IP address blocking problem

[Roadburner]

Hello Sam,

Monday, September 26, 2005, 12:15:08 AM, you wrote:

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SP> Roadburner wrote:
SP> [...]
>> SP> A thought occured to me, since you have only one IP, I'm guessing that
>> SP> you have a dynamic IP?  Have you thought about staying offline for 48-72
>> SP> hours and seeing if when you come back up you end up with a different
>> SP> IP?  The DHCP lease of IPs often expire after that length of time at
>> SP> which point you might end up with a new one.
>> 
>> I think it is the same IP I have had for the last year and a half. I'll give
>> it a try. I have never had it off line that long. Good idea!!!

SP> As an extra precaution you might want to unplug any dsl or cable modem
SP> you use as well as any router.  This may not be necessary as I believe
SP> the only piece of equipment that needs to be offline is whatever MAC
SP> address recieves that particular DHCP lease (someone with more
SP> networking knowledge want to correct me?) however, I know that cable
SP> modems have MAC addresses and DSL modems might (again, someone with more
SP> networking knowledge want to put me straight?) so you never know.
SP> Better to err on the side of caution with this.  If your provider uses
SP> PPPoE I'm not sure how that works or effects it, but I would think given
SP> 72 hours you'd almost be certain to end up with a new IP.  This is how
SP> the dhcpd deamon on a red hat box of mine worked anyway, it had 24 hour
SP> lease times by default.  Another thing you can try is a new network card
SP> or router.  Given a new MAC address, you may recieve a new IP right away
SP> and hence not have to be down for that long.

I do have a cable modem. I also have another router that's been sitting in
the study. When I had it installed, I had the cable modem and router hooked
up and turned on at the same time. Could be either I guess. Wonder if I
changed out the cable modem? It has frozen up on me a few times with heavy
Tor traffic. I have been kicking about getting another one. I had to lower
the bandwidth limits from the default for Tor to keep it from locking up.

>> Only 2 re-mailers have me blocked. Apparently while I operated as an exit
>> node, someone abused the service and got my IP blacklisted. Only 2
>> re-mailers are using black list filtering. That is not very good if I am
>> a middleman of a chain. Someone's mail won't go through :(

SP> I'm curious that remailers would even choose to black list at all, it
SP> doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  Due to latency and reliability I
SP> always assumed the remailer network was never a desirable vehicle of
SP> spam, but of course I've got no data to back up that assumption (doesn't
SP> AOL block most of the remailer network?  Heck, they block my personal IP
SP> address because I'm not a known ISP, I have to use my ISP's smtp server
SP> to talk to @aol.com addresses).

No, far too slow for spam. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Normally
it can take 30 minutes to a couple of hours for a message to go through.
Definitely not a spam network. Besides, the messages have to be formatted
before they can even get in to the re-mailer network. That requires keeping
up with re-mailer keys, encryption to the re-mailers before sending and the
software itself looks at the message MD5 and if it sees 2 or more message bodies
that are identical, it will discard all but one. It is also all plain text
messaging, no pictures of Rolexes and sizes are limited. I tried it my self
on my re-mailer. I changed the subject but left the body the same. When it
hit the re-mailer software 7 out of 8 test messages were deleted.

>> One of the 2 re-mailers that has me blocked is also a Tor node operator. I just
>> checked the list :) Funny huh?

SP> Indeed.  Does he/she have contact info?  You may be able to explain the
SP> situation to him/her.

Yes, I sent off an e-mail. Hopefully he will understand. After all, all we
want is our right to privacy. He is doing the same as I only on a bigger
scale. Must have a lot more bandwidth than me.



-- 
Best regards,
 Roadburner                            mailto:roadburner at comcast.net