October 25, 2009 by sharky
The purposefulness of blocking or banning seedbox IP ranges when torrenting through a home PC is to be able to increase your upload rates to non-seedbox peers. By limiting your BitTorrent traffic to mostly other home users only, such as yourself, this will effectively cut out seedbox traffic - simply put; it means you won’t be uploading to seedbox peers in the torrents, in turn giving you an advantage to seed to lower-speed home torrenters. For some trackers that are difficult to seed on, in our tests we’ve found this solution to be somewhat effective in increasing upload data and sharing ratios.
Disclaimer: The subject on the appropriateness of banning or blocking seedbox IP ranges is continually up for debate. While this tip can certainly assist home torrenters in uploading to other home PC users (by limiting your connections to mostly PC-to-PC only) - it will also hamper download speeds considerably. Additionally, if certain torrents you intend on downloading only have one seed and it happens to be hosted on a seedbox, you won’t be able to connect to it. Inversely, if you are the only seeder on a torrent and a user tries to download your torrent to their seedbox, they won’t be able to connect; thus you’ll get no upload on it. Be aware that the use of this IPFilter will block traffic from these IP ranges on all torrent sites you download from or upload to. Use at your own discretion, and definitely do not do this if you’re using public trackers only (although it shouldn’t really make all that much of a difference).
If you want to experiment with it, it’s possible to create a second instance of uTorrent so as not to affect your current seeding and/or downloading torrents.
Using ipfilter.dat to Block Seedbox Traffic
Essentially, we’ll be creating an ipfilter.dat file to incorporate into uTorrent or Vuze. Copy the code from below, create a new text file and paste the data into it. Then, save it as ipfilter.dat. Or, simply download our own ipfilter.dat file.
85.17.0.0 - 85.17.255.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
94.75.192.0 - 94.75.255.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
95.211.0.0 - 95.211.255.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
83.149.64.0 - 83.149.127.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
62.212.64.0 - 62.212.95.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
82.192.64.0 - 82.192.95.255 - NL-LEASEWEB
87.118.64.0 - 87.118.127.255 - DE-KEYWEB-SAXTEC
88.191.1.0 - 88.191.250.255 - FR-DEDIBOX
89.250.64.0 - 89.250.79.255 - NL-XENTECH
91.121.0.0 - 91.121.255.255 - OVH
94.23.0.0 - 94.23.255.255 - OVH
213.186.32.0 - 213.186.63.255 - OVH
213.251.128.0 - 213.251.191.255 - OVH
87.98.128.0 - 87.98.255.255 - OVH
188.165.0.0 - 188.165.255.255 - OVH
212.117.160.0 - 212.117.175.255 - Server-lu
This approach can also be done using external apps such as PeerGuardian or PeerBlock, although it may not be ideal. Using the IPFilter.dat file through a BT client will localize the blocking to only the client, and therefore will not affect other Internet services.
Using ipfilter.dat in uTorrent
First, make sure that ipfilter is enabled in uTorrent. Go to Options > Preferences, and click on the Advanced tab. Scroll down to where it says "ipfilter.enable" and change this to True. Click Apply and OK to finish.
Next, you’ll need to copy (move) the ipfilter.dat file into your uTorrent "appdata" directory. Depending on your Win OS, this will vary slightly.
WinXP Users: To find your appdata directory, click Start > Run… and enter %appdata%\uTorrent
Vista Users: The working uTorrent appdata path can be found as shown in the example below:
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent
Lastly, exit and restart uTorrent.exe to load the filter. To confirm that ipfilter.dat is properly loaded, click on the Logger tab:
To test that it’s working correctly, click on a torrent that has a lot of peers (i.e. a new downloading torrent). Now click the Peers tab - you should notice that there won’t be any (or many) OVH, Kimsufi or Leaseweb peers.
Using ipfilter.dat in Vuze
In Vuze, first be sure to change the Mode setting to Advanced, in Tools > Options… Next, click on the tab IP Filters and turn on (Enable) the filter. Browse to your ipfilter.dat file, and click Load Now - you should now notice a list of currently blocked ranges. Finalize the procedure by clicking Apply at the bottom.
You can now view what has been blocked by selecting IP Filters from the Tools menu in Vuze.
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