How to block bittorrent on my eircom router?

radioactiveman

Hi
Does anybody know how to block just bittorrent on the Eircom motorola router?

My housemate is downloading about 10 gigs a day, which is fine except that it is really affecting the connection for others.

Can you block a range of ports for bittorrent or will it find other ports to use anyway? I tried setting up a filter but it's not clear how to do it only for bittorrent.

CrackisWhack

Would you not just have a word with your housemate?

radioactiveman

we've done that he denies all knowledge of it
don't want to block access on it just bittorrent...

gav240

he probably has a port forwarded in the router
delete the forwarded port and then change the password on the router

that should help.

bonzodog2

When I visit my daughter who has Eircom BB, I don't have any forwarded ports, and torrents work just fine

Alun

bonzodog2 wrote: »

When I visit my daughter who has Eircom BB, I don't have any forwarded ports, and torrents work just fine

If the router has UPnP enabled and the torrent client is set up to use it then there's no need for any port forwarding. No idea if UPnP is enabled by default on the Eircom routers though.

To the OP, just disable UPnP on the router, remove any forwarded ports and lock it down with a password, that should stop him.

radioactiveman

Hi thanks I actually tried disabling the UPnP but it actually blocked all traffic for some reason..
Eventually managed to do it by setting up a filter on port 6881 and greater...

potsy86

:eek: ten gig a day do they not give out s h it for that i just changed from eircom today was at the owl downloading me self but not that much bout that a week or two weeks but heard storys bout them monitoring wha your doing so i got paro hahaha

edanto

Just wondering how exactly did you set this up in the eircom router, please - did you forward all those ports to a non existent address or what did the filter look like?

edanto

@ radioactiveman - would you mind explaining how you got this to work please?

I tried dropping all connections on ports over 6000, but in testing I found that android mobiles couldn't browse with that rule in place. No idea why, but it was definitely that rule causing it.

Anyone have any other ideas please?

Dardania

Edanto, would it possibly be that you're dropping incoming connections from the internet for ports over 6000? Maybe the android browser, while it sends the request TO the web server over port 80, it is expecting to receive the response to the phone on a port higher than 6000.

As a general observation, most bittorrent clients don't restrict themselves to ports 6801 etc. and indeed will hop around all ports to try make a connection. I personally have all of the bittorrent clients in my home set to port 6801, 6802 etc. so that I can apply QOS at the router level in case I have a more pressing net connection to make such as a VoIP call, or web browsing.

I don't think the eircom Netopia (now Motorola) router would be intelligent enough to do QOS, to throttle bittorrent. What you could do is try a modem/router that can do QOS, apply a priority to everything important, and apply bulk status to bittorrent, or if you want to eliminate that traffic altogether, perhaps there's a way of giving it no bandwidth. Nonetheless, I reckon you're at nothing with the Netopia - maybe ask eircom to send you a Zyxel P660.

The manual from here: http://www.zyxel.com/uk/en/support/download-search.shtml?product=20080815092146&mtype=&keyword=&submit=Submit# / ftp://ftp.zyxel.com/P-660HW-T1_v3/user_guide/P-660HW-T1%20v3_3.70_Ed2.pdf

mentions on page 253 about QoS.

Is the problem that bittorrent is getting in the way of other traffic, or that it shouldn't be used at all?

edanto

That could be the explanation for the lack of browsing on Android.

I might have to start looking for a way to achieve the same effect with the WAPs on the network.

The desire here is to disallow bitorrent traffic on the network. My friend with the problem has accommodation with students, a group that changes a lot, and some of them have been torrenting. He wants to stomp it out.

I'm conscious that some clients will use a port below 6000 if they are set up that way, so this method wouldn't be fool proof.

The WAPs are fairly good - e3000s. I wonder if there is something I could change on their config to block p2p traffic. I'll keep researching.

Dardania

Architecturally, are the e3000s acting as pure WAPs, or are they routers as well? This type of block / allow policy may be better handled at the router, rather than at the WAPs, as sometimes WAPs are phsycially accessible, and therefore resettable to default settings. Otherwise, if it is secure, you can of course do it at the router

If the WAPs are in fact the router, I suspect Cisco will be meagre with the functionality in the software, to make you buy their more expensive routers (I've had this experience with them before) DD-WRT can apparently be loaded onto the e3000 version 1.0 http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/support/router-database which is the firmware I use to perform QOS here - very useful interface, and it additionally has functionality to block P2P: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Access_Restrictions

Give me a PM if you would like to login to the interface of my router, to see how to use it.

edanto

Architecturally, are the e3000s acting as pure WAPs, or are they routers as well?

I'm not sure. I'll describe ; People access the network via wireless connection to that WAPs (no wired connections), the WAPs are plugged into a dumb switch along with the broadband router.

I'm looking into DD-WRT, thanks. There's a discussion on their forum about this topic http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=619973 and also a (not great) youtube showing how to downgrade everything except port 80 to 2nd class status. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vBjVxB_10E

I'll probably find more precise instructions in time - basically I'm wondering if DD-WRT uses only port blocking method or if another method is an option? If it's post blocking, I'll probably have the same problem I've already found.

Thanks for the kind offer to demo your config, I'd be interested in that. Will send a PM.