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is there a way to block users on pfsense-firewall level from using torrents?

Thnaks in advance

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    yes, you could ask your users to kindly stop using torrents. Co-operation from your user base will always work better than enforcing rules on them. Jul 27, 2012 at 9:39
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    Hi Unix Janitor, Thanks, but I want to know the configuration for the traffic shaper. Jul 27, 2012 at 11:00

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The short answer is no.

The long answer is that Torrent traffic isn't easily characterizable. I have yet to see a deep packet inspection program that can accurately identify torrent traffic.

If you are concerned that your users are saturating your link with Torrent traffic while other users are trying to do simple things like check e-mails, you should probably consider limiting the amount of simultaneous connections a user can have. Torrents work based off of having many simultaneous connections work together. If you limit the amount connections, you can limit the speed of the torrent and thus, the amount of bandwidth the torrent consumes.

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  • Would be easier to just equally divide the internet pipe among the users (bandwidth wise), so all users get at least 1/N of it or more when some of them aren't using their quota. Jul 29, 2012 at 20:06
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The "easy" way is to limit internet traffic to proxied traffic - depends if your use case permits this.

The hard way is to get a DPI firewall - not sure if there are any add-ons for pfsense... nDPI is an opensource DPI but not sure if it works on BSD. Even that will be imperfect.

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As Seanny123 correctly states, one method is to limit the number of concurrent connections per user.

You could also limit the number of outgoing ports, so only fx. port 21,80,443,25,110 etc is allowed - and then open up on request if users have a good reason.

That is how I do it when I got a lot of users on a limited WAN connection, and it works.

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