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Blocking Kazaa 2.0?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-when-it-becomes-a-nuisance dept.

coder_ asks: "Has anyone had success blocking the latest versions of this annoying P2P application in a network-wide context? Previously, people have been told to block a specific port, etc, yet as expected, Kazaa has found an easy solution to this. Apparently, when a connection via default port is not available, Kazaa makes encrypted http requests through port 80, making it rather difficult to now block. If anyone has had success in doing so, I would love to hear from you."

6 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. What's it connecting to? by tunah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just block all connections to the authorisation/logon server. Problem solved?

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  2. Depends on the situation by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you're adminning a corporate environment where the only things that the employees should have access to is email and browsing, you could cap their bandwidth. If you're at a school, you might want to try blocking access to the login websites (there's a username/pass system in KaZaA, right?), and forget the bandwidth cap entirely, since students may want to download monster .iso files or something.

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  3. Packeteer by gatorade123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just upgrade you packeteer packetshaper to version 5.3.0. This image has new code to specifically handle KaZaA 2.0.

  4. More information needed by Zocalo · · Score: 3, Informative
    Could you possibly be more general? Seriously, you are going to need to give people a better idea of your network setup unless you only want general answers on this, most of which will be moot in you environment.

    That said, there are *plenty* of approaches to the problem of killing KaZaA (and KaZaA Lite), but they rather depend on the network infrastructure. You certainly need to filter the standard ports used by the program, and forcing all port 80 traffic through a filtering proxy server nay be of use. Also, P2P in general seems to need a fair amount of UDP traffic - depending on your setup it might be possible to restrict that to just those ports you require.

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  5. Why not just use Web proxies by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's not much reason for most people to have any other net access than Web via proxy.

    If you've got every box in the company NATd then you are being hoisted by your own petard really.

    Giving Lusers software installation rights on terminals may save you some annoying "but I need MSN" bullshit but when they cram Bonzi Buddy and whatever other crap they can find in there you are risking your network and pushing your support costs up.

    I'd rather be seen as some sort of network nazi than have to try and use ssh into a remote site at 1 second per character. I found who was running Napster and since that day I'm the annoying guy that curtails people's "rights" and "freedoms".

    If you want a compromise let one machine be a p2p client. You can get Gnutella clients with a web front end so anyone on the LAN can submit queries on the same box and then throttle that box's bandwith during working hours & let it roam free when the bandwith is underutilized.

    If people kick up a fuss, sack them.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  6. Fire 'em by Captain+Large+Face · · Score: 4, Funny

    Three suggestions:

    1. Ensure Kazaa can't be installed in the first place by locking down user rights.
    2. Fire anyone who has it installed.
    3. Give me their job.

    NOTE: I am not a SysAdmin, but these options are from a layman's POV.