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[birdy51]

The power driver on my laptop has hit it's last straw. After nearly three years, I believe it is time to replace the wiggly bastard.

Any suggestions on going about this?

[Sinistar]

You can try rebooting the router, but generally speaking, if one user can max out the connection, then everyone in total should be the same. It's more likely that users overloading the connection.

Hm, yeah, that's what I was afraid of.

Torrents complicate matters, a lot of cheap routers can only manage a few hundred simultaneous connection in their NAT table before they go to poo. With a torrent client, people need to limit the Max number of simultaneous connection as well as the bandwidth to play nice with other users.

This IS new to me though, it might have to do something about that... Though I've been long suspecting the upper to be the case. I'll also contact internet provider just in case but we'll see. Thanks.

[Tellemurius]

The power driver on my laptop has hit it's last straw. After nearly three years, I believe it is time to replace the wiggly bastard.

Any suggestions on going about this?

Depends on the brand, you can buy from manufacturer for expensive replacement or on ebay for cheap chinese knockoffs. I took the ebay route and I swear that power brick can toast my hot pockets if i had a second one. Can you find a model number on the brick?

[wierd]

NAT has a fundamental restriction on the number of sockets that can be open to an obfuscated IP.

That number is 65535 sockets. 

NAT does what the name says it does.  Network address Translation.

It takes a gateway device in one network, and gives a single identity on other network. That gateway then functions as a sort of proxy for that whole obfuscated network it is the gateway for. The outside network sees only the single device, not the whole network behind it.

TCP/IP limits the total number of ports available, and also the number of sockets that can be open on a specific port. We have a single logical device providing connectivity to a whole network in the case of NAT. That can quickly give you some problems if you have lots of communicating devices/users behind that NAT gateway.

Even with enterprise equipment that does not go crazy when the NAT table is more than a few hundred sockets, it is still a problem with large numbers of Torrent users.  Torrent users routinely use 20 or more sockets, just by themselves. Sometimes over 100.  50 torrent users with 100 sockets each will nearly saturate the 65k socket hard limit of NAT.

The solution of course, is IPv6, where every device is directly visible. But ISPs dont want to do that.

[Aklyon]

They're gonna have to eventually.

[Thief^]

NAT has a fundamental restriction on the number of sockets that can be open to an obfuscated IP.

That number is 65535 sockets.

[...]TCP[...]

Actually, that's not entirely true. TCP (and by extension NAT of TCP) is limited to 65535 sockets per source ip per destination ip per destination port, not 65536 total. For NAT with only one public IP, and assuming you're connecting to a fixed destination port (e.g. 80 for a web server) that limits you to 65535 sockets for each remote IP, which is normally plenty. Torrent clients normally only open 1 connection to each other user, so 50 torrent users would only use a tiny fraction of NAT's capability.

For TCP it's the size of the router's NAT table that limits you, not NAT inherently.

UDP (with an "open" NAT) is another story, as that allows replies from other IPs. That is inherently limited to 65535 connections only, but it's also possible to intentionally reuse the same port for communicating with multiple other PCs, so it's not a hard limit.

That said, the solution is definitely IPv6 with a border firewall replacing the NAT.

[birdy51]

The power driver on my laptop has hit it's last straw. After nearly three years, I believe it is time to replace the wiggly bastard.

Any suggestions on going about this?

Depends on the brand, you can buy from manufacturer for expensive replacement or on ebay for cheap chinese knockoffs. I took the ebay route and I swear that power brick can toast my hot pockets if i had a second one. Can you find a model number on the brick?

Well, first I should should state that I was wrong. It's the Power Jack that is having issues. Whoops! Anyways, I own an HP Probook 4530s. There are replacement jacks available on Amazon for about 13-14$, so if I do that route I shouldn't be set back too far.

[Tellemurius]

The power driver on my laptop has hit it's last straw. After nearly three years, I believe it is time to replace the wiggly bastard.

Any suggestions on going about this?

Depends on the brand, you can buy from manufacturer for expensive replacement or on ebay for cheap chinese knockoffs. I took the ebay route and I swear that power brick can toast my hot pockets if i had a second one. Can you find a model number on the brick?

Well, first I should should state that I was wrong. It's the Power Jack that is having issues. Whoops! Anyways, I own an HP Probook 4530s. There are replacement jacks available on Amazon for about 13-14$, so if I do that route I shouldn't be set back too far.

Ah. The good news at least is the power jacks for this HP model are stupid easy to replace. You will need to disassemble the bottom part of the laptop to get access to the power jack so there is going to be alot of screws. Manuals are available for this model. All you will need to do is unplug the old jack from its powerboard and plug in the new one. I remember back in the day when HP actually kept the power circuit and the jack separate from the motherboard so incase it gets fragged from power surge or busted you can easily replace it.

[wierd]

NAT has a fundamental restriction on the number of sockets that can be open to an obfuscated IP.

That number is 65535 sockets.

[...]TCP[...]

