Have I mentioned that it could happen that Network-administrators would block your Port of preference (I am sure they blocked 6346 and 7 in our University).

So what I have to do usualy is go through pages and pages of http://www.gnufrog.com listings handpicking the odd ports and hope I can make a connection. once that has happened I ad that first contact on Outgoing host to my 'Auto Connect Host' list hoping that it may (and it does often enough) work another few times.
With a first contact the next few come in themselves (only on the new 0.6.2 that seems to not work quite as well?). Continues the problem then that the Hostcatcher (I don't really knowwhere it gets its info from but it must be out of the search or answer traffic) caches all those default ports that ar blocked on my subnet... So I was asking for a Port filter for that point - and I will when I get around to analysing and understanding the structure of the Phex source see if I can do it myself...

At any rate Greatest Thanks to the Development team of douphtlessly the best Gnutela client for my purposes !

I congratulate you on your release early and often Philosophy Greg - for now I still went back to the 6.1 client cause I can manualy restart when I got a bit further but I dont have the communication why I dont get enough incoming connections sometimes - maybe its just because I feel saver to adjust (thanks for that new capability) the max search traffic to less than 5k (I got in truble before when I was running phex 0.5.x on 4 machines at the same time and maybe without knowing how much search traffic i was generating) I would like to run phex again on that many (sometimes remote) machines but for that I would like a feature 'Priority Connection' - Or even Better a Localized MULTICAST SEARCH PLASMA ? Has that ever been considered ? I don't know but I am sure it has by you progressive developer folks. I know my experiments with multicasting where not yet too succesful but it is in use Multicasting streaming audio isn't it ? So How about that if a Client participated in regular connections plus a few multicast bubbles that would reduce his local traffic because he does not have to repeat the seach packets to every one of the multicast group members.
what would be neccessary is of course some mechanism that not two clients try to act as the relay between two multicast bubbles at the same time ...

Anyhow with random ports and reasonable traffic use the admin peple can not complain and will not again dare to threten me with disconnection...

Also I thought about the multicast scheme also for sharing popular files more efficiently and possibly more than one host (of the desired morsel) can contribute packets and more than one client can enjoy the added bandwdth - of course all with propper checksumming and out of sequence reassembly ...

I hope I am not overdoing my newly reestabliched login here today!
Cheers

eagle3Eyes