Video Dowload problem for months

[BasharOfTheAges]

I think i may have mentioned this before in another topic but i can't seem to find it.

I have had difficulty downloading much of anything in the last two to three months. On the advice of several other people here i switched from Mozilla to Firefox (less bloat is good) and installed the flashgot plugin and i use it in tandum with flashget. However my problem still presists, about 90 to 95% of the videos i attempt to download stop somewhere in their download process and will not continue. Flashget attempts to retry several hundred times and eventually gets into an equilibrium of a 0.01k/sec transfer speed (which might just be redundant data streams) by reconnecting every 5 seconds or so. If i pause a video stuck in this loop it will not restart no matter how many times i try to hit the start button again.

my logs look like this:

Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Connecting nago.animemusicvideos.org [IP=205.134.161.105:80]
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Connected.
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 GET /downloadlocal.php?v=40463 HTTP/1.1
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Host: nago.animemusicvideos.org
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Accept: */*
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Referer: http://nago.animemusicvideos.org/localdownload.php
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Cookie: cookie_skin_id=0
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Range: bytes=15965090-
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Pragma: no-cache
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Cache-Control: no-cache
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Authorization: Basic REDACTED ---derobert
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Connection: close
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:25:36 GMT
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux PHP/4.1.2
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 X-Powered-By: PHP/4.1.2
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Connection: close
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Start Receiving Data!
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Error occured!
Mon Apr 25 23:25:43 2005 Wait 5 second for retry

Can anyone clue me in as to what is going on or what i can do to fix this problem?

[derobert]

First off, that this line:
Authorization: Basic [BLAH, BLAH, BLAH]
contains a username and password. You have just disclosed the password for the user basharoftheages. <b>You need to change that password immediately.</b> [Yes, you probably don't see that username or password in there, but that's just because its trivially encoded. It starts with 'n' and ends with 'm', and is 15 characters long if you don't believe me]. I have redacted it out of your post, but change the password immediately.

OK, now, a few questions:

(1) What exactly are you authenticating to? AFAIK, Nago does not request or understand Basic authentication. Is there some proxy between you and .org that you're authenticating to?

(2) Does this problem happen with Kero, too? Or just Nago?

(3) Does it happen at all times of the day? Can you give it a try between, say, 4AM and 12PM EDT? [Not sure what your local time zone is. That's 0800 through 1600 UTC.]

(4) Do you have a packet sniffer such as <a href="http://www.ethereal.com">Ethereal</a>? If so, could you check what's happening at the TCP level --- e.g., are you seeing a lot of retransmits?

(5) Could you at least give some pings to nago.a-m-v.org and yuri.a-m-v.org when the downloads are stalling? Also, some when things are working well.

(6) Use one of the many free online "what's my IP address" sites to see if your web traffic is actually coming from your IP address. Google for "my IP address".

[BasharOfTheAges]

First off, that this line:
Authorization: Basic [BLAH, BLAH, BLAH]
contains a username and password. You have just disclosed the password for the user basharoftheages. <b>You need to change that password immediately.</b> [Yes, you probably don't see that username or password in there, but that's just because its trivially encoded. It starts with 'n' and ends with 'm', and is 15 characters long if you don't believe me]. I have redacted it out of your post, but change the password immediately.

wow.. i feel like such an idiot o.o;;


(1) WI just used the default settings that flashgot had.. i didn't know if anything needed to be changed in that regard.

(2) I have had the problem with both servers.

(3) I have had the problem at most hours of the day. Given a significant number of retries (around 1000) some vids eventually download, but one i just got was corrupt when it stopped at 97% and retried 800 trimes for the last 3%.

(4) I don't, and i believe our network user liscence agreement puts me a serious risk if i attmept to port sniff my network (i.e. expulsion and/or legal action).

(5) i'm really not sure how to do this... wow i suck

(6) I do know that my network is packet shaped and NAT-ted. Could this be the problem? If so, why do connections even start?

[derobert]

wow.. i feel like such an idiot o.o;;

Did you change the password?

(2) I have had the problem with both servers.

Hmmm, its possible that there could be buggy code on Nago causing it, but I doubt Kero suffers from it (being stock apache handling resumes). Plus its 100% different code...

(4) I don't, and i believe our network user liscence agreement puts me a serious risk if i attmept to port sniff my network (i.e. expulsion and/or legal action).

What kind of weird network is that that you can't packet trace your own packets? (Are you confusing this with port scanning, which is entirely different?)

(5) i'm really not sure how to do this... wow i suck

On the command line (start -> run; type "cmd" for NT/XP/2K; "command" for 95/98/ME). For Mac OS X, bring up Terminal.app. Then type on the command line "ping nago.a-m-v.org -t" [on Mac, leave off the -t]. Control-c will stop it.

(6) I do know that my network is packet shaped and NAT-ted. Could this be the problem? If so, why do connections even start?

Could be. No idea what they'd be doing. Have you tried waiting an hour or so to resume the download after it stops? That might let whatever shaping data they have expire.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Did you change the password?

yes

What kind of weird network is that that you can't packet trace your own packets? (Are you confusing this with port scanning, which is entirely different?)

Part 16 of our network use code says

Network scanning or packet "sniffing" on or off campus are not permitted.

All i really know about that sentence is that it's gramatically incorrect o.o;;
I'm not sure what they're tring to say we cannot do.

(5)Pinging Nago gives me request timeouts 100% of the time.

Have you tried waiting an hour or so to resume the download after it stops? That might let whatever shaping data they have expire.

After so much as pausing a download it will never start up again no matter how long i wait.

By the way, Others here at my school have had some problems with this site as well, but none this serious.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Pinging yuri gives me the same reply... "destination net unreachable"

[derobert]

Hmmm.... we're not blocking pings, so you *should* get replies. Sounds like something on your network is messed up.

As for that part 16 thing... who the hell writes such silly rules? On or off the network? Ummm....

Now, I wonder, how to route around the damage... Might want to bring it up with local network people first and see what they say.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Thanks for your help... All i know about the network people here is that they are very strict and fear everything. All P2P is banned (with good reasons) but MMORPGs are impossible to play, any online game is pointless (even starcraft won't work at any reasonable ping). Somehow IRC works , but only sometimes and less and less nowadays.

So, what's i'm tring to say is that I'm not exactly sure how to phrase my question to them. "Oh, please change the structure of the network so that i may download things that exist on the greay area between legality and morality."

And trying to do something on my own runs it's own risks, but i'm willing to try anything.