Block Lists for Deluge & qBittorrent

24-August-2015 - Page rewritten.

Firstly, are Block Lists worth the trouble?

This is a highly informative article written by a professional in the IT Security industry, so he knows what he is talking about. It is well worth reading all of what he has to say here: [1]

This is a small part of the start of his article, just to get you going:

IP Block Lists Myths Misconceptions

	Written by Moore -> Viewed 44784 times (when copied here)

Table of contents

   IP Block Lists Myths Misconceptions
   Myths and Urban Legends
   Blocklists give 100% protection
   Companies regularly change IP's
   Blocklists block billions of innocent people
   Blocklists put you at greater risk
   Block lists achieve absolutely nothing
   Bust The Myths


Over the years we have heard all kinds of false and incorrect
information posted around the net regarding the use of
blocklists as a unreliable form of protection against a wide
range of internet based threats.

This has led to the development of common misconceptions about
the blocklists among many users.

Some of this false information may be part of a deliberate
campaign to discredit the blocklists and their maintainers, or
an attempt to trick people into lowering their defences by
convincing people they are either more at risk or wasting their
time.

While in some cases the false information has been outright
fabricated lies intended to do damage, it also seems that a lack
of technical knowledge mixed with extremely poor research simply
results in bad and incorrect information being spread with no
attempt to seek out the actual facts.

Often you'll see different kinds of insults on discussion forums
from people who just want to ridicule other p2p users that are
discussing the use of a blocklist.

Taken from here: [2] Please go there & read the full article?

Some Background

I stumbled upon the above block list information some time ago now, due to Transmission-gtk not functioning particularly well on my machine.

So I decided to install Deluge. It offered more options & shows more information than Transmission, therefore it isn't quite as simple to use, though really its not that hard to setup. But you do have to manually import a block list...

Finding a Block List

(The most time consuming problem was finding a block list for Deluge to import.

If you want to use a Block list with Deluge, then open the Preferences panel, where you will find a Plugins option, a long way down the list on the left hand side; select it, then in the Plugins pane select (tick) the built in Block list plugin.

I found the block list that eMule uses looks to be good enough (for me anyway). It can be found here: [3]

The added bonus is that you can use eMule block list in other torrent clients. I use it in qBittorrent, & it works fine.

This link should download a huge block list that you should be able to install in torrent client (& the like) that uses blocklists: http://john.bitsurge.net/public/biglist.p2p.gz

Here is a link to a page with some instructions for using this (or any) block list with Deluge: [4]

Thanks go to xircon for pointing me to these last two links.

Block List installation

The Quick Way

For Deluge

Here is the installation path for the unzipped contents after unzipping the file & calling it ipfilter.dat :

~/.config/deluge/plugins/ipfilter.dat

For qBittorrent

Here is the installation path for the unzipped contents:

~/.config/qBittorrent/ipfilter.dat

The Slower Way for Deluge

Use this page: [5]

Which means, whilst still in the Plugins pane of the Deluge Preferences, select the Install Plugin button & then navigate with the file requester to where you have the eMule ipfilter.dat & then type the path to it in the location field (it opens up once you start navigating in the file requester), using the following format:

file:///home/<username>/<path.to.file>/ipfilter.dat

After that it may be a good idea to restart Deluge to initialise the block list.

Results

After installation, I've been using Deluge with up to 10 simultaneous torrent files, & it functions perfectly with magnetic links, & uses roughly between 6% & 10% of the CPU's power, shared over 2 CPU cores.

Which sure beats the upwards of 30% that Transmission was using consistently on my machine. Transmission had been functioning like that for many weeks & using a number of different kernels?

I fairly quickly moved on to qBittorrent which I have now been using for years. qBittorrent uses less CPU, has a great internal search engine & is extremely reliable.

Support

Following is a link to this page's forum counterpart where you can post any related feedback: [6]