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Comment by wcchandler | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I actually spent a couple hours this evening troubleshooting this problem. I don't think those IPs are complete, but it's a start.

For those with tomato firmware: Administration -> Scripts -> Firewall

iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 173.194.55.0/24 -j REJECT

iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 206.111.0.0/16 -j REJECT

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It can also be implemented using "Access Restriction" like this http://imgur.com/0sdc0CI

Can you SSH into your router and do an `iptables --list` ? I'm thinking that implementation uses the L7 chain. If that's the case then it may be a hair bit quicker using my implementation. Also, the REJECT rule is a bit cleaner than just dropping the packet, which I also suspect to be the case with "Access Restriction" implementation.

I can do iptables under the firewall settings, but ... it took me a while to find my way through this setting and I know it works, I tested by streaming YouTube content on AppleTV. I am going to leave it as it is.

If this workaround gets popular, I wonder if my provider (Comcast) and others will catch up and throttle youtube directly.

So far so good.

I implemented a quick fix that worked for me, but I'm not a networking guy. I would love to hear more if you get further details.

This worked really well for me. Thank you!

How do you debug this kind of problem?

I ran iftop and checked IPs with arin.net. I found a couple in the 206.111.0.0/16 range that didn't point to google or youtube. However, I originally had a handful of /24's, but the OP pointed out the entire /16 -- so I edited as such.

I also didn't find 173.194.55.0/24 in my testing. It's also a Google IP address, so I doubt it's causing any issues -- in fact, it may be the cause of some playback issues my wife is now having. (I think it may be their video ads, but have nothing to go on aside from getting "Playback Error" when an ad usually plays)

So you're basically looking for IPs allocated to Google (the arin.net part) that are not using very much bandwidth while you stream a youtube video (the iftop part)?

Looking for IPs not controlled by Google that are using a lot of bandwidth while streaming a youtube video.

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