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liquid_mage
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Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 22, 2013 8:56 pm

Hello,

Just curious if there is someone can help me. My wife is taking an online class. Whenever she logs into the Angel web based online learning tools, it seems to lock out other wifi activity. This makes me doing work or surfing the web on my laptop difficult. My network is secured. I can't find any info on the college's website to verify that Angel is locking out other devices. Does anybody have any suggestions on how to keep this form happening.

Thanks
 
just brew it!
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:08 pm

It should not be possible for one site to block WiFi access from other devices. When you say blocked, do you mean WiFi seems to be completely dead from other devices, or just really slow?

The only two possibilities that come to mind are:

1. The site is a bandwidth pig, and is chewing up all your available bandwidth.

2. The site is misbehaving in some other, more subtle way (e.g. opening an unusually large number of simultaneous TCP streams), which is triggering a bug in your WiFi router's firmware.
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chuckula
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:35 pm

just brew it! wrote:
It should not be possible for one site to block WiFi access from other devices. When you say blocked, do you mean WiFi seems to be completely dead from other devices, or just really slow?

The only two possibilities that come to mind are:

1. The site is a bandwidth pig, and is chewing up all your available bandwidth.

2. The site is misbehaving in some other, more subtle way (e.g. opening an unusually large number of simultaneous TCP streams), which is triggering a bug in your WiFi router's firmware.


I was thinking one possibility could be some sort of bizarro-VPN setup that is misrouting traffic over your LAN. The thing is, while I've seen VPNs mess up the use of applications on a single computer, I've never seen it cripple third-party devices. For example, due to NATed IP address space collisions, I've seen situations where a web browser on your computer can't go to regular websites when the VPN is turned on because even the normal non-VPN traffic routes go through the VPN (and gets lost) instead of going to the real gateway. However, another computer on the same LAN would still go out to the Internet fine.

Other than that, I'd lean toward the resource exhaustion scenario that JBI described. Even a high-bandwidth service usually has enough slack to let other devices on the network have some opportunity to download data. If, however, your router has no additional resources to perform NAT translation or other operations, then your packets will get dropped instead of just being sent at a slower rate.
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liquid_mage
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:44 pm

Thanks guys. The info is helpful. The reason I asked was, I couldn't even load webpages when she logged in. I'm going to try the newest firmware version for my router. I'll post an update later.
 
JohnC
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:41 pm

Yea, do that... Angel LMS can be a very bandwidth -intensive, especially over WiFi. One thing you can try is see if your router has some kind of QoS settings, if it does - try giving your own laptop's IP a higher "priority" (if you don't know how - check your router's manual, it should explain it), see if it helps...
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liquid_mage
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 29, 2013 6:53 pm

I updated my routers firmware, but that wasn't the problem. Symantec Endpoint keeps blocking my comcast dns servers for dos attacks. I tried adding the dns servers to the excluded hosts table in Endpoint but ended up having to disable DOS detection in Endpoint.
 
JohnC
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 29, 2013 7:01 pm

Interesting behavior... That's why I prefer to use "normal" antivirus products, without all the nonsense "DDoS/firewall/antihacker/antiscript" protection built-in :wink:
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chuckula
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 29, 2013 8:02 pm

Symantec


You found the problem! Terminate all processes and uninstall with extreme prejudice!
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liquid_mage
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Re: Educational website seems to block other wifi activity

Fri Mar 29, 2013 8:26 pm

Can't really uninstall its a work laptop, fortunately for me i have a user id with local admin rights since I install and maintain cad software. Lucky for me I can disable the DOS detection myself. But I really don't understand how a Symantec product can have this issue with a DNS server from such a large isp. The odd thing is that I didn't have this issue with my previous work laptop using the same software, it may have been a different version though.

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