New to gnutella community but not new to networks but I wanted to share both my responce and add some input to this cluster issue which should not go on unchecked and resolved.

I thought limewire was horrible as it mismanaged buffer space making it difficult to run multiple communication apps browser the internet and share via limewire without getting insufficient buffer space messages.

Now I am already shy on buffer space as I run multiple services off this single machine including multiple web daemons and ftp and both a web mail and pop / smtp daemon. Apache is hosting some 20 domains which is not very many for a nix box but until I finish constructing a new nix box this windoze 98se will have to do for a while.

I dumped limewire and ran bearshare and experienced a greater threshold and only ran into difficulty when I bumped the hosts and download numbers too high. I am running the hosts at 10 and the download files at 8 at the same time all the daemons running in the background serving out requests (get about 100 unique hits per minute) and was able to run trillian with 10 different connected accounts without a problem. I also enabled the bearshare webserver which also worked well.

Bearshare did stop accepting requests both in client and webserver after editing the ini for the webserver and client params. This was cleared up after rebooting.

No I am looking into the clustering issues and wonder about dumping bearshare as well and moving onto a better client if one exists. opensource is not always better, preferred maybe but doesn't mean it will work well for everyone. bearshare so far gets a higher score than limewire but I also am very disappointed with the corrupt files I have been downloading. It simply doesn't make sense to me how people with modems can deal with the time it takes to download a corrupt file. It is bad enough with the misleading files names that some of these losers share. I downloaded what I thought to be a kids movie and ended up with someone's idea of a sick joke.

I would prefer open source and those clients made by those networks who do not try to block other clients and force their ads onto the masses in order to make a dime. I don't care so much about the forced ads so much as I do about the attempt to control the networks with sick clustering and secret packets. This is simply WRONG and If I was still the hacker I was once known to be I would wage WAR on their networks until they fell to the waste side. Lucky for them I am 0160 the invisible hacker gone admin. unlucky for them however since it would seem the word is out and they will still fall as users become aware.

I am no a gnutella expert per se but I understand networking. I used to run my own IRC Network and a BOT NET to boot. I understand hubs and clusters leafs and nodes etc. I will be looking more into this clustering issue and welcome all input & intel from others. If I find this to be without a doubt a fact that they are doing what you said about the clustering then I will convince all my online brothers to start adding warnings to their files (html,doc,txt,pdf, and even video files) in addition to postings on webpages and forums.

We will not let this go on unchecked! We demand that this be resolved immediately! Call it beta whatever, we want there to be a gnutella standard for both packet protocol and clustering practices! I love extra features just as much as the next guy but get annoyed when those features cause connectivity issues and especially do not like those which attempt to create a monopoly like network for themselves.

We should be able to add any number of connect#.networkname.tldort# to the configuration any of the gnutella clients and have them connect and download/upload without the problems we have seen lately. I may not know enough to talk about this intelligently for some but I think I am being clear enough.

When I complete my new nix server this week I will be able to run some additional tests among the nix box and the few MACS and PC's I have here at my disposal.