Comware

We have the above switch at our offices. We have noticed members of staff playing games during working hours and we though a good way would be to block the port the game uses from the switch which will stop it being played on the network. Does anyone know if this is possible ? and if so how this is done ?

Thanks in advance, any comments welcome.

Hi.

Unfortunately the switch doesn't have any way to block a certain TCP port - only to block a certain physical port and even that must be done manually.

HTH,
Arimo

I don't see any filtering capabilities in the 4108 manual or in the release notes. Usually this sort of stuff is handled by your router or firewall. Without knowing what game they were playing it's hard to say if there is a port that could be stopped anyway. If there were a particular server involved you could add a static route for that one server's IP address that sent it in circles.

Thing is that even if you stop their networking game they will just find another one or just play one that lives on the PC. Apparently they do not have enough work to do. We've found that if you fire one of them that it stops that sort of thing. You can also tell them that you are monitoring their network usage and anyone playing games will be fired or given more work. You can actually track the traffic using snort (www.snort.org). It's a rule based intrusion detector which can be set up to report all activity to a particular server or port. If this is some sort of game which requires an open port on their machine you can scan the network for open ports (lots of freeware and shareware programs to do that) and report them.

Ron

to block a specific port you need a layer 3 switch...

a 53xx with lastest firmware or a 93xx

The game is Unreal Tornament which is played over the network (LAN game). The thing is I say tell them they can't play it full stop, buts its not my choice. Some are playing the game after work hours but staying logged on to our system (work hours) we want to stop them doing this.

You can't filter with a 4108gl.

The best approach is for their management to address the issue. Network policing is usually just a blackhole for time and money. This is a personnel issue, not a technical one.