On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 12:13:37PM -0600, Nathan E Norman wrote: > > Bzzzt. This is simply not true with DOCSIS modems (if you can cite a > provable example I'd love to hear about it). It's also not true with > LANCity Gen3 modems at least. It might work with the super-old Zenith > stuff but I don't know anyone sane using that. (My prior employer > still is in one market :/ ) unless they changed something in the last year or so, come to alaska and get GCI's cable modems, i have personally seen where every packet sent across the network is happily deposited into my friends lan. (this was a while ago though) > Cable modems act as a layer-2 bridge. To prevent the sniffing problem > you are talking about, each modem is programmed to proxy arp a finite > number of MAC addresses (usually one). So, unless you are a technical > wizard and have access to documentation that the manufacturers won't > even give the cable companies, you are SOL if you want to sniff your > neighbors. though in many cases you don't need to do any sniffing since they also bridge unrouteable protocols like appletalk and netbios, simply hook up a mac or windows box and go poking around all the hundreds of wide open shares. or run your neighbors appletalk printer out of paper... (or did they do something about this too?) > When I worked for a cable provider, I wanted a sniffer so we could > troubleshoot. Obviously I needed a modem that could be set to > "promiscuous" mode. The official word was it couldn't be done. I was > unofficially informed that it could be done but the manufacturer > didn't plan on that software ever leaving the factory. well when you ask GCI if they could please route mail worth a damn they say `im sorry that cannot be done' ;-) same thing with `can you please avoid regular week long failures of your network?' > Some providers support POP over SSL. Usually that implies a clueful > provider, and, well, we're talking about cable companies :) clueful isp? wuahahahahahaHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAH those are as extinct as the dinosoars. :/ > Except you now risk running afoul of the DUL. using your isp's mail service runs you the risk of having very large quantities of your mail simply dropped in the bit bucket without you ever knowing about it. my isp recently added murphy.debian.org to thier silent bitbucket list, i cannot be sure they don't have more machines on such a thing. (it was hard enough to convince them that i KNEW they were throwing away mail, they tried to just blow me off, when i started talking about having no such problems getting the mail from another machine out of state they decided to fix the problem rather then risk me coming down thier to lart them personally) > > unfortunatly there seems to be a law saying all ISPs must suck, and > > thus shell access is an endangered species. along with static ips, > > reliability, security, etc etc.... > > Can't argue with that. The sad thing is, a "geek oriented" ISP > wouldn't necessarily get very far; the mass horde is fairly happy with > the crap they've got. the problem is geeks are all spread out across the globe. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
Attachment:
pgpnHfH9ZNo4F.pgp
Description: PGP signature