Why don't routers have a "disable BitTorrent" feature?

[VirtualLarry]

I would think that would be even better than a QoS feature. One to actively disable BitTorrent connections going through the router. How hard would that be to implement, I wonder?

Or possibly, connection limit per LAN IP address, so that BitTorrent connections would be connection-limited, and not allowed to fill up the NAT/connection table in the router and cause a denial-of-service for other connections.

 

[imagoon]

It probably has something to do with the fact that most routers don't have enough brains to do NAT well in the first place let alone session inspecting and the like needed to do proper limiting. The protocol itself isn't what is defective in this case really. I can hand you my older netscreen 25... good luck getting bittorrent to crash that. It has the CPU / RAM / software / performance it needs to do the inspecting and session pruning. It also gets more aggressive as you approach the session limits (assuming you don't tell it go in to stupid mode)

 

[Murloc]

I have a decent router and I can do both.
I can block bittorrent ports or choose how much bandwidth to give to each internal computer.

If you have a 100$ router then it's normal that you can't do that.

You can disable upnp and block ports on any recent router though.
If you sons are changing the port all the time they will have slow download, so it shouldn't really be a problem.

 

[gothamhunter]

Just tell the people doing it it's a no-no and if they're caught doing it then don't let them use the/their computer and/or block it from the network.

Also, what Murloc said 🙂

 

[Kanalua]

DD-WRT has this option.

 

[imagoon]

Just tell the people doing it it's a no-no and if they're caught doing it then don't let them use the/their computer and/or block it from the network.

Also, what Murloc said 🙂

^ this is what worked at work. The bittorrent protocol is pretty impressive with how resilient it is.

 

[Nuwave]

^ this is what worked at work. The bittorrent protocol is pretty impressive with how resilient it is.

Agreed.

The equivalent of blocking bit-Torrent ports is "cutting the cord".

 

[Modelworks]

My router has that and it is an off the shelf netgear model. WNDR3300

 

[Mark R]

Bittorrent has been designed (and modified over time) to be able to get through most firewalls and avoid blocking.

Yes, you can block 'basic' bittorrent - non-encrypted connections on the standard port range - however, many illicit trackers force non-standard ports, and many clients will detect and avoid blocks on the standard ports. (it may be more effective to severely throttle these ports rather than block them)

Of course, if the user sets their client to encrypt, there's no easy, reliable way to identify encrypted torrent connections and almost any blocking/throttling strategy will fail.

The only real way to do it is to measure bandwidth usage, and the number of connections used to do it, and the number of peers and severely throttle anything that looks vaguely torrenty. The disadvantage is you tend to throttle legit traffic as well.

 

[Makaveli]

I use a Dlink DGL 4500 and it runs great with Torrents running. The most important thing was setting an upload cap in the torrent client. So my current max uploads are 125kb/sec and I set the client to 25kb/sec max. This way i can do everything else on my connection including gaming and it doesn't affect my pings or anyone else on the internet.

QOS in this dlink router works rather well.

If anyone else in my house decides to run torrents I simply give them the lowest priority on the network including wireless connections. And they would still have to know which port I opened to allow incoming bittorrent connections if not the client program will just complain about how there is a firewall and its affecting incoming connections and they download at a snail pace.

 

[Ichinisan]

If it was that easy to disable BitTorrent, I think ISPs would have done that before BT took off.