I'm new to Gnucleus, and I do have a question or two--but first some comments:

After Napster died, I used Aimster because I liked being able to just share with buddies. Typically I would put the songs they wanted onto my hard drive for them, and download theirs into the same folder. Sometimes I *would* search for a song outside of my buddy list, but I noticed that people would almost always cut me off (as did many Napster users). Now, after reading the many comments on these forums, I think one reason was that people thought I was a freeloader. My shared folder only has about 80M in it. (And I admit I keep other songs on CDRW.) I'd just like to say that there *are* people with small hard drives out there! I have a 4.3G. I don't have the space to keep 900M (total size of my collection) on my computer. Besides, the vast majority of my mp3s are tracks I made myself off of vinyl or cassettes, which I refuse to re-purchase (I have about 600 albums.) I also have a dialup connection, so I don't do an awful lot of downloading anyway. So please don't go throwing labels at people unless you really know.

Anyway, I like the Gnutella system because of the free and open network, etc. I got fed up with Aimster's adware (and constant crashes), so I started researching. I ended up installing Gnucleus after reading all the forums here on gnutellaforums. But I don't understand all the network protocal jargon....

My first question is how do I find a *specific* person? I realize that I need an IP address (which changes every time). But then what? Where do I enter the IP, so that I can connect to a friend? Also, someone in another post seemed to imply that a person's IP can change during a session. Is that true? That doesn't make sense to me--unless they get disconnected and have to dial in again.

Next question: I'm running under Zone Alarm Pro, and I have the box "I am behind a firewall" checked. Is that all I need to do? I've also given Gnucleus server rights. But no one has downloaded any songs from me yet. That seems abnormal, because whenever I was open and visible on Aimster, I'd be uploading to someone. Also, Zone Alarm gives me tons of alerts when Gnucleus is running. People do look at my files (I've seen it under "statistics", I think?) How can I be sure that people are able to *connect* with me?

I guess I've gone on long enough. Thanks for any info or referals you can give...