P2P Shriekers Force Network Lock-Downs

Europe’s BEUC made its position brutally clear: Users have the right to ignore artists’ copyrights and abuse bandwidth as they see fit. The resulting legal, QoS, privacy, security and cost challenges are forcing managers to limit p2p, if only to survive. Email Battles runs down the list of options admins have available, including throttling individual abusers, port blocking, p2p signature detection, and other traffic shaping tricks. Both open source and off-the-shelf solutions are covered. They even dredged up a comple of bandwidth controllers for Microsoft Windows servers.