[OPLINTECH] Bit Torrent traffic managment

[Chad Neeper]

Personally, I prefer to leave things pretty open and unrestricted (save the
content filter for CIPA) on the wifi. Torrent traffic is just one example
of countless others that have both good and bad uses. It's very difficult
(and expensive) to try to completely restrict use of these technologies,
and a bit of a losing battle. Simply blocking a well-known port often isn't
sufficient because there are often other methods to bypass the restriction
(for instance, by using an unrestricted port such as 80 or 443). Then
there's the whole argument you touched on with legitimate use. Torrents are
an efficient way to transmit large files. I've often used it myself to
download DVD images for installing software. I've also often downloaded
those same large DVD images via HTTP. Those could have just as easily been
copyrighted movies, but we certainly wouldn't be discussing a ban on HTTP!

Rather than going after the technology, I prefer to try to identify and
restrict the abusers. Generally, I'll put a restriction or ban on their MAC
address, which pretty effectively encourages them to move on to greener
pastures. (Of course, MAC addresses can be spoofed/changed on some devices,
which would circumvent the restriction, but most people don't know or know
how to do that.)

If you're just generally having a problem with torrent traffic eating up
your bandwidth and not necessarily looking to curtail illegal usage, maybe
you could configure your network to restrict the bandwidth used by each
connection. Maybe limit each connection to a maximum of 20% or 30% (or
whatever you decide) of your total bandwidth. That way no one device ruins
the experience for everyone else. I ended up doing that for my own network
at home. I have an asynchronous network connection and the kids kept
uploading their silly and ridiculously long videos to YouTube, completely
filling my uplink...which in turn severely degraded performance on the
downlink. I used a one-two punch of traffic prioritization and restricting
their maximum uplink capacity per device so that their video uploads didn't
affect others' use of the connection. Problem solved.

In fact, limiting bandwidth per device might help a bit to discourage the
torrent downloads of large videos as well. If you cap the WiFi bandwidth at
half your downlink speed, their torrent downloads would take twice as long.
You could probably limit the rate even further and still be able to stream
videos reasonably, but the speedy downloads via torrent would be...not as
speedy any more.

It's a tough problem with no easy/cheap solution, which is probably why
Internet providers generally don't attempt to police what their customers
use their Internet access for. We're essentially the Internet providers for
the transient public and are in the exact same untenable position. Good
luck!

2 cents.
Chad




______________________________
*Chad Neeper*
Senior Systems Engineer

*Level 9 Networks*
740-548-8070 (voice)
866-214-6607 (fax)

*Full IT/Computer consulting services -- Specialized in libraries and
schools*

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:34 AM, Technology Coordinator <techco at acdl.info>
wrote:

> How are you curtailing Bit Torrent traffic on your wireless networks? I am
> using Meraki and am seeing multiple instances of Bit Torrent being used to
> download copyright protected material by individual devices per MAC
> address.
>
> Do you block Bit Torrent outright?
>
> Enable Bit Torrent for each individual?
>
> The sticky wicket is that there is a legitimate use for this protocol so I
> am resistant to outright blocking it.
>
> Thank you,
> Mark
> --
> Mark Sanzotta
> Technology Coordinator
> Ashtabula County District Library
> 4335 Park Ave.
> Ashtabula, Ohio  44004
> Cell: 440.969.5486
>
> “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back
> the right one.” ― Neil Gaiman
> <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1221698.Neil_Gaiman>
>
>
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