Author Topic: Weird Firefox 17.0.11 TCP/IP traffic spike...  (Read 4380 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Weird Firefox 17.0.11 TCP/IP traffic spike...
« on: May 02, 2016, 03:41:47 am »
Hi Everyone!

Within the last couple of weeks I started noticing a weird tcp/ip traffic spike while using my Firefox 17.0.11 release and openning a new window. Each time I do this I get about 4-5 secs of massive data xfer (which I monitor through my 'PU Monitor' utility)...in total there seems to be some kind of localhost loop where about 80-100 MB of data appear to be downloaded with matching 1MB uploaded...the thing is I am absolutely 100% certain there is no real "beyond the router" communication, it only appears to be hapenning internally on my machine.

So I'm curious if anyone has seen this behaviour with Firefox, maybe some add-on? The last add-on I installed is ChatZilla, but that was at least over a month ago...

Thanks!

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Weird Firefox 17.0.11 TCP/IP traffic spike...
« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2016, 02:08:19 am »
So here is the thing I was able to find, I ran iptrace on my lan0 interface to capture the Firefox traffic.

As it turned out that massive amount of data is due to traffic between my OS/2 box and my NAS unit, that being ZyXel NSA325 V2. What exactly is being moved is hard to tell, but ipformat shows that the traffic is limitted to just those two static ip addresses.

I ran iptrace as follows: "ipformat -f iptrace.dmp > iptrace.out2". Perhaps I could have tried some other options to better judge what type of data is actually being exchanged.

Here is a sample of typical data packet:

=== START ===
-------------------------- #:4 --------------------------
 Delta Time:  0.020sec   Packet Length: 234 bytes (EA hex)
 IP:    Dest: 192.168.001.005    Source:  192.168.001.010
----------------------- IP HEADER -----------------------
 IP:  Version: 4 Correct    Header Length: 20 bytes
 IP:  Type Of Service: 00
 IP:     000. ....  Routine
 IP:     ...0 ....  Normal Delay
 IP:     .... 0...  Normal Throughput
 IP:     .... .0..  Normal Reliability
 IP:  Total Len: 234 (xEA) bytes          Id: 2629
 IP:  Flags: 2
 IP:     .1..       Don't Fragment
 IP:     ..0.       Last Fragment
 IP:  Fragment Offset: 000
 IP:  Time To Live: 64 sec    Protocol: 6  TCP
 IP:  Header Checksum: 9085    (Correct)
 IP:  No Options
---------------------- TCP HEADER ----------------------
 TCP:  Source Port: 57489  (Unassigned port)       Dest Port: 445  (Unassigned port)
 TCP:  Sequence #: 4155242293
 TCP:  Ack #: 468644365
 TCP:  Offset: 20 bytes
 TCP:  Flags: 18
 TCP:     ..0. ....        Urgent bit Off
 TCP:     ...1 ....  <ACK> Ack bit On
 TCP:     .... 1...  <PUSH>Push bit On
 TCP:     .... .0..        Reset bit Off
 TCP:     .... ..0.        Synchronize bit Off
 TCP:     .... ...0        Finish bit Off
 TCP:  Window: 33888      Checksum: 944A   (Correct)
 TCP:  No Options
--------------------------------- DATA -----------------------------------
0000 00 00 00 BE FF 53 4D 42    72 00 00 00 00 08 01 C8   .....SMBr.......
0010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    00 00 00 00 00 00 18 00   ................
0020 00 00 01 00 00 9B 00 02    50 43 20 4E 45 54 57 4F   ........PC NETWO
0030 52 4B 20 50 52 4F 47 52    41 4D 20 31 2E 30 00 02   RK PROGRAM 1.0..
0040 4D 49 43 52 4F 53 4F 46    54 20 4E 45 54 57 4F 52   MICROSOFT NETWOR
0050 4B 53 20 31 2E 30 33 00    02 4D 49 43 52 4F 53 4F   KS 1.03..MICROSO
0060 46 54 20 4E 45 54 57 4F    52 4B 53 20 33 2E 30 00   FT NETWORKS 3.0.
0070 02 4C 41 4E 4D 41 4E 31    2E 30 00 02 4C 4D 31 2E   .LANMAN1.0..LM1.
0080 32 58 30 30 32 00 02 44    4F 53 20 4C 41 4E 4D 41   2X002..DOS LANMA
0090 4E 32 2E 31 00 02 4C 41    4E 4D 41 4E 32 2E 31 00   N2.1..LANMAN2.1.
00A0 02 53 61 6D 62 61 00 02    4E 54 20 4C 41 4E 4D 41   .Samba..NT LANMA
00B0 4E 20 31 2E 30 00 02 4E    54 20 4C 4D 20 30 2E 31   N 1.0..NT LM 0.1
00C0 32 00                                                2.
=== STOP ===

....but, where this led me to is to eventually spot a filename that was stored on the NAS...some more poking around identified the root cause (as best as I can tell at the moment anyways). I must have downloaded this file using Firefox and pointed to my NAS box as the "SAVE AS" location. I was able to find this very filename in the Downloads list...removing it from there no longer causes Firefox to interrogate my NAS box for directory contents, or so it appears.

Strange, at least it seems strange that the app would do this, it implies that all previous downloads still present in the History would be looked at as well. Local filesystem is different then network stuff, thus the spike in my tcp/ip traffic. This behaviour could certainly be the result of Netdrive version I use, which is 3.1.4 with File System Drive being 3.027.