Hello, Can someone tell me why when I set the restriction rule to block BitTorrnet it blocks all traffic? The others on my network have no connectivity at all if I use this. I even tried set a exception at the same time to allow all traffic but BitTorrent but they are still cut off.
Yes, I am making a exception for me because I put heavy restrictions on my utorrent, limiting # of connections, total bandwidth and use of scheduler. The others let utorrent run wild with unlimited speed and connections killing our sat internet.
I Use 1.3.5 on a WRT54GL
Ah! "Block all" I see what I was doing wrong. But I still do not understand how to make torrent blocking work.
Have set up exceptions to permit all but torrent. This did not kill the connectivity but it is not blocking torrents. Tested with other computers after setting up, router just lets torrent traffic fly through.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that this type of matching does not work very well. You can observe how well under status/connection list. If the router is able to determine that the connection is a 'bittorrent' then the block you configured can work. My bet is that it is unable to tell.
It is not easy to block bittorrents. Many of tried, few have been successful. My suggestion to you is to configure a Quota for each user and let them decide what they want to do with it.
Ok, thanks. That was my first approach however it seemed that even when throttling them as low as 5k, the number of active TCP connections they had was crippling us. A few users had 60-120 TCP connections each. I suspect our satellite connection will not tolerate this many connections but this is all new to me and I am not sure about that. I don't want to ask the ISP and admit to abuse.
Can I limit # of TCP connections (if this is even a issue)?
Rather than throttling them would you recommend cutting them off completely, how much should I allow?
The number of connections is an issue only for your routers memory. Your ISP will not care of know about this issue. The total number of connections that your router will support is limited by the setting in firewall/connections and the amount of memory your router has.
If you set the limit too high you increase the chance your router will run out of memory and crash. Each connection takes around 300 bytes so do the math based on the free memory you have. Once the limit is reached no more connections to the internet will be allowed for anyone.
For routers with 16M of memory you need to be very careful about this issue.
What matters to your ISP is the total number of bytes transferred. I would probably throttle them back seriously once they reached a daily limit.