Need proof my ISP is blocking certain ports

I've found these guys here to be absolutely better than ANY phone call support team.

I had a problem on my mobile account (£5 discount loyalty reward expired before my contract did which was an obvious error) and the woman on the phone argued with me, raised her voice and got very snotty when I asked to escalate the call (me suspecting she didn't have a clue what she was on about and couldn't reset the reward back up - turns out I was right).

I got in touch with the below link on Facebook (there's a Twitter link too if you prefer that) and they got onto it pretty much right away. They were very polite and computer literate!

http://www.facebook.com/orangehelpers

https://twitter.com/#!/OrangeHelpers

Find what ports the game is using, then create a netcat lister elsewhere on the web and try and connect to it, this will show you if its blocked.

(netcat is a tcp program that acts as a server / client and is amazing for sending content over any ports, if you dont have access to a external sourcei can start a listner on my server which you can try to connect to if you want

Hi muneris,

Netcat is a great suggestion and is used a lot for this. But if you want to be able to do this with a few key clicks (and without having to install a netcat listener on a server sitting on the Internet), then the only service out there that can tell you for sure of any UDP or TCP port being blocked by your ISP is Firebind.

www.firebind.com

If you go to their site you can choose to use their Java based applet client..

Then enter your list of ports, choose UDP or TCP, and hit start. If you want to test more than 100 at a time you'll need to register. But if you do register you can then run a test for all 65535 UDP and all 65535 TCP ports. It tests the ports consecutively so if needed you could open a few other browser windows and do a few tests at once. for example you could open 2 windows for TCP and do half the 64k in each browser, then open 2 more browser windows and do half and half (1-32k, 32k to 64k) of UDP.

You'll then get a full report of all blocked ports. Bear in mind you need to have Java installed.

good luck!

ProtocolGeek

muneris,

Here is a quick breakdown.

25 - Firebind sends a generic payload between the java client running on your PC and its server on the Internet. If it says 25 is blocked then it's probably due to the fact that your ISP will only allow properly formatted SMTP packets over that port. So in reality this isn't likely blocked completely, but it is blocked for anything that isn't SMTP traffic.

135,138-139 - These are generally used by Microsoft Networking. So the idea here is that your ISP doesn't want you to accidentally be able to see your neighbors file shares.

445 - This is SMB. Same idea as above - used for file sharing.

646 - No idea why this is blocked.

A few other things to keep in mind. The Firebind test will give you a list of detailed results at the bottom that will tell you how the firewall blocked you (since there are many different ways packets can fail to reach the Internet.) Once you finish if you can send that I can help interpret.

Also, another good practice is, once you have the list of TCP ports that have failed, to simply cut and paste that list of ports and re-run the test just on those failed ports and using the 12 second timeout value. There is always the chance that a port failed solely because there was some sort of network congestion or network "hiccup" that simply delayed the packets for that given port from going back and forth in the 10 or so seconds Firebind waits for a single port test. You'd then do the same for the list of UDP ports that failed.

One other quick thing... Firebind isn't checking for throttling. It's just trying to send a small packet back and forth from your pc to its server and verify the packet came back intact. Since it's only a tiny amount of traffic per port, if Orange was throttling, I wouldn't expect that this would be enough traffic to kick in the throlttling mechanism.

ProtocolGeek

:: You may need more (mental block ..it's been so long) ah..Tcp/IP protocols installed...Control Panel..network and sharing..change adapter settings..
right click and view the properties.Also check Windows Firewall..for a quick check..disable it and see if you can connect.
Edited by Schmuckley - 3/22/12 at 5:38am