Howto Block Bittorrents On A Wifi Network?

[george]

I was helping setting up a Wi-Fi network in a friends restaurant, and all went smooth. Now the owner want to block all bittorrent traffic as it's being abused. I don't belive that is possible, but asking here anyway

Is it possible to successfully block bittorrent traffick ports the simple way, at the wi-fi router? The router is very advanced with build-in firewall and should be able to do this if I knew which ports?

Advise?

[monty]

What model router?

I love to use the Lynksys wrt54g, since you can customize the firmware.

I have several of them at friends' locations running the sveasoft hotspot firmware. In the "access restrictions" you can specify which applications and which port ranges will be blocked, or even allowed but at limited speed!

[george]

Compex Netpassage 28G Wirelesss 108Mbps Wireless Router

[monty]

is it the hotspot version?

I found the manual of this device: "NetPassage 28G Hotspot"

[Prasert]

The easiest approach is from the other side: which traffic do you want to allow? And just open those ports (For simple browsing, email etc. open icmp, http 80, https 443, smtp 25, pop3 110)

Bittorrent traffic is usually found on the following ports:

411

4661 - 4672

6257

6346 - 6381

6700

6881 - 6999

Next to this, deny any traffic from >7000 to >7000

Catch 1: you'll also make skype impossible and ftp transfers.

Catch 2: blocking traffic will encourage users to search for other options. A lot of P2P traffic tries to disguise itself by using ports 80 (http) and 25 (smtp). You'll need a firewall that inspects these packets to deny P2P traffic.

[stumonster]

allow ports 80 , 81 and 443 and block the rest

or as Monty says buy a wrt54gl and flash tomato onto it

Edited January 13, 2008 by stumonster