Shut down torrent program when connected to public Wi-Fi, reconnect when joining home wireless

Question

Is there a way to quit a program automatically, or stop it running, when connected to a particular Wi-Fi network?

I have µTorrent running, but want it to stop if the computer connects with the college wifi and have it be able to auto-start when connected to the Wi-Fi at home. Is this possible?

Answer 1

This could probably be most easily done using firewall settings. Most firewalls allow you to specify different "zones" and then create custom rules associated with them. Since you probably are concerned about packet sniffing/bandwidth use on your college network, simply blocking uTorrent's network traffic on your college campus should be sufficient. All you would have to do is create a separate zone for your campus network, and specify a rule that will disallow all inbound and outbound traffic specifically for the uTorrent application (or, alternatively, on the ports that uTorrent uses for communication, if you want to be application-agnostic). Then you can create another zone for your home network and create a rule for that zone specifically allowing traffic for uTorrent (or on those ports).

To control starting/stopping applications, under Windows, you would have to use the Task Scheduler. You can schedule a task for starting the uTorrent application and have it trigger conditionally, only when connected to your home network. I don't believe the Task Scheduler has options to conditionally stop tasks, but it could conceivably be done if you know how to write a script or small program that sends a terminate signal to the uTorrent process, effectively instructing it to close the program, and have it run automatically when connected to your campus network.