option to block certain ports

[nafebolg]

Hi,

I think that an option to block seeds/peers working on certain ports, like Azureus does ("Ignore peers with these data ports" option) would be useful. Personally, I use Peerguardian2 and blocking ports 80 and 443 from inside the torrent client allows me to turn off HTTP blocking option in Peerguardian without decreasing security nor affecting web browsing.

Thanks

[Druidor]

Well I used to use the blocking function in Azureus to block the default port range 6881 to 6889 as I felt that these ports should not be used by anyone who knows what they are doing with Bittorrent.

I know of a number of Trackers that will prevent you from downloading off them if you are using these ports & I personally would appreciate the inclusion of this function within UTorrent.

[Nefarious]

well, using the HTTP blocking inside pg2 shouldnt be used unless u are very VERY paranoid, and blocking ports 6881-6889 is really not good, but anyway u should be able to do this outside utorrent easily using any firewalls out there

blocking ports within utorrent is as much as being able to ban peers within utorrent, and we all know that aint gonna happen, so i barely see this happening either

[oliversl]

Auto banning is implemented, so maybe it will help you.

[Nefarious]

auto-banning is nothing near it, as it choose who is hurting you by sending you bad data over and over, but doesnt let you decide who to hurt

[Ultima]

Firewall... this "feature" will almost never be used, and even if it is, there's only so many ports that people are going to be blocking... why not just relegate it to your firewall? It's not that hard to add rules to any half-decent firewall.

[Steenú]

Firewall... this "feature" will almost never be used, and even if it is, there's only so many ports that people are going to be blocking... why not just relegate it to your firewall? It's not that hard to add rules to any half-decent firewall.

Blocking via a firewall is time consuming & tedious. Why not just add a right-click option to kick or block peers directly from the peer list, Azureus has this feature and it proves very useful. Better yet would be an option to block leeching clients completely !!!

[Firon]

Because few people have valid reasons and understand the protocol enough to use the kickban function properly.

[Vectorferret]

As it says in the FAQ, many peers use ports 80 or other service ports to get around draconian restrictions by ISP or other firewaller on them. I don't think the client should have a feature designed to further hurt those who have to go to great lengths to use bit torrent.

[winMX_67]

I really want the feature implamented its a good idea.

[Ultima]

@Steenú: No need to quote a post you're responding directly under to. Aside from that, this thread isn't about blocking users. It's about blocking ports. If you want to ban peers by IP, use the ipfilter.dat. And as Firon said, people don't have any real reason to ban users other than for personal gain, meaning the swarm ends up getting harmed. NO to manual ban by right-click. If you want badly to ban peers, then do it with the time consumption, because µTorrent isn't going to help you hurt the swarm. And by the way, this whole manual ban thing is one of the most requested, and not too oddly, one of the most rejected ones as well.

[Steenú]

@ Ultima

... then if your so concerened about the health of the swarm, how about an option to block leeching clients, specifically BitComet versions from 0.00 to 0.59 ... or are they NOT harmful in your estimation?

[oliversl]

@Steenú: No need to quote a post you're responding directly under to.

In a busy topic, you will never know if a person will answering just when you're typing, so, I think quoting its ok. Makes things more clearly.

Also, this is a feature request. I don't think feature requests should be moderated by users, it should be moderated only by developers.

If you don't like this feature, say so, only once. Thanks.

[Ultima]

And so we just let people break rules (going offtopic [hijacking is rude], and quoting right under the same post). And waste forum resources. Cool. Just FYI, I did not post that just because I don't like the idea -- I'm not petty like that, thanks for understanding my friendly reminder to Steenú. Notice how I quickly said "aside from that?" I guess that wasn't the main focus of my post, but apparently, you took it to be and highlighted it as the point of your whole post, blowing it out of proportion. It's already assumed that if there is no quote or some kind of indication, you're responding to the person right above you, or close to your post, or the original poster. I notice that YOU thought auto banning would help the original user, but it doesn't. Well manual ban doesn't either, and as Nefarious said above, it's nothing near it. By the way, none of the administrators/moderators (besides ludde) are developers of µTorrent. Wee Firon shoudn't moderate the forum either, hm? I have the right to state my opinion, thank you very much. If you don't like to read my opinions, then just ignore me. And tell anyone else "moderating" in the other threads to stop. Thanks. (Yay so many thanks to you! I can't believe I had to post something like this... I guess forums aren't for open discussions any longer, huh?)

Edit: As a response to your response here, I'll ask you the follwoing:

- Was I discriminating?

- Was I insulting?

- Is this a forum only for praising, and not discussing?

- Do we allow people to go offtopic and hijack a thread? Because you seem to have conveniently left that part out.

- Did I not advise Steenú that it was requested before?

I notice that you yourself did the "'do X, so you don't need your Y request' (even when X does not solve the problem)" thing by pointing out the auto banning feature.

