Question

Control/block Bittorrent Traffic Using A Linux Firewall

Asked by: adrimanssc

Hello,

I run a VPN service, I have OpenVPN and PPTP.

Because of to much abuse from our hosting provider, we have to block P2P and Bittorent for our clients.

VPN servers are running as gateway.

Iptables rules for NAT:
SNAT       all  --  192.168.0.0/24       anywhere            to:IP_ADDRESS #PPTP
SNAT       all  --  10.8.0.0/24          anywhere            to:IP_ADDRESS  #OpenVPN

I already blocked port 6969 and install IPP2P module for iptables but it's not working good.

I need a 99% solution.

Please recommend me something.
Also please recommend me something for VPN bandwidth monitoring on Linux.
P.S. OS: Ubuntu 8.10, 2.6.27-7-server SMP

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Asked On
2009-10-02 at 03:04:35ID24779689
Tags

iptables

,

firewall

,

bittorent

,

vpn

Topics

ISPs & Web Hosting

,

Computer Servers

,

Linux Networking

Participating Experts
4
Points
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: nociPosted on 2009-10-02 at 04:37:05ID: 25476876

bandwidth monitoring:

MRTG http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
CACTI http://www.cacti.net/

for p2p blockage you will have a problem..., it can use almost any port, many technologies etc.
To what extent is it possible to use a proxy for html access? only allow mailout from a mailserver and so on i.e. use whitelisting in your Firewall.
Then the number of open ports is limited.

If possible limit UPNP control of a modem (to allow specific port forwading to a client).

 

by: adrimansscPosted on 2009-10-02 at 05:03:04ID: 25477034

Hi,

Already using cacti and mrtg for bw monitoring.

Maybe I can block bittorent announcers in some way ?  

 

by: nociPosted on 2009-10-02 at 05:44:15ID: 25477310

Yes of you block the trackers the clients dont knnow where to fetch the next block.
The problem is there are a lot of them and they are changing too, also modern P2P exchange this information amongst each other too.. so if there is one other P2P client found this will defeat your barier.

If you need to block P2P you should considder thinking about blocking every thing and then allow all access that is required. At least it will be less maintenance. As HTML can also be used as a channel for retrieving information you might need to have a HTTP proxy too with filtering capabilities.

Anyway it will become a lot of work for maintenance.

 

by: Roachy1979Posted on 2009-10-02 at 11:58:16ID: 25480938

As noci suggests - good firewall policy blocks everything outbound then permits on a business case only basis....

IE...permit outbound http, https, from all clients (80,443) and permit 25 from your mailserver only.  If you can , run a proxy and permit http outbound only through this (such as Squid).

This will not only help with P2P but will also help with other issues, such as viruses and malware....

 

by: adrimansscPosted on 2009-10-04 at 04:55:44ID: 25488919

Roachy1979,

Squid is not a solution as we give our client unique dedicated IP address.
Also permitting only http, https.. is not a good solution for my as there are many online games, online tv software, other.. which use some nonstandard ports.

Maybe someone used this on Ubuntu http://l7-filter.sourceforge.net/HOWTO ? Is this a solution ?

 

by: nociPosted on 2009-10-04 at 10:19:55ID: 25489821

As other filtering it only works on specific ports.
l7 filter is to force to use HTTP on port 80, FTP on port 21 etc, it's about preventing misuse port 80 as f.e SSH tunnel.

You can also try traffic shaping preferring the correct use of various protocols above other uses...

 

by: stephenhoekstraPosted on 2009-10-05 at 22:22:13ID: 25502043

I don't have any personal experience with it, but http://www.lowth.com/rope/BlockingBittorrent looks pretty decent.  

What is suggested above about closing off everything outbound and using a proxy is a good idea.  Do your customers really care what their source address is when they are browsing websites?  Most ISPs have transparent proxies in place anyway, so if you're not proxying their connection, chances are someone further up the chain more than likely is..

 

by: nociPosted on 2009-10-06 at 08:49:49ID: 25506421

Rope does indeed look promising, the problem may be that it has no SMP support (so all multicore systems need to switch back to single core use, using a non-SMP kernel).

 

by: nociPosted on 2009-10-06 at 13:26:36ID: 25509566

And there is no new version since 2005, that might cause a problem with recent kernels.

 

by: MithrilhallPosted on 2010-04-09 at 10:32:05ID: 30221336

Take a look at MasterShaper for blocking P2P applications such as Bittorrent.

www.mastershaper.org

MasterShaper is a network traffic shaper which provides a Web Interface for Quality of Servcie (QoS) functions of newer Linux 2.4- & 2.6-Kernel-Series.

It targets to let users learn and use the traffic shaping mechanism. This should be possible for everyone who has no deeper knowledge of Linux and the difficult syntax of the tc commands from the iproute2 package.

It provides a Web Interface which lets you define bandwidth pipes and filters (based on IP, MAC, ports, protocols, ipp2p, layer7-filter, ...). It also draws some graphs about the current bandwidth usage and distribution. There is no more need for any shell access or privileged users.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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