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Author Topic: How Do You Block ALL Peer-2-Peer Activity?  (Read 7818 times)

Cobra97

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How Do You Block ALL Peer-2-Peer Activity?
« on: March 27, 2008, 07:01:07 AM »

I would like to block all peer-to-peer activity on my network. I have read the instructions under Access Control, and it appears that I need to create an Access Policy and apply it to each PC on my network.
 
It also appears that I have to choose to "Block Some Access" on Step 4 of the Access Control wizard, and then I have to select (A) Apply Web Filter and/or (B) Apply Advanced Port Filters. If I choose to "Apply Advanced Port Filters", then I have to identify the ports to be blocked on specific machines, plus I have to know the protocol.

It (again) appears that the Dest IP Start and Dest IP End are NOT related to machines in my network, because when I use the emulator and enter 192.168.0.15, I get a message box which reads
"Destination IP Start address should not be in the LAN subnet....".
 
 
Question 1 - Am I correct in assuming that I have to know the EXTERNAL IP addresses which I will have to block on an IP-by-IP basis?
 
Question 2 - Is the protocol to choose here "TCP"?
 
Question 3 - What is the port or port range that peer-to-peer networks use? An alternative way of asking this question would be "How do I go about determining what ports to block, in order to prevent all peer-to-peer activity on my network?"
 
Question 4 - In order to block peer-to-peer activity (based on selecting "Apply Web Filter" in the Wizard) do I then go into the Website Filter page and identify websites by name? If so, is there a "published list" of peer-to-peer websites that would be entered here?
 
I thought the idea behind peer-to-peer is that you don't need websites and each peer station is a server, meaning it would be virtually impossible to identify all the IP addresses under the "Apply Advanced Port Filters", since that appears to require an external IP address (ie, not one on your internal LAN).
 
So bottom line is, can anyone provide guidance regarding how to accomplish my goal of blocking ALL peer-to-peer activity on my network, given the fact that I clearly don't know what I'm doing?

Thanks for any insight you can provide!
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Cowtipper

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  • Posts: 12
Re: How Do You Block ALL Peer-2-Peer Activity?
« Reply #1 on: March 27, 2008, 04:34:17 PM »

1) If you leave the default values of 0.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255, it will block the ports to all external addresses. You can change these IPs to restrict the port blocking to a certain web site (via IP address). In most cases, the default settings are all that will be required.

2) The protocol will be determined by the traffic being blocked. P2P programs can use different ports in the TCP and UDP types. A good site to find the ports for programs is http://www.portforward.com, they list a large number of programs and list the TCP and UDP ports in seperate columns.

3) Check the site in question 2 for the ports to block. These are guidelines for the programs, as the program can be configured to use different ports. You would need to check the program setup for the current ports, but the person could change these ports again at a later date.

4) You would not be able to use the website filter to block the traffic. You could use the list to block the torrent sites where they publish the available torrents.

P2P programs can be difficult to block as their nature is designed to circumvent security. One way would be to block all ports, except for required ports like 80 and 443 from the client PC. This would be difficult to manage in the setup, as a new program installed on the computer may require ports to be opened and the rules to be modified.
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