3 ms·

Now if only there was an easy way for me to all but kill BT on my own LAN, so my roommates stop using up all my upstream bandwidth, and so I don't start getting

Now if only there was an easy way for me to all but kill BT on my own LAN, so my roommates stop using up all my upstream bandwidth, and so I don't start getting nastygrams from my ISP because of them once they start doing that in July. As a network admin, BT sucks!

mdaniel 14y ago
Back a few years ago when I was the net admin for our small company, my boss asked me how to set up his home network so that his daughter could not access games or chat or whatever kids do that parents don't approve of. My answer to him is the same advice I offer to you: don't try to use technology to solve a social problem. In his case, I know for certain that his daughter has a lot more free time to think of ways to circumvent the restriction, and he has less time to think of, and then implement, new firewalls. I don't know your situation, but I would be willing to bet a compassionate plea to only torrent during off-peak hours, or to set the upstream throttle on their client would go a lot further than trying to "kill BT". Of course, having said all of that, controlling bandwidth usage is a slightly different use case than trying to prevent certain content from entering/exiting the network. If you are having a problem with one peer using too many resources, I would think IP throttling would solve that problem (presuming the softer social strategies didn't pan out).
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  The main problem is they can't be bothered to figure out how newsgroups work, or pay a little money for the privilege of using a less network-intensive protocol with better performance. BitTorrent is just a drain on the network, and makes things like gaming impractical no matter how much you throttle it (though it certainly helps a lot). And people often leave it running for long periods out of civic duty. IP throttling isn't specific enough. I don't need to throttle an HTTP download that's going to be done in a few minutes. I just want BT to die on my network, at least when I want the resources free for other use. /rant

mdaniel 14y ago

Back a few years ago when I was the net admin for our small company, my boss asked me how to set up his home network so that his daughter could not access games or chat or whatever kids do that parents don't approve of. My answer to him is the same advice I offer to you: don't try to use technology to solve a social problem. In his case, I know for certain that his daughter has a lot more free time to think of ways to circumvent the restriction, and he has less time to think of, and then implement, new firewalls. I don't know your situation, but I would be willing to bet a compassionate plea to only torrent during off-peak hours, or to set the upstream throttle on their client would go a lot further than trying to "kill BT". Of course, having said all of that, controlling bandwidth usage is a slightly different use case than trying to prevent certain content from entering/exiting the network. If you are having a problem with one peer using too many resources, I would think IP throttling would solve that problem (presuming the softer social strategies didn't pan out).

WiseWeasel 14y ago
The main problem is they can't be bothered to figure out how newsgroups work, or pay a little money for the privilege of using a less network-intensive protocol with better performance. BitTorrent is just a drain on the network, and makes things like gaming impractical no matter how much you throttle it (though it certainly helps a lot). And people often leave it running for long periods out of civic duty. IP throttling isn't specific enough. I don't need to throttle an HTTP download that's going to be done in a few minutes. I just want BT to die on my network, at least when I want the resources free for other use. /rant