If you’re a geek like me, you may already be using IPFire as your main router software. It’s pretty powerful and allows you total control over your network. I recently had some troubles with it blocking my torrent / P2P traffic, so I thought I’d share the quick fix for enabling/disabling torrents and other P2P networks.

I’m not quite sure when this change came into effect. Searching Google for “IPFire torrents” doesn’t seem to come up with any recent mentions of the ability to filter torrent / P2P traffic. Also, I used to be able to download torrents without issue, so I think the ability to block these things may be a new feature.

Logging In

The first thing you’ll want to do is log into the IPFire interface. You can typically do this by going to https://{IPFireIP}:444/ in your browser. For example, if you have IPFire running with the IP 192.168.0.1, you’d go to https://192.168.0.1:444/.

Enabling / Disabling Torrent Traffic

Ok, now that you’re in, go to the “Firewall” tab and choose the “P2P networks” option. This will give you a list of P2P protocols that IPFire can control access to.

To enable torrents, ensure that the check box beside “Bittorrent” is checked.
To disable torrents,you guessed it, ensure that the check box beside “Bittorrent” is unchecked.

You can also enable / disable any of the other P2P services here.

Reload the Firewall Rules

We’re almost there! The final step is to reload the firewall rules. You can do this by going to Firewall > Firewall Rules and clicking “Apply Changes”.

Once that has been done, you’re all set. Fire up your favourite torrent or other P2P software and get sharing!