[OPLINTECH] Bit Torrent traffic managment

Mon Oct 17 12:48:16 EDT 2016

I want to give a +1 to Chad’s statements on managing torrent traffic.  I’d take the approach of limiting per device bandwidth (my firewall has this functionality built-in for downloads under the name “Download throttling”.. when I’ve told some staff about this, their eyes light up as if contemplating beating some especially obnoxious individual with a riding crop..).

I like the idea of barring MAC addresses to the extent that you can identify the individual devices as well.  One caveat I’d give on Chad’s suggestion of limiting to half or quarter of your bandwidth, if your connection is strong enough and you have quiet enough slow periods, you might find that you’d need to set the limits much lower to encourage the offending individuals to move along.

For instance, if I set per device limits here to 25% of our connection, the public would find during slow periods that our bandwidth is still at least twice as fast as what they’d be able to acquire at any kind of reasonable price for their homes, especially for the folks who are a couple of miles out into the country.

Best of luck.

Joe

Joseph Knueven
Director
Germantown Public Library
51 N. Plum St.
Germantown, OH 45327
937-855-4001
joe at gtownlibrary.net

From: OPLINTECH [mailto:oplintech-bounces at lists.oplin.org] On Behalf Of Chad Neeper
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2016 12:17 PM
To: OPLINTECH
Subject: Re: [OPLINTECH] Bit Torrent traffic managment

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<mailto: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<tel: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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