Hi guyz, i subscribed with IPNX(internet providers here in nigeria) family plan, 7pm - 7am daily.

Lately i realized that my yahoo messenger keeps on connecting and working well even after the 7am limit and it can work for 24hrs provided i do not disconnect or put off my pc. Although everything else is disconnected, i mean the regular web browsing (I get error messages with something about SSL certificates).

I felt within me that the IPNX network system could be "backdoored" so i did some research and tried several approach and softwares, yet i couldn't. I even changed my pc's MAC address, yet it still didn't work. I guess i was looking at the wrong places during my research.

Bottom line, i know there are some gurus in the house that could be of help so i decided to open this thread. Pls if you have any thoughts on this, kindly let us know, ciao.

p.s; i guess this systems does not only apply for IPNX, any other wireless internet service providers in Nigeria (horizon and co, ) would have same flaws.

They probably only block TCP/HTTP based services. Yahoo IM can connect using a variety of protocols.

The other (more likely) possibility is keep-alive connections. iPNX don't seem to terminate connections when your time-limit expires, so applications that have open connections stay connected.

On the other hand, you usually browse using HTTP which is stateless - you connect to get a resource you need, and then the resource is returned to your browser and the connection terminates. So each time you make a request, once a response is returned the connection does not usually stay alive (unless if keep-alive is supported and activated). But when your time-limit expires, an attempt to create a new connection is blocked.

So your Yahoo IM probably opens a connection that stays alive until you disconnect from iPNX.

thanks logica for the reply.

are there any thoughts on how i can "keep" the connection alive on my browser just like in Yahoo IM?
are there special browsers that can do this?
I tried downloading some few ad-ons on mozilla, but it still didnt go thru.

Await your response.
Thanks once again.

It's the server that makes the keepalive happen, not you. You have no control. Think about it.

You send a request to some a server by opening a connection to that server. Once the server sends back the response, it closes the connection. The only thing you can do though is send some hint for the server to keep the connection alive. But not many servers support this for obvious reasons (security and limited resources - imagine 100 million people from all over the world connecting to your server and you allow them to tell your server to keep the connection alive).

Besides generally speaking, a web-server serves pages using HTTP which by default is stateless. It won't make any sense for the owners to have them keep connections alive.

I need to mention the real reason HTTP (over TCP) connections are very expensive to keep open - they always guarantee delivery (as part of the design of the protocol). Unlike a protocol like UDP which gives no guarantees. UDP connections can be easily kept open since for each packet sent the server is not required to guarantee delivery. And by the way, Yahoo IM supports UDP.

so make i rest my case?

It will be safer.

i guess i can do that. Thnx anyways