Shorewall users - May 2003 - Streaming Video

No idea whether this is a Shorewall issue but perhaps someone has met this
problem before and any help would be appreciated.

	. I used to run a Windows 2000 Pro machine directly connect to a
cable provider and protected? bu Zone Alarm. When watching streaming video
(Baseball from MLB) the display would be clean and reasonably steady. I now
have the same Windows machine but attached to the cable provider through a
Suse Linux machine with Shorewall protection and MASQ running. The streaming
video will still work but not cleanly. It may run for some while OK but
eventually will break down and get blocky or black and white or screen
refresh only ever few seconds. Any pointers much appreciated.

Regards

Roy

On Mon, 12 May 2003 10:08:16 +0100, CARTER, Roy 
<Roy.CARTER@birmingham.sema.slb.com> wrote:
> 	. I used to run a Windows 2000 Pro machine directly connect to a
> cable provider and protected? bu Zone Alarm. When watching streaming 
> video
> (Baseball from MLB) the display would be clean and reasonably steady. I 
> now
> have the same Windows machine but attached to the cable provider through 
> a
> Suse Linux machine with Shorewall protection and MASQ running. The 
> streaming
> video will still work but not cleanly. It may run for some while OK but
> eventually will break down and get blocky or black and white or screen
> refresh only ever few seconds. Any pointers much appreciated.
I don''t have any suggestions other than to offer the opinion that this 
isn''t a Shorewall-specific issue. The NetFilter rule-set generated by 
Shorewall is static -- the rules don''t have the property that they
change
under load or over time.

You might try installing Wonder Shaper on your SuSE box (see 
http://www.shorewall.net/traffic_shaping.htm. I run it here and my 
Streaming Video performance is acceptable.

-Tom
-- 
Tom Eastep    \ Shorewall - iptables made easy
Shoreline,     \ http://www.shorewall.net
Washington USA  \ teastep@shorewall.net

On 12 May 2003 at 9:10, Tom Eastep wrote:
> On Mon, 12 May 2003 10:08:16 +0100, CARTER, Roy 
> <Roy.CARTER@birmingham.sema.slb.com> wrote:
> 
> > 	. I used to run a Windows 2000 Pro machine directly connect to a
> > cable provider and protected? bu Zone Alarm. When watching 
streaming
> > video (Baseball from MLB) the display would be clean and 
reasonably
> > steady. I now have the same Windows machine but attached to the
> > cable provider through a Suse Linux machine with Shorewall
> > protection and MASQ running. The streaming video will still work 
but
> > not cleanly. It may run for some while OK but eventually will 
break
> > down and get blocky or black and white or screen refresh only 
ever
> > few seconds. Any pointers much appreciated.
> 
> I don''t have any suggestions other than to offer the opinion that 
this
> isn''t a Shorewall-specific issue. The NetFilter rule-set generated
by
> Shorewall is static -- the rules don''t have the property that they
> change under load or over time.
> 
> You might try installing Wonder Shaper on your SuSE box (see 
> http://www.shorewall.net/traffic_shaping.htm. I run it here and my
> Streaming Video performance is acceptable.
I''ve been known to watch a few Mariners games on the net as well as a 
few Baghdad Cams during the war and had no problem pulling this thru 
Shorewall.  Mind you I have fairly good bandwidth here at the office, 
and was not able to watch MLB on a different 384 cable modem without
a lot of re-syncing. But has higher bandwidth its been rock steady.

I''ve used both RealPlayer (both in windows clients and Linux clients)
as well as Windows Media player.

Tail you logs and see if anything is getting blocked by shorewall.
I found lots of real media spam packets (pop up ads etc) being 
blocked by shorewall.  I saw some, and it worked in spite of
this.  There is nothing special about my shorewall setup.

-- 
______________________________________
John Andersen
NORCOM / Juneau, Alaska
http://www.screenio.com/
(907) 790-3386

._______________________________________
John S. Andersen
NORCOM  mailto:JAndersen@norcomsoftware.com
Juneau, Alaska
http://www.screenio.com/