Constant recieving on cable modem

[Pam R]

On Saturday 12 October 2002 4:31 pm, Harry G wrote:
> I just started using ATT with a cable modem, external via a networking
> card, and gkrellm shows that I am constantly receiving small amounts of
> data.
>
> Is this normal?  I am using a firewall set up for a single station with
> Suse 8.0, and all unnecessary ports are closed.

Yes, it is normal and probably nothing to be worried about as your firewall 
should be blocking the nasties, take a look in your xconsole or the /var/log 
files and you should find that the firewall is dropping them.

In my case the traffic seems to be a mixture of port scans from the cable 
company to make sure that I am not doing anything naughty, from crackers in 
the hope that I am, and broadcast messages between the cable system routers 
(igmp protocol?).

If you fire up ethereal you can take a look see at what the traffic is in your 
case.

Don't know about SuSE personal firewall, but I'm running firewall2 on SuSE 8.0 
and I've configured it to drop the most frequent cases without logging to 
keep the log files from growing too big.
-- 
Pam R: Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave to the day after.
Linux StepbyStep: http://www.linux-sxs.org/stepbystep.html