Hello!

I was one of the many folks who got taken by surprise when I saw the "expired" dialog box and read the "we have decided to discontinue XoloX" message. It hit me especially hard since I am a relative newcomer to p2p and the search for a good client was a long and painful one. In XoloX, I found a wonderful client with the features I needed that worked great. I did a 'net search, and fortunately stumbled across this message board which had the "block www.xolox.nl" advice. (THANKS!!!)

I notice there is a patched version available for download, but many folks are wary of downloading executables, and there has been some discussion about it being hard to download it (probably a lot of folks trying to do that) :-) There's no need to download anything though; your current client will work if you block www.xolox.nl.

As far as blocking www.xolox.nl goes, many people may be thinking you need a firewall (or access to your firewall) to do this, but that isn't the case. Here's what I did to get my copy working again...

From the command line, type:

route add 194.109.6.83 192.168.0.123

Basically that tells your system to redirect all traffic bound for 194.109.6.83 (www.xolox.com) to 192.168.0.123 instead. It doesn't really matter what you use for the second IP address, I just used 192.168.0.123 because it is an unused IP address on my local network. (Using an IP address in the 192.168.*.* range will ensure you don't hit an Internet host. It doesn't matter if you do, as long as that Internet host is not www.xolox.nl, but using the local address range may speed up your startup time and its also a little less traffic that has to travel over your 'net connection.) This route will be lost when you reboot your machine, so if you don't want to keep typing it, put it in your autoexec.bat file.

If you want to allow access from your machine to www.xolox.nl again, type:

route delete 194.109.6.83


Note that if their IP address ever changes, you will need to use that instead of 194.109.6.83. If you notice that this hack doesn't work anymore, check to see what their IP address is by typing:

ping www.xolox.nl

That'll try to ping the IP address, but will also show you what IP address the name resolved to.

Note: I am using Win2K Pro. This should work in Win9X and XP too, though there is a chance the syntax is different. If it is, just run the "route" command without any arguments and it should print some help for you, and you should be able to figure it out. Just remember that what you want to do is to add a route for 194.109.6.83 to a bogus destination.


Sorry for the length of this message; many of you probably already know this info, but I wanted to be explicit so that those folks who aren't familiar with TCP/IP routing tables could benefit.

Enjoy!