The new Flash Player contains spyware! Look at the image above, my Ethereal logs reveals the following when i'm watching Flash sites. Adobe is evil!!!
I can already see the trolls on Slashdot and Digg if some l337 h4ck0r goes through his packet logs. This weekend i was debugging our Edge/Origin setup and was going low-level trying to find a nagging bug where streams were dropped for no reason.
I noticed some odd requests on port 67 using the UDP protocol and couldn't figure out what it was for, but after a RTFM moment it became clear. The Flash Player sends a UDP Broadcast Packet on port 67 along when you setup a NetConnection and connect to your Flash Media Server over RTMP. The server then replies if an Edge server is available and the player then constructs the necessary RTMP connection string to connect to the Edge. This makes it relatively easy to deploy an Edge/Origin solution without changing your connection code in your app, but it relies on your Origin to redirect clients to the Edges making it a 'Single Point of Failure' in your architecture (actually i have not found documentation that allows for multiple origins within a edge/origin setup...).
Since the documentation on this feature ( called FPAD, based on WPAD ) is not heavily documented at all ( actually the only mention in the FMS 2 documentation is in the section 'Clustering Reverse Proxies' ) i have yet to find out how the player actually connects to the closest edge. I presume it's based on a 'first-come, first-served' effort, the edge that can connect the fastest wins. Anyone else have more information on this.
An Edge/Origin solution not only makes sense in a reverse proxy cluster, it improves TCP performance when delivering video streams ( ie in a Content Delivery Network ) as it can lower the latency of your network ( TCP was originally designed for low latency networks ). I assume companies specialized in FLV delivery such as Akamai, Vitalstream and Speedera benefited the most from such a setup.
More links:
I just saw this too. A weird DHCPINFORM message, where the only parameter mentioned was the vendor info [43] one. Decoded looked like:
tag=fpadreq;timestamp=10725543;zone=0;uri=rtmp://strm.atdmt.com/
Posted by: Adrien | Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 03:00
StrongVPN is the best vpn service The have the best customer support I have dealing with, It is 24 hours and 7/ Days a week Good job Strong VPN, and keep on going
Posted by: alexsmith11 | Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 16:53
I agree with Alex,about that StrongVPN is one of the best vpn services!
Posted by: raul echeberia | Thursday, March 05, 2009 at 16:45