Actually, that's not entirely true. TCP (and by extension NAT of TCP) is limited to 65535 sockets per source ip per destination ip per destination port, not 65536 total. For NAT with only one public IP, and assuming you're connecting to a fixed destination port (e.g. 80 for a web server) that limits you to 65535 sockets for each remote IP, which is normally plenty. Torrent clients normally only open 1 connection to each other user, so 50 torrent users would only use a tiny fraction of NAT's capability.

For TCP it's the size of the router's NAT table that limits you, not NAT inherently.

UDP (with an "open" NAT) is another story, as that allows replies from other IPs. That is inherently limited to 65535 connections only, but it's also possible to intentionally reuse the same port for communicating with multiple other PCs, so it's not a hard limit.

That said, the solution is definitely IPv6 with a border firewall replacing the NAT.

This is true, but also misleading.  The NAT device is going to be accepting network traffic on well known ports, not "all 65535 possible ports".  That means that it is going to be managing a NAT table of say, Port 80 (HTTP) connections, in addition to say, port 443 (HTTPS). Torrent clients use port randomization, but they use ports that are within a certain range, favoring the 50000 to 60000 range. Granted, thats a 10,000 port range, each with up to 65535 possible max connections allowable by TCP NAT, (for over 6 million possible concurrent connections over the NAT in theory) You are still going to run into limits for HTTP, HTTPS, and other well known ports much sooner, with the 65k limit imposed on the ports in question.

If you are managing a large obfuscated network, (such as a corporate LAN), then HTTP/HTTPS traffic through the NAT can potentially become a problem.

I consider NAT to be a bandaid over the "not enough IP addresses in IPv4" problem, and nothing more.

[birdy51]

Ah. The good news at least is the power jacks for this HP model are stupid easy to replace. You will need to disassemble the bottom part of the laptop to get access to the power jack so there is going to be alot of screws. Manuals are available for this model. All you will need to do is unplug the old jack from its powerboard and plug in the new one. I remember back in the day when HP actually kept the power circuit and the jack separate from the motherboard so incase it gets fragged from power surge or busted you can easily replace it.

Sehr gutt! I've got a part ordered, so I'll let you guys know how it works out in a few days or so. Thanks!

[Thief^]

One correction for NAT: the allowed source ports (excepting a few specific cases) are the "dynamic/ephemeral ports" 49152 through 65535, which is only 16384 ports, not 65535.

I was also speaking about outgoing connections (primarily) before. For incoming connections, the destination ip and port are fixed (the NAT device itself), but every connection comes from a different source ip, so there's still 16384 ports per remote IP.

For TCP anyway. As said before, for UDP (assuming an open NAT) the remote IP can't be used to disambiguate, which would limit you to far fewer. This is of course why corporate NATs are "closed" type, which allows using the remote IP to disambiguate and doesn't limit you to ~16k total UDP sessions. Of course that breaks a lot of things that rely on "open" behaviour.

I also agree that NAT is a load of crap, ISPs can't roll out IPv6 fast enough for me!

[Baffler]

So it seems my computer isn't able to connect to any online game, but it can surf the web just fine. At first I thought it was a steam problem, but that doesn't seem to be it either. I've checked the access options on my firewall, turned off the firewall, and restarted the router, but none of those things worked. Tom's Hardware suggests changing my ISP, but that isn't really an option. Has anyone else had this problem?

[wierd]

I would test to see if you are being firewalled by your ISP.  If you live in the US, affirmation of such firewalling would be in violation of the new FCC regulations that state that ISPs must abide by title II restrictions, and cannot limit access through their networks preferentially.

You can easily test this with some conspirators.

If you suspect that outbound TCP and UDP data for non-http sessions are being blocked (which would make playing online games impossible unless they used an HTTP proxy), then make use of an HTTP tunneling proxy.

You can find publicly accessible ones with google.  Setting up a suitable tunnel interface can be tricky, but can be done.  If you can send the data over the http tunnel, but not directly, that means that your packets are being filtered based on their protocol type, which is a clear FCC violation.

If you dont live in the US, sucks to be you then.

[gimlet]

How do you connect to the internet?  You *probably* have a router/modem that you plug the PC into, and that's what connects to the internet.  *Most* online games need some port forwarding to be done on that router/modem.  Google for "port forwarding for NAMEOFGAME", if you're lucky they willl have instructions that cover your model of router/modem.  Be prepared to look at the label on the router/modem to figure out which exact model you have, and google for instructions for "port forwarding for ROUTERMODEL".

That's about all anybody can tell you - for more specific help you will need to provide at least the router/modem model + the name of the game.

[Baffler]

How do you connect to the internet?  You *probably* have a router/modem that you plug the PC into, and that's what connects to the internet.  *Most* online games need some port forwarding to be done on that router/modem.  Google for "port forwarding for NAMEOFGAME", if you're lucky they willl have instructions that cover your model of router/modem.  Be prepared to look at the label on the router/modem to figure out which exact model you have, and google for instructions for "port forwarding for ROUTERMODEL".

That's about all anybody can tell you - for more specific help you will need to provide at least the router/modem model + the name of the game.

This worked, it seems that I can direct connect but it still doesn't generate a list. Good thing I already had a server picked out, I guess. Thanks.