Sophos Alert - Please Read.

[GhostShip]

For those Using Sophos this may be of interest.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-7832.html

Sophos announced new Application Control features today that aim to keep company data and networks safe by blocking unauthorized VoIP, P2P and IM applications.
These features are integrated into Sophos Anti-Virus version 6.

Concern has been high lately about the effects of these kinds of applications on corporate networks. In fact, results from a recent survey by Sophos itself showed great concern from system administrators over the apps.
"Clearly enterprises want to stop employees from running unauthorized programs that eat up bandwidth

Not really anything new here as regards p2p blocking but good to be aware of.

[KM]

It's amazing actually how many companies spend large amounts of money on special routers or software or whatever to mess with p2p traffic - considering there is a module for iptables which allows any linux router to mess with p2p traffic for free with very little extra configuration needed (a single rule to drop all matching traffic, or ideally a rule to mark the packets for QoS to give them a lower priority to only use idle bandwidth rather than completely blocking it) - or of course you can use a couple of rules for bandwidth usage of connections rather than specifically matching p2p protocols