Hi,
I live in Hyderabad but Hathway cable modem is not yet very common here, hence I am shamelessly posting to a Mumbai list with my question! My apologies!
I have had this service (Hathway cable modem metered service, 300 MB/month limit) for almost a month now, and I am about to give up on it because what their website shows as my "usage" is far higher than what my iptables firewall shows I have downloaded (sum of all IP traffic coming to my machine).
My observations are that if I stay online (without actually surfing) for more than 2-3 hours, this difference is quite noticeable. "ifconfig eth0" (which shows IP *plus* non-IP traffic, as opposed to iptables' input chain, which shows only IP traffic) is closer to what they claim is my "usage", and using tcpdump I realise that the difference is the constant stream of ARP traffic (amounting to about 300-500 KB/hour!)
More bizarre, if I stay online beyond midnight, the next day the usage is almost double of what you would expect even from the "extra" caused by ARP being counted, so I'm effectively getting hit twice when I do that! Some serious double-counting bug in their software :-)
My question to the group: has anyone in Mumbai noticed this? People using Windows will have no way easy way of detecting this, which may explain Hathway's extremely polite but otherwise apathetic attutude to my concerns, so I have to ask Linux people this question...
Thank you!
Sitaram
On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Sitaram Chamarty wrote:
My observations are that if I stay online (without actually surfing) for more than 2-3 hours, this difference is quite noticeable. "ifconfig eth0" (which shows IP *plus* non-IP traffic, as opposed to iptables' input chain, which shows only IP traffic) is closer to what they claim is my "usage", and using tcpdump I realise that the difference is the constant stream of ARP traffic (amounting to about 300-500 KB/hour!)
Check your firewall configuration, misconfigured firewalls can generate unwanted ARP packets. Don't know about your double counting problem though.
Best regards, Rajesh
I used Hathway Cable Modem at Nariman Point, Mumbai for 8-9 months in 2001 at a client's place. Their systems were under windows.
First, as far as I have seen on their agreements, and they gave me clarifications on it, the limit was on "downloads", which they defined as "ftp" and "pop3 - email attachments". Everything else was excluded from the limit. So I could surf as much as I wasnt and not have to pay anything extra for it.
However, they never charged us extra even when we had heavy downloads since (we found out), their software is not capable of differentiating between http and ftp traffic. Dont know if they have changed the terms since then.
As far as Hathway's response is concerned, I would be suprised if you got any worthwhile response. Even when we had problems (in windows systems), my office peons had better answers than hathway tech-support personnel. To the extent that when we got the cable modem, they asked me to install a new (second) lan card.......When I pointed out that the modem had a usb port and I could install without using another lan card, they didnt seem to know that there is something called USB port.
Regards Saswata
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sitaram Chamarty" sitaram@dimensional.com To: linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 10:46 AM Subject: [ILUG-BOM] Hathway cable modem - high download counts
- LUG meet @ 4.00 pm on 12 Jan. 2003 @ VJTI
Hi,
I live in Hyderabad but Hathway cable modem is not yet very common here, hence I am shamelessly posting to a Mumbai list with my question! My apologies!
I have had this service (Hathway cable modem metered service, 300 MB/month limit) for almost a month now, and I am about to give up on it because what their website shows as my "usage" is far higher than what my iptables firewall shows I have downloaded (sum of all IP traffic coming to my machine).
My observations are that if I stay online (without actually surfing) for more than 2-3 hours, this difference is quite noticeable. "ifconfig eth0" (which shows IP *plus* non-IP traffic, as opposed to iptables' input chain, which shows only IP traffic) is closer to what they claim is my "usage", and using tcpdump I realise that the difference is the constant stream of ARP traffic (amounting to about 300-500 KB/hour!)
More bizarre, if I stay online beyond midnight, the next day the usage is almost double of what you would expect even from the "extra" caused by ARP being counted, so I'm effectively getting hit twice when I do that! Some serious double-counting bug in their software :-)
My question to the group: has anyone in Mumbai noticed this? People using Windows will have no way easy way of detecting this, which may explain Hathway's extremely polite but otherwise apathetic attutude to my concerns, so I have to ask Linux people this question...
Thank you!
Sitaram
-- _______________________________________________
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Rajesh Deo -
Saswata Banerjee & Associates -
Sitaram Chamarty