Bittorrenting on campus - Problem

[GoranCro]

So we run a campus only torrent site and we have had no problems for the last year.

We have to use Azureus Vuze and a plugin for it called Lan Peer Scanner so it only looks for peers on the school network. However it scans on port 1234 every x intervals.

Now IT disabled my wall ethernet port and sent me an e-mail saying:
Situation: Scanning the network on UDP port 1234

They usually disable your port if they think you have a virus or something.

How can we get around this? I'm not sure if it's because the scans are too often or if it's because its scanning the whole network range.

Any ideas for how we can get torrenting to work on campus now? Decentralized torrenting through Vuze worked great but it doesn't work if it can't find peers.

What are we supposed to do now? Any ideas will greatly help? Maybe use a different bittorrent client?

My only idea so far is to add the ip's or registered network machine to Lan Peer Scanner instead of the whole IP range and have Lan Peer Scanner scan only those machines that are part of the site but I'm not sure if that would work or if IT would get mad again.

It would be great if we could keep this site working because we can't browse computers on a different subnet than us or dorm building. And we are able to share files across dorms and what not with the current system.

[curlywagner]

Couldn't you just run an FTP server?

[GoranCro]

Possibly. But IT would probably not like that and I don't have the amount of space to hold all the files people would be uploading to it.

[curlywagner]

IT need not necessarily know, but that's a good point about the amount of space. They've probably got IDS set up that warns them about any port scanning. It's a shame 'cos it's not always malicious but there's not a whole lot you can do.
I wonder if it's possible to set the plugin to scan less frequently and to scan in a less detectable manner (i.e. not just 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2 ...)
You could try the azureus forums or maybe mailing the author->

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=azlanpeerscanner

I've never dealt with them, but it's worth a shot.

[drtoker]

Possibly. But IT would probably not like that and I don't have the amount of space to hold all the files people would be uploading to it.

C'mon, have everyone involved chip in 5 bucks, you'll have a hugh disk array in no time. Hard drives are cheap, and thats a lousy excuse for a perfectly acceptable solution to your problem.

As for IT, they didn't like the p2p obviously, so why worry about what they think of an FTP? As long as its protected, it could just be your personal FTP for all they know.

[soulxtc]

C'mon, have everyone involved chip in 5 bucks, you'll have a hugh disk array in no time. Hard drives are cheap, and thats a lousy excuse for a perfectly acceptable solution to your problem.

As for IT, they didn't like the p2p obviously, so why worry about what they think of an FTP? As long as its protected, it could just be your personal FTP for all they know.

Yah, a 1TB HDD is only like $150 USD.....hold a bake sale, wash some cars....10 people at 10 bucks a head and your 2/3 of the way there.......

If you're all that broke you can get a 500GB external HDD for $70 or an internal 500GB HDD for like $59 bucks > http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=6078

500GB is like 714 700MB XVID movies.....

[GoranCro]

Unfortunately the school monitors bandwidth usage. If you go over a certain amount in 24 hrs you get placed in a low tier which basically means you get dialup speeds.

[drtoker]

But is that internal traffic, or just external? if its external traffic, your ftp will be fine.