More warped thinking and lies.
Let's get back to the thread topic, huh? Are BT throttling connections?
Well not officially, no, and nor were they ever. That's official, so it must be true!
But for the last two or more weeks, BT Infinity subscribers - including me - have had a pathetic experience. But not, of course, for the important opinion-formers on this and other forums, who are renowned for defending the indefensible when it comes to BT! Kitz herself even weighed in, to downplay this one. It was just a brief hiccup with BT's DNS. Remember? But switching to Google's DNS or OpenDNS, as suggested, didn't solve it either. So that theory flopped.
Kitz then ran with that alternative conspiracy theory that it was caused by BT apparently intercepting udp/53 traffic. Redirecting all DNS queries to their own nameservers, and re-writing or forging those DNS response datagrams as if they were coming from OpenDNS or Google DNS, or whoever. Except that wasn't true either - or at least BT probably *is* covertly intercepting our DNS traffic for marketing/tracking purposes - because that's the sort of weird and sinister thing it does; for a similar example from earlier, see BT & the Phorm scandal. But, importantly, that wasn't the cause of *this* outage.
Then Kitz kept plugging that barefruit.com theory. Which wasn't actually the same thing at all. Returning a web page full of adverts in an HTTP response when a DNS lookup for a website fails -- that's the barefruit.com "service" - is not the same thing as re-directing all udp/53 traffic and forging DNS response datagrams. Big difference.
*sigh*
So then we moved on to the much more likely possibility that BT has or has had a fairly drastic failure with its core routing. A major failure that was affecting lots of BT punters, across the UK from Portsmouth to Glasgow and beyond. That piece of detective work - which importantly discredited the DNS theory - came courtesy of one insightful poster to BT's own forum (of all places!) He spotted that *some* page pre-requisites - even those pre-requisites hosted on the same server - were taking ages to load. Only *some* of them. That, in a nutshell, ruled out the DNS theory; because of the use of local DNS caching - the IP address of a web server is only looked up once during a session.
Even at this stage, though, BT was still denying the problem. It was Officially Solved. Kitz meanwhile was still going with barefruit.com being to blame, and unhelpfully claiming that TalkTalk and Sky did it too (not true) so we shouldn't according to her, be pointing any finger of blame at beloved BT. Because other ISPs intercept DNS traffic, too, apparently. In fact, TalkTalk (can't comment about Sky) do not redirect and re-write udp/53 traffic to and from external nameservers. And never have done; they do redirect HTTP on DNS look-up failure of a website made to their own nameserver. But even that "service" is helpfully an opt-out.
Either way, that major BT outage was first publicly documented on or around Dec 2nd, so far as I can see; although some contributors said later that they had problems even earlier. That huge thread of complaints on the BT forum kind of dried up after page 53 (around 18 December) so that bounds the problem with some dates. Pretty bad. Is it reasonable to grumble about that? Well, judging by the 53 pages of complaints - and the repeated Official Denials of there being any problem whatsoever - and the length of time it took to actually resolve the "non-existent" problem - well, yes it would see it was entirely reasonable to complain!
And just to wind this goddamn thing up - in so far as I'm not at all interested in it since the outage does at last seem fixed - BT is still sending HTTP responses from its own webservers when there is DNS lookup failure for some other website. Dreadful..
You have completely twisted my post
here to suit your agenda and make up some weird conspiracy theory about me. I strongly believe that what BT is doing is wrong and have voiced that.
You appear to have conveniently forgotten that it was you who first started off the DNS Hijacking theory
here. I stand by my assertion that I have always been against this sort of thing and also Phorm. I was one of those who strongly objected to it and my stance on DNS hijacking is exactly the same.
Re barefruit I never said it was the same thing. I said that Talktalk and Virgin use Barefruit which they do. I never said Sky used it. Stop twisting things to suit your agenda.
I also conceded that DNS wouldnt cause such issues. I also agreed with the posts made by sjones on the BT forums. I said at last someone talking sense and not spouting out rubbish about tracerts and ICMP. I even went out of my way to check DNS caching to make sure - see my post
here and I said it didnt make sense.
I will stand by my assertion that its not core routing, because if it was core routing then all ISPs would be affected.
BT retail do intercept DNS on port 53, its been proven many times over and I still stand by my claim that the most likely reason is that something went wrong in how they were intercepting the traffic with say a bad rule in the ellacoyas. I am strongly against DNS interception and believe that users should be able to have a choice in which DNS server they want to use.
BT had been intercepting DNS on port 53 so that users see the barefruit advertising.
So you can stop your ridiculous theories and attempts to discredit me right now.