Blocking people outside my WAN from accessing my torrents

[rfeineis]

I plan on using UT to push 60 GB of confidential data from a central location to 15 other servers via our WAN. The scheduling and throttling is ideal for our work environment.

IT just found out about my testing this and came up with a good point. How do we prevent people from outside our WAN from accessing my torrents that I am pushing to my servers? Is it as simple as blocking the port that I am using to connect to?

When I build my torrent it is built with the trackers set like this: http://172.XXX.XXX.XXX:54321/announce.

I need help convincing our IT staff that using UT is safe to use within our WAN if we follow certain precautions. Please help me to identify what those precautions are.

[Firon]

Um, setup firewall rules that only allow the correct IP ranges.

[Switeck]

Use an ipfilter.dat file containing this:

0.0.0.0-9.255.255.255

11.0.0.0-172.15.255.255

172.32.0.0-192.167.255.255

192.169.0.0-255.255.255.255

This will allow ONLY ips in LAN ranges.

If your LAN range is only one of those, then you can simplify it further.

You must ALSO disable DHT in µTorrent and Local Peer Discovery.

Resolve ips shouldn't be used either -- though it won't cause 'leakage' of any kind, just useless internet bandwidth use.

[rfeineis]

Thanks guys. I'll give it a try. I found this in the FAQ. Someone needs to change the FAQ so the example does nto show spaces between the IP range.

What is ipfilter.dat?

This is a simple text file that specifies IP ranges to block. The format is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy

You can also use single IPs on a line (i.e. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx). It ONLY supports blocks: it will ignore all text specified afterwards (such as what BLM and Tiny BLM does).

Do not pad IPs with 0s to ensure that it will work (i.e., write 64.12.15.0 not 064.012.015.000), though it is reported to work anyway.

Each new IP or IP range must be placed on a new line.

Place it in %AppData%\uTorrent, and set ipfilter.enable to true in the Advanced.

To reload ipfilter.dat without restarting µTorrent (1.7+ only), view the Peers tab, right click, and select "Reload IPFilter."

[Firon]

Spaces work fine (I was mistaken when I said it didn't in an earlier post).