Review of my home broadband router logs (suspicious activity?)

[Adrian Caspersz]

If you don't have much control what he does on the internet, then perhaps you might feel more secure getting yourself a different ISP.

That can't cost that much.

[Micky]

I found the answer to this, where the computer boys play.

The router has its own clock, which can be wrong, like anything else.

To keep it correct, it has two possibilities. Automatic (Automatic time update with pre-defined NTP servers or enter customized NTP) Manual is the alternative, but I have Automatic checked.

I don't have anything in the customized NTP field and I have the interval for Automatic as 24 hours, the default, so that lets it get wronger and wronger for 24 hours until it gets corrected.

If the log were important, I could set the interval at as little as one hour. (it goes up to 72.) But I'll let it stay at 24. I'm glad to know how it can be wrong, when other times are a lot closer.

It's a shame I can't use this to peer into the future.

[Micky]

Good reasons!

Not thinking of that, I probably threw away the adapter, except for the fact that I never throw away anything. In this case if I have it it should be in the same box, so I'll open the adapgter before I throw it away. ....In fact I would have saved it just to remove the prongs. I save spare prongs, and I've used one or two of them for something, I forget what.

[Paul M. Cook]

Millions of today's kids play violent games, and only *some* turn violent.

It can't be a 1:1 relationship, so if there is *any* relationship, it must be 10,000:1 (or some other huge number with lots of zeros).

Millions of us 50's kids played cowboys and Indians, but, none of us actually hurt an Indian (as far as I can recall) when we became adults.

[Paul M. Cook]

I have no idea what that advice is trying to tell me.

[Don Y]

I didn't claim anything of the sort!

I grew up watching scenes from Vietnam every night on TV. Yet, I don't own a gun.

Rather, my comment (below) suggests my concern is that it desensitizes folks to violence.

[MWBradburne]

BTW, is that "millons of we kids?" or "millions of us kids?"

[Micky]

Millions of us kids. Us is the object of the preposition "of". Kids is an appositive to us.

Millions of us played Millions of kids played.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Oh well. Bye.

[Micky]

But witha wired alarm, what happens if someone forces a door or window every day?

When does the homeowner abandon the system?

[Micky]

That raises the whole issue of vanity plates.

The goal of the government is to catch you when you do something wrong, but some people on impulse rabbit. If you're going to flee, do you want a catchy plate that everyone can remember from reading it once?

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

True, and it's almost impossible that could be cause and effect. People can be violent, and then play a game that they get ideas from.

I must have seen a lot of violent things in the last 55 years, and I don't have any desire to do those things.

[snip]

[Tony Hwang]

There is parental control feature, several blocking method for certain ip address or MAC address, etc. with router firmware. Some times 3rd party firmware is more robust. dd-wrt is one example.

[Paul M. Cook]

Thanks to everyone here, below is a summary I wrote of my current understanding of just the UPnP versus Port Forwarding issue for setting up the Transmission bittorrent client on Linux (Ubuntu) for optimal speed.

It's written in my words, so, if there are errors in my understanding, I'm fine with you pointing them out!

My summary of what was learned in this thread about UPnP & Port Forwarding

(0) The way things work is that an incoming request to WAN external IP 1.2.3.4 on port 12345 hits the SOHO router. Without port forwarding, the SOHO router will drop that request (or any request to any port).

But, with port forwarding, the router sees the external port WAN request for 1.2.3.4:43101 and it forwards that external port to a static LAN internal port of 192.168.1.10:43101, which the Transmission client is listening on for upload requests (which apparently require both TCP & UDP messages). (Transmission settings are in $HOME/.config/transmission/settings.json)

(1) Since bittorrent maintains two download queues, the first priority going to those who are uploading data and the second going to those who are not uploading data, if I'm not uploading data, then I will only download data when the first queue is empty.

(2) That means two different things if I don't open a port to the world: - For those people with public sockets, I will be in the first queue because they can get data from me even though I don't have a public socket myself. - For those people without public sockets, I will be in the second queue because, to them, I'm not uploading any data because I don't have a public upload socket open.

(3) Overall, not opening a port will probably increase my download times (depending on a combination of how many other people have public sockets open and on how full that first queue is).

(4) The *easiest* way to open a port for those external clients who do not have a public socket is to simply turn on UPnP on both the SOHO router and in Transmission. Optionally, if UPnP is turned on in Transmission, I can set Transmission to use a random port each time the application is started.

(5) The *safest* way to open a port is to turn off UPnP in both the SOHO router and in the Transmission app, and just manually forward a port in the router & set that same port in Transmission. Pick a random port between 49152 & 65535. The default is 51413.

However, there are a bunch of things you have to do in order to accomplish that task: (a) You'll need to have your computer on a static IP address on the LAN (e.g., 192.168.1.10). This can be set (based on the computer wlan0 MAC address) by the router, or, this can be set on the Ubuntu computer. (b) You'll need to select an unused external/internal port set to forward UDP & TCP packets to (e.g., port 51413) (This port needs to be between 1025 and 65535.) (c) You'll want to doublecheck your /etc/services files to ensure whatever port you chose is not being otherwise used. In my case, there are no ports in /etc/services between port 27374 & 30865, and only 3 ports higher than 30865 {57000,60177,60179}, so, all other ports are fair game. Application = trans

NOTE: There are other things you can set to improve Transmission speeds!

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