2

My cousin complains that his housemate uses torrent and thus it causes slow connection to my cousin.

He owns the ADSL modem and I saw some good futures such as blocking websites or protocols. Like if the banned word is pirate then thepiratebay.com will be blocked and wikipedia.org/pirate won't be blocked.

My questions are;
Will it be enough to block the most popular 10 trackers?
Will it be enough to block the udp protocol?

3
  • What kind of router is he using? Everthing will depend on that and its functionality.
    – KCotreau
    Jun 6, 2011 at 0:41
  • 2
    Short answer - You'll never be able to block torrent downloads using consumer grade gear if the user has even half a brain. Jun 6, 2011 at 2:20
  • @KCotreau, he is using ZyXEL P-660W T1 v3 goo.gl/jXhMP
    – ilhan
    Jun 6, 2011 at 9:53

3 Answers 3

10

DO NOT BLOCK UDP! Doing so would prevent name resolution and likely interfere with any online games and many other applications. Basically you could do nearly nothing with your internet without UDP.

Mircea is right that bandwidth limiting/throttling would work well. This could be done from within his torrent application or from the router if it has a quality firmware (consider tomato and dd-wrt 3rd party firmwares if the stock does not support those QoS features).

Blocking pirate in web results would only block those sites. He could still get torrents from other sites.

Blocking the popular trackers would probably work well but peer exchange may circumvent that and blocking like that is a pretty dick move either way.

6
  • I'd be interested in hearing the reasoning behind the downvote. I thought it was a decent answer.
    – EEAA
    Jun 6, 2011 at 2:35
  • @ErikA what downvote? There are no downvotes on this answer...
    – nhinkle
    Jun 6, 2011 at 2:50
  • @nhinkle - it was downvoted once before being migrated from SF.
    – EEAA
    Jun 6, 2011 at 2:51
  • @ErikA votes are usually transfered with the question when it is migrated, and none appear here. I guess it's possible only the total vote score is moved, not the individual up/down score. At any rate, you get another chance to upvote it here.
    – nhinkle
    Jun 6, 2011 at 2:56
  • @nihinkle - that's odd. The downvote still appears on the deleted answer over at SF. link.
    – EEAA
    Jun 6, 2011 at 3:01
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I would use rate limiting and traffic prioritization. Blocking the traffic will make him to search for alternatives. Limiting his traffic will allow both of you to share the connection in a fair way.

1
  • Agreed. Many popular routers will allow you to rate-limit certain IPs on your local network, by port even. On my router (WRT54G) it's under the 'QoS' heading.
    – Jeff
    Jun 6, 2011 at 3:38
1

Disable UPNP in the Router, then delete any port forwarding that has been configured in the router.

Set a strong password on the Router.

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