Hello everyone ,

I have an article which describes how Gnutella works: in 5 Steps.

1. Connect to at least one active peer (address received from bootstrap)
2. Explore your neighborhood (Ping/Pong)
3. Submit Query with list of keywords to your neighbors (they forward it)
4. Select "best" of correct answers (which we receive after a while)
5. Connect to providing host/peer

I can not really understand the 2nd point. Well, how can we explore our neighborhood via Ping/Pong? Well, after point 1, we have lets say 1 neighbor. After that we want to explore our neighbor via Ping/Pong. Who do we ping then?

Because, what I know about Ping/Pong, is that, we ping some nodes, and we receive pong as answers from them, in order to know how the latency to each node looks like (in Napster). The requirement is that we already know these nodes.

In Gnutella, in the 2nd point, we have only 1 neighbor, we dont know any other nodes, so how can we explore our neighborhood via ping/pong?

Well, I imagin, probabaly, the 2nd step means: we ping our existence to our neighbor, and this neighbor will ping continously to his neighbors, so that these neighbors know about me. Well, sounds very coriously?
Can someone help me? Thanks so much.

Perhaps, can someone give a brief description, how point 3-5 work. Thanks..

Ratna from Germany.