet was my oyster, prompting me to run the aforementioned Fservs and Gameserver)

The IT guys still knew how to take away net access though, or at least call someone who did. A friend accidentally set off a portscan alert on the firewall/proxy thing; when they called he wasn't very congenial, and they killed his ethernet port. (of course then he just used his roommate's)

 

[Mookow]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: Anubis
there are programs you can DL that will tunnel SSH, you just set BT to use it as a proxy of sorts

Of course, the next question is: where was he proxying to? SSH will get you through the network alright, but you need another machine of equal bandwidth on the outside of the nextwork, and at 10Mb/sec, that had to be one beefy machine.

It was 15 different BitTorrents. They didnt have to be going to one machine, it could have been this guy seeding it for all his friends, or there might be a bunch of college kids tunneling BT through SSH, since many places leave port 22 open, and my university is on I2, which means we get very nice speeds to other colleges on I2. I think we saw a wide spread of recipient IPs for his outgoing packets, but I'm not 100% on that.

 

[BatmanNate]

Originally posted by: Xiety
lol... my ISP has every P2P port capped. I can't pass the 1kb/s barrier for BiTTorrent, Kazaa, etc., etc....

Use a different port for BT.

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: Mookow

Originally posted by: lnguyen
i don't have to worry about sucking all my bandwidth using BT. that little packetshaper sitting at the border tells me to go take a hike if I try to use anything 😛

Yeah, but he had been managing to tunnel it through SSH. I dont know exactly how he had it set-up, this is just what my supervisor told me when he said that "such and such IPs are taking a huge amount of bandwidth, go find out where they are and what they are using it for."

well, that doesn't help here either, anything encrypted... gets capped at 5KB/s...

 

[Mookow]

Originally posted by: lnguyen

Originally posted by: Mookow

Originally posted by: lnguyen
i don't have to worry about sucking all my bandwidth using BT. that little packetshaper sitting at the border tells me to go take a hike if I try to use anything 😛

Yeah, but he had been managing to tunnel it through SSH. I dont know exactly how he had it set-up, this is just what my supervisor told me when he said that "such and such IPs are taking a huge amount of bandwidth, go find out where they are and what they are using it for."

well, that doesn't help here either, anything encrypted... gets capped at 5KB/s...

Well, starting next week, anything coming in or out of his three jacks will be operating under his new cap of 14.4 Kbits/s. I say starting next week, because until then he wont be getting ANY network traffic, because the ports will still be dead. And who knows, we might be too busy to turn them on come Monday... and Tuesday... and Wednesday...

 

[abaez]

update?

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: sygyzy
You gotta admit that's pretty impressive of him to figure out tunneling through SSL. I have never heard of anyone doing this for Bittorrent.

Edit: Sorry, meant SSH.

Almost anything can be tunneled over SSH.

 

[OrganizedChaos]

If i understand SSH corectly dosen't the tunnel have to connect to another machine on the otherside of the network to act as a proxy?

 

[mugs]

Pictures of scripts on a computer screen are boring! Go back to his room with a digital camera, say "What's up now, bitch!" and take his picture.

 

[orakle]

Originally posted by: mugs
Pictures of scripts on a computer screen are boring! Go back to his room with a digital camera, say "What's up now, bitch!" and take his picture.

yes, definitely get pics