[kwlug-disc] Blocking Bittorrrent

[Paul Nijjar]

To (belatedly) answer this question: We use social solutions to try
and make sure people understand not to torrent traffic, or at least
not to saddle the organization with Rogers EUAs. We had a particular
user whom we could not identify, but who was getting us in trouble. My
primary goal was to identify this person so this person would have a
conversation with us. My secondary goal is to be evil by identifying
torrents easily and either blocking them or blocking the people
running the torrents from our network, so that they can get their own
Internet connections and get Rogers EUA notices in their own name and
not our organization's. 

My preference is not to take a whitelisting approach, but in the worst
case this is what we might have to do. The immediate problem has been
dealt with, but I know it will come up again, and it is frustrating
that finding a way to block this traffic is so difficult.

Some people feel that the notice-and-notice system means that there
are no consequences if people torrent on our network. I disagree.

Firstly there is the stress of getting the notices (and the danger of
somebody clicking a link inside them, which will establish the
connection between our organization and the would-be plaintiffs).

Secondly we are a bigger target than an individual illegally
downloading seasons of Linux ISOs. 

Thirdly our VPN traffic has gotten mysteriously unreliable since these
EUA notices. It is only a conspiracy theory at this point, but for all
I know Rogers is engaging in some retaliatory traffic shaping and
slowing down all our encrypted traffic now. That has big consequences
and is a huge source of stress for me, because I cannot pinpoint what
the problem is or how to fix it. That in turn makes other people grumpy.


- Paul 

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 09:26:57PM -0500, Raymond Chen wrote:
> What is the purpose of doing this? To enforce fairness on bandwidth usage?
> Can you apply bandwidth limit for each IP? Or even make it smarter, enforce
> it only when bandwidth usage is almost full.
>