[anonymousisme]

Heh. I used Netcom and they did not outright ban slirp, but they did have a script running that would renice (lower the priority) of user processes once they reached a certain total cpu time (two minutes). I discovered this feature shortly after they implemented it because my slirp network performance went down. Note that I am referring to cpu time and not run time. Most processes spend most of their time waiting for something, so accumulating two minutes of cpu time under slirp usually took several hours.

My solution was to write a program (I called checkcpu) that would spawn a process (slirp) and periodically check its total cpu usage. When it hit the threshold (110 seconds), it would spawn a child and suspend the parent (seamlessly passing the current run state to the child). It worked great and they either never noticed what I was doing, or they did not care. Over time, the number of suspended parent processes would rise, but it never became a problem.