How to disable direct download and torrents

Question

Is there any way to disable direct download and torrents from the router? Or from the computer?I have a slow internet connection (.40 mbps) and I'm sharing it with another person. Please help. If you need further details then just ask in the comments. Thanks!

Answer 1

Many home routers are not that granular to allow blocking of download ports, and I checked your manual, but I was surprised to find yours could.

You have a number of options on pages 39-42 below, but the one I would go for is:

1. Enable the firewall, and block any ports his applications use, usually a random port between 1024-65535 for torrent apps, so block them all. You can do this for his IP address specifically, be warned, he may try to change his IP address to get around it, so you may need to include multiple IP's. You can try giving yourself a static IP address of 192.168.1.2 for example, and then deny every other address above it access to those ports.

If he does change the port he uses to one of the lower ports, simply block every IP address except yours from even getting on the Internet, and tell him it will stay that way until he stops downloading, at least when you are home.

http://www.tp-link.com/english/soft/200943083466.pdf (pages 39-42)

Answer 2

For downloads, this simply is not possible unless you use DPI (deep packet inspection)/HTTP filtering and actively block .exe .zip filtering etc, but there are still ways around it.

For torrents - if you find out, sell this to the ISPs and they will pay you a lot of money! If your router supports P2P filtering or something similar, it is possible it will try to do a good job, but, it is notoriously difficult to block as it is a penetrating protocol that can get around most blocks.

... You can always try to use the firewall and on the other persons machine, block everything other than port 80,443,25,110,143,993,465... (I think those are the most common ones).

Answer 3

I think that rather than trying to block those downloads entirely, using the Quality of Service settings in your router to fairly divide up the bandwidth would probably be best. Obviously, that would depend on what router you have, and what you consider fair, but it's probably a better solution than trying to block downloads like that.

Answer 4

I know this thread is old, however i thought id contribute.

I had a similar issue, i allow some of the people i live with to use my 120mb internet connection, but noticed a huge amount of downloads being made, which lagged the servers i host.

What i did was blocked from ports 1-79, then 81 to 65535 specifically to his LAN IP on my router (VM "Superhub") meaning he can access the internet, but nothing else like p2p software could access the internet. drastic but worked.