anyone familiar with utorrent and p2p downloads

im wanting to get an advanced firewall but thats in another thread i posted, but until i get paid and buy one i want to learn what i can about some things i may be neglecting in my home network.

utorrent is a p2p program to download stuff basicly and it connects you to users all over the place, what would be a defense against this since i insist on using it? how would i go about righting custome rules, either in my online armor soft firewall, or my hardware router/firewall could someone give me a breakdown.

also are there some good articles about how to manage what traffic uses what ports and to kinda lock down what i can? im assuming writing rules for software firewalls are the same as for hardware firewalls?

also since some of the websites i access when searching for torrentz are im not 100% sure safe although theyv never been blooked maybe a few cookeies here and there and an active x control once or twice but would using opendns.com would that be benificial for that web browsing in general?

any other suggestions feel free to add and comment

 

Some router internal firewall refuse to let bittorent traffic be free.
I have experienced this issue with a Dlink router. On my netgear, I have disabled the hardware filtering and everything is fine.

If you do this, you will have to rely on a good software firewall.

 

Just enable UPnP functionality on your router and the rest will be done automatically.

 

Just what the Polymorphic Sheep said above... and an ipfilter.dat

 

I believe Online Armor supports I-BlockList (just extract and import) and HOSTS. As for ipfilter.dat, this is the only free one I've found that's still being updated. Just set ipfilter.enable to true in "Options > Preferences > Advanced" after putting the file in "%appdata%\utorrent" or root directory of portable version.