It seems that Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conference in Australia late last year saw the company responsible for the wireless network attendees were to use, Codify, deploying some fairly unorthadox countermeasures to stop users torrenting.

i. download torrents from a Microsoft event

Indeed, according to a recent blog posting by Codify’s David Connors, users were abusing the company’s largesse when it came to the amount of bandwidth made available, which in itself wasn’t too much of an issue. Unfortunately, the issue seemed to arise from “port exhaustion” – the Tech.Ed network was essentially being overwhelmed not by the sheer amount of data being pushed through it (which was, apparently, unusually high but within tolerance), but by the fact that those using the most data were monopolising ports.

It’s curious stuff, but the long and short of it was that the folks on Tech.Ed’s network side needed a quick and easy way to stop the activity. There are a few possible solutions discussed before eventually hitting on the simplest, and perhaps funniest, solution available to them.

While looking for a more comprehensive solution, the folks from Codify simply redirected the traffic to major torrent trackers. Connors describes the change, saying that,

“In the meantime, we implemented certain, ahem, ‘interim countermeasures’. We quickly built a list of all the top torrent trackers around and got the nod from Jorke to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts.

How professional network administrators deal with Torrent users.”

In the end, they simply wrote a script that logged some users as having a higher ‘naughty factor’ than others based on their total number of port mappings, distinct hosts and idle time. Those users with a high ‘naughty’ index then found themselves suddenly experiencing network issues, as well you might imagine.

Still, the interim solution was interesting enough that we imagine it will garner a lot more widespread interest than the actual solution…