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IP Filter. Yes or No ?


ScubaSteve

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protowall is good and very lightweight. however, why the need of an external program running in the background? (okok, protowall is implemented on a driver level, but still), when the functionality could be included in utorrent, and thus only using resources when you are running utorrent (if its enabled that is, else the only overhead is the actual code size for ip filtering, which is pretty much nada). I don't really need ip filtering when I'm websurfing, and for security I use a proper firewall.

it may bump the exe up 2kb or so, but other than that it won't hamper those who prefer protowall/peerguardian etc in any way. for the rest, it will make things easier.

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You still don't get it? If utorrent ever implemented this function, it would never be as efficient as the standalone IP-range blockers. It was changed from normal blocking to kernel-level drivers because it wasn't efficient enough the normal way.

Adding such an inefficient feature into utorrent would counter it's claim as being an efficient torrent client...

Anyway, what makes you so sure it would only take 2KB more memory? utorrent would have to load the whole IP list into memory. Does that magically take no memory? Or should it access the disk every time it wants to check the list? (It's even slower that way)

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yes of course it will use more memory, if ENABLED, but those who use protowall would not ENABLE an utorrent built-in ip-filtering option, hence no ip-filter would be loaded into memory (please read before flaming).

and yes, it is more 'efficient' to filter ip's on a driver level (ring-0) than in a application (ring-3), but when I turn off utorrent (or DISABLE ip-filtering in it), it will take NO resources, (unlike a driver). add to this the fact that protowall has problems with certain network cards (like realtek's, which is used by ALOT of people) then why not have this OPTION (<-- read 'optional' ip-filtering) in utorrent.

at the end of the day, it's up to the developers wheter or not they'd want to spend the time implementing this, but in my personal opinion it would make for a more 'complete' application, since ip-filtering is more or less standard in todays p2p apps.

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You people are comparing apples and oranges. A program like peerguardian needs to check every single packet running through the system to see if it's coming from or heading to a bad IP. That's why they have to go out of their way to make it use as little resources as possible. A program like uTorrent only needs to check if an IP is bad or not when it's attempting to establish a connection. It's a process that happens once per peer. Now, as this functionality will already be in the program in the form of a "bad-data blacklist" I really fail to see how this is going to take precious development time away from the developers.

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PG1 was an extremely badly written program in VISUAL BASIC!, and ip-filtering on an application level does NOT eat all your cpu, look at the post above yours scuba and maybe you understand. and given that it would be OPTIONAL, and for those who choose not to enable it the added 'cpu hogging' would come down to something like this code:

mov eax, [iPFiltering]

cmp eax, [iPFILTER_YES]

jne >

please stop spreading the FUD scuba, and stick to facts.

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  • 3 months later...

An IP filter would be an excellent addition. It isn't "acting like a firewall" - the crucial point is that it only affects bittorrent, not the rest of your network connections.

The purpose of a program like microtorrent is to connect to a number of IPs and exchange data - it seems to me pretty natural that the ability to control which IPs are connected to is a worthwhile feature. I don't see how such a feature could be described as "bloat" when connecting to IPs is such an inherent feature of a bittorrent application.

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