Europe’s answer to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BEUC added another line yesterday to those previously drawn in the sand, declaring that consumers have the “right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions,” and redundantly, the “right not to be criminalised.”

Besieged Owners of Various Assets heard this as “the right to steal anything, anytime without being hassled.”

Thus, the circle is complete. Network managers are surrounded.

On the right lurk copyright holders, fatpipe providers, network owners… and lawyers. They want the pipes protected.

On the left skulk p2p file sharers, instant messagers, consumer advocacy groups… and lawyers. They want the pipes opened wide.

Sadly for network managers, they both want what they want cheap, or they’ll sue. Therein lies your problem.

Containing p2p data transfer by intercepting copyrighted data with products like Audible Magic may be dicey and expensive, as you may inadvertantly restrict legal data transfers. You might be wise to add upfront legal fees to your implementation budget.

On the other hand, simply managing p2p traffic is easy… as long as you don’t mind dropping a wad of cash. Just issue a P.O. for the latest and greatest p2p traffic shaping appliance or add-on from Allot, Cisco, Packeteer, Cymphonix, ipoque, or other googlable vendor.

But what if you’d rather save most of your hard-earned budget for other network toys? You can restrict abusive users’ bandwidth and/or limit available ports. Babak Farrokhi offers his BSD port blocking config, along with a robust debate at GeekStyle. However, as many p2p clients are now port-shifters, the list may be more interesting than effective.

Beyond that, you’ll still need to spend a little, because proper p2p management involves inspection of nearly every packet that flows across your network. And that takes horsepower, which means you need to pick up a standalone computer.

Using Linux? You can gin up a rough p2p packet controller by planting some fancy entries in iptables fortified with Linus QoS. But these are fields others have already plowed.

For example, IPP2P is an iptables module that ferrets out peer-to-peer data in IP traffic using regular expressions. P2P packets can then be blocked or restricted by assigning low priority classes or limiting available bandwidth. Commenting on the latest IPP2P release (October 20, 2005), the author crowed, “Version 0.8.0_rc3 was so stable that I have had to fix only one iptables parameter error.”

Chris Lowth offers p2pwall and rope. Lowth claims success at intercepting:

  • Gnutella offspring: LimeWire, BearShare, Shareaza, Gnucleus, Gtk-Gnutella, Acquisitionx, Poisoned, Mutella, Phex, Qtella, Gnotella, XNap and CocoGnut;

  • Bittorrent clients: BitTorrent, ABC, Azureus, BitManager, eDonkey2000, Rufus, BitComet, BitLord, BitSpirit, BitTornedo, Burst!, G3 Torrent, Shareza, TorrentStorm, XBT Client, Bits on wheels, Tomato Torrent, ctorrent, Qtorrent and rtorrent;

  • And others: Kazaa, KazaaLite, K++, iMesh, Grokster, WinMX, OpenNAP.

Stuck on Microsoft Windows for shielding your network? Check out NetLimiter and IM Lock. Both appear to be more limited than the Linux solutions, and neither is free. But what did you expect?

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