Many Universities, workplaces, etc are starting to take action against the use of torrent files. You can always change ports so port blocking is a worthless use of network time. However, places have started to restrict the ability to download files ending in the .torrent extension. This complicates things immensely.
Take for example a situation I encountered. On the Ubuntu 7.10 release date it was nearly impossible to find a server to download the ISO from as they were all getting hammered with requests. The solution many servers displayed was ‘download via a torrent’. When I tried that on my university network, I encountered the problem, I couldn’t download the .torrent file. This was annoying, as the University states that using the network to download and seed legal torrents is allowed. How did I get passed this? Using a simple php script I coded up, that can be found at http://steve.blogme.us/bypass.php
The script simply takes the URL to the .torrent file, saves it on the local server as a text file, and allows you to then download it, then all you need to do is change the extension to .torrent and load it up in the torrent client. It is that simple, and it works! Enjoy.