LinuxQuestions.org - blocking bittorrent trackers

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blocking bittorrent trackers

Hi,

I've done some research on the issue of blocking bittorrent traffic. What I've come up with is that it is very difficult to detect the data traffic. Tools such us ipp2p fall short because of encryption of the data between peers.

What I'm thinking of (and starting to test at the same time) is to block the "single poit of failure" - the trackers.

My idea is to collect a list of IP addresses of the most used trackers and block all traffic to them:

Code:

# bittorrent trackers

# # tracker.prq.to

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -d 85.17.80.0/24 -j DROP

# # tracker.openbittorrent.com

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -d 188.126.64.0/24 -j DROP

# # free.btr.kz

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -d 195.210.47.0/24 -j DROP

# # tracker.mightynova.com

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -d 209.50.48.0/24 -j DROP

# # tracker.torrentbay.to

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -d 94.228.210.0/24 -j DROP

What do you think about this? Is this going to work? Where could I get a bigger list of bittorrent tracker addresses?

Thank you for any ideas,
Robert

Those blocks are too large, there will probably be other hosts in thoose ranges not related to bittorent.

Modern bittorent clients can use distributed hash tables and therefore work without trackers.

Why are you trying to block bittorent? There is probably a better solution.

ISPs around here try to block torrent traffic whenever they can, but most of the time it has no effects so I guess it's very difficult. If you're in a position where you actually legitimately can deny such traffic and it's really needed (say, you were an employer and wanted to deny it from your employers inside your firm), your best bet might be a written ban instead of a technical one, along with appropriate penalty if violated. That way you wouldn't need to take the impossible route of blocking every hole, as long as the threat of penalty was real enough. The downside is that you wouldn't be liked much after that. If you are not in a position like that, you can probably forget about being able to block torrent traffic except for single cases and probably short periods of time.

Blocking by a range of IP addresses is always a bad move, especially when they're client IPs which can and often are dynamic, meaning that you're blocking out a lot of unrelated users per every related user. Some forums on the net use IP based blocking (probably for spammers), and a few forums have displayed a "your IP address is banned" message even though I've never visited them before. Means I won't be visiting any time soon either..