I may have been a little rude, and for that, I apologize. I have no real justification, but I'll just say that after reading the same requests over and over, it gets to be a bore and annoyance. And again, I was telling Steenú that it was requested before. It wasn't like I flamed him, did I? I will not edit my response to Steenú below -- not searching before posting is a BIG nono in the forums. If someone wants to lack forum etiquette, barge into a forum, and request things that have already been requested (very rude, BTW), then I see nothing wrong with my response.

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@Steenú: Why not search the forums? THAT TOO has been discussed more than enough times already. I'm not going to repeat every argument over and over for you, especially when it's offtopic.

[1c3d0g]

Oliversl: people have the right to complain about every feature and posting about it - multiple times even, if it bothers them that much.

Steenú: although your intentions may be well-intended, far too many people will ban clients for no good reason at all. Examples are plenty, like: "Hey, there's a peer from Cuba here, I don't like Fidel Castro, so I'm banning him!", "Hmm...that peer is not updating his % since being connected, he's banned!", "Look, this peer is using Azureus, I don't like that client, banned!"... etc. etc. etc. This is why banning will not be implemented. If you really feel the need to ban someone, there are other ways to do this as you're probably aware of. Firon said it best:

Because few people have valid reasons and understand the protocol enough to use the kickban function properly.

Edit: and as for the option to block certain ports, I'm against it for the same reason Vectorferret mentioned.

[oliversl]

As a response to your response here, I'll ask you the follwoing:

I didn't wrote that topic because of you, I wrote it because of this 2 topics:

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=521

http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=56315

I don't need to answer your question, I have no problem with you. Is just a misunderstanding.

Auto banning is implemented, so maybe it will help you.

I was not talking about the feature request. I pointed to him a feature that can help while this feature is implemented. I did not judge this feature. I was neutral.

Sorry if I sounded negative, was not my intention. :|

[Ultima]

Heh just a big misunderstanding. It's all fine. I think I semi-exploded earlier... sorry 'bout that xD

[oliversl]

No problem, I exploded too

[alexh]

As it says in the FAQ, many peers use ports 80 or other service ports to get around draconian restrictions by ISP or other firewaller on them.

The side effect is that it plays havoc with other software. Such as AVG. People using port 110 (PoP3) cause AVG to think that emails are being sent constantly triggering the AVG email checker. "Just Switch off AVG for outgoing email then" I hear you say. Dont you think would make it harder to spot if you've been infected with a new bulk mailer?

Also getting excessive traffic on port 110 can result in NTL (UK service provider) sending you a "You have a bulk mailer virus installed. Fix it or you are in breach of your Terms and conditions".

Being able to block peers using port 110 would be valid, dunno about other ports.

[nightshifted]

Being able to block peers using port 110 would be valid, dunno about other ports.

Port 25, perhaps?

[Switeck]

µTorrent should not dictate lots of port range restrictions or people with draconian ISPs will be forced to either accept always being firewalled or not able to connect at all.

Blocking-by-default seems a ready-made disaster which causes µTorrent to reject connections from working BitTorrent clients.

A bad software firewall is in many ways worse than no software firewall at all...at least if you have a properly set-up router.

[alexh]

People should be allowed to choose who they connect to if it is going to make detection of viruses and other malware more difficult.

Dont think that I am only petitioning for uTorrent to have this feature. I am also petitioning for AVG to be able to ignore access to ports 110/25 10110/10025 from certain named processes (namely uTorrent)

[Ultima]

Eh, isn't this what bt.no_connect_to_services is for?

[WebReaper]

Strikes me that if people want to block ports, they can do it via their firewall, so what's to discuss? And blocking arbitrary ports within uTorrent is just dumb. For example, if I'm downloading a torrent which has 100 peers and most of them are using 6889 as their port, then if I block that for no reason other than "these ports should not be used by anyone who knows what they are doing with Bittorrent", I'm doing myself damage as I'm restricting my own download.

Fact is, any peer on any port is a good peer, whether the persion knows what they're doing or not. The only thing that determines a bad peer is if they're sending bad data or cheating. And for the latter, whilst it's annoying on private trackers, frankly ICGAS most of the time - as long as my download completes, who cares if somebody else manages to get there slightly ahead of me or manages to boost their ratio?

People spend so much time getting paranoid about cheaters and bad peers. I'm continually astonished at how much attention people give this; when I download something, I add the torrent, check it's downloading and then minimize uT and go and do something interesting instead...

Oh, and for the record, I use ports in the range of 6881 to 6889, mainly because I've never bothered to change the ports on my firewall since I initially configured it a year ago. As a software developer ith a ratio of 3+ on most private trackers I'm on, and having done about 0.8TB of data transfer with uTorrent in the last 3-4 months, I'd say I know exactly what I'm doing with BitTorrent. If you want to ban my port, go ahead - but the 2GB/day I seed onto various trackers will just go to somebody less anal.

[alexh]

Eh, isn't this what bt.no_connect_to_services is for?

Excellent. Yes this appears to be what I wanted.