Oddities with certain connections

[mikepparks]

I've noticed some odd (to me, at least) behavior when verifying new applications in my software firewall. When a connection is created for the first time, I'm prompted with a dialog telling me the remote address & IP before I allow the application access.

With my previous ISP, these dialogs have never concerned me as it would normally display an address I'm aware of (eg. blizzard.com). However, ever since I switched to Sonic.net, I've noticed that some new connections will display *.static.sonic.net addresses rather than the endpoints I would expect. This is behavior I've never seen before and, while it doesn't raise any real caution flags to me, I'm curious as to why I would be seeing *static.sonic.net addresses in place of a connection's actual destination. With my limited knowledge of the ISP's workings, it sounds to me like some sort of proxy or other sorts of filtering. Should this sort of thing bother me or is it just something I should get used to seeing?

[dane]

Screen shot?

[mikepparks]

This is the screenshot I got from running one of the programs that I know would show the issue.

[thulsa_doom]

I believe that's an Akamai server. Various companies contract with Akamai to facilitate content delivery for them. http://www.akamai.com/ has more information about their operation, but basically any time you connect to a service that has cause to move large amounts of data but doesn't have its own stupendous-scale data infrastructure, there's a reasonable chance Akamai will get involved (to keep you Old Republic folks from beating Bioware's uplinks to death).

A quick web search for SWTOR and Akamai indicates that they're indeed doing edge caching for the game.

[mikepparks]

That was actually one of my first guesses. Glad to know I was on the right track. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Still getting comfortable with the new service and feeling around for quirks.