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Restricting P2P. How?

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5 replies

by catsforus

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Is there a way to restrict the use of P2P? I know that shaping would place some restrictions on this. However programs such as Bitcomet and Limwire do they uses a specific port or protocol that could be shutdown or restricted by bandwidth?

5 replies

by adembo

Here is my simple answer. They all access the interent, which is obviously on port 80. So what I have done, is (assuming you are not using a proxy server) add to the hosts file for those websites. Direct limewire traffic to 172.0.0.1 or to a site on your network. You may need to find out what the IP is, but that could take care of most of it, besides not giving your users admin access to allow them to install the apps, would be my advice.

by toivo talikka

Firewall appliances and firewall applications have usually sets of rules available to block applications that tunnel P2P traffic over HTTP.

For example, have a look at the signatures are already in the ISA 2004 firewall:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/isa/2004/plan/commonapplicationsignatures.mspx

Then there are also P2P and IM sniffer applications designed to work with the ISA 2004 firewall.

On the other hand, if you enforce a policy where users can access only websites they need for work, the problem with P2P would disappear.

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