At the school I go to there are many people using Limewire and a few using Frostwire and it really wastes the school's Bandwith. I am helping the school trying to stop this from happening. I know you guys may not support it but people use it during school and it interrupts education alot.

I have looked all through the web and finally decided to just ask on the forum.

What is the IP of the Gnutella network so the school can block it? if not is there some way for a Microsoft 2000 server to block out the network or at least Limewire and Frostwire?

There is no one IP address you can block. The gnutella network is ran by the internet users of the world. It is not controlled by anyone.

If you wish to block access to gnutella, you are better off doing deep packet inspection filtering for "Gnutella 0.6" or whatever the connection version is... heh

Gnutella is always evolving and awhile back you could just block a port (6346) and that would stop most people who dont know how to change their port number, but now that limewire can detect port blocks and port in-use, that way of blocking can nolonger work. Soon, you wont even beable to block it at all. TLS or some other encryption method will disallow the connection to blocked all-together because you wont beable to filter an encrypted connection (you wont know a Gnutella TLS connection from an HTTPS connection). So this fix may work in the short run, but its not a long-term fix.

Try blocking 6346-6348 anyway.

That should bring the bandwidth down far enough to make
further steps unnecessary, without completely pissing off the
most talented and dangerous geeks.

Run a proxy, only allow for std http (poert 8080 from memory, but probably wrong). Block everything else. Put a download upload limit of 300meg a month on each user account. That should sort it out pretty quick.

Alternatively Put a sniffer on the line, and remove anyone's access whom is obviously using peer to peer.

Tell em to pay for their own bandwidth.

Probably easiest of all is send out a message you are giving the MPAA and ARIA free access to the server records linking IP addresses to user logins.

All of those approaches are too provocative to use on children.
You'd cause more problems and create resentment instead of compliance.

Ferral, using Gnutella or any kind of file sharing is not illegal at all. It is illegal to pass information about users to the RIAA, MPAA etc. Those are simply commercial organizations with no privileges whatsoever. Violating the privacy fits those organizations pretty well though. As you probably know Sony/BMG as one of the largest member of the RIAA is guilty of computer sabotage in more than a million cases.

You should just talk personally with some of the LimeWire users and explain that and why they are not allowed to use it. Treat your pupils with respect and keep civil, then they'll respect you as well. Technical measures will only encourage some of them to find ways around those.