Controlling the ports that uTorrent uses...

[closetosomethingreal]

Hi there,

I am running a large shared network where I want to limit torrent downloads to certain times of the day, but preserve uPnP access for online gaming. I can set the rules for torrenting to require them to use uTorrent, and set whatever settings are necessary in their client before allowing access.

I have spent many nights trying to figure out how to limit torrent downloading during peak hours through port range blocking to no avail...is there any way that I can force uTorrent to only pull from a select range of ports that I can turn on and off access to?

I am aware that I could require everyone use the scheduler, but last year when I tried that, many users disabled it easily and abused the network bandwidth.

I tried setting net.outgoing_max_port and net.outgoing_port to a certain range, and when I blocked that range in my router, there was still traffic getting through with uPnP disabled in the uTorrent client.

Thanks!

[DreadWingKnight]

is there any way that I can force uTorrent to only pull from a select range of ports that I can turn on and off access to?

Not easily, no.

[paintball9]

The ports you see utorrent 'using' are really mostly the outgoing ports. They line up with the incoming ports that other users will have set on their clients. The only way to really control ports on your direct machine/connection would be to route all traffic through a gateway. Whether that be a vpn or a proxy of some kind. It would only need to ensure that the first section the traffic travels is restricted to a certain port (I'm assuming to get around a port based firewall). Basically tunneling.