Anyway....

This is what Limewire has on their home page under "Get Involved ::: add a pong server"

The Gnutella network currently relies heavily on two pong servers to act as entry points into the Gnutella network. This is a major shortcoming in that it is totally unscalable and it provides close to a single point of failure.

We would like to encourage the availability of a larger pool of pong servers in the Gnutella world. As the network scales up, the two primary ones (router.limewire.com and gnutellahosts.com) can not handle the total traffic. Any centralized system is not truly scalable but as a first step, it would be good to have as many pong servers running as possible. These could also be localized to specific geographic regions, university campuses, etc.

We are looking for sites with static IPs that are willing to run a pong server 24 by 7.

Lime Wire has created a minimalist pong server that is available here:
http://www.limewire.com/pongcache/SimplePongCache.tgz

This is a Java based pong server that can handle from 100 to 200 users a minute. It requires you to separately download a Java VM from here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/jre/

You can install this on a linux/unix server with "gzip -d -c SimplePongCache.tgz | tar -xvf -". You are required to have Java1.1 or higher available. (With 1.1, you may need to change the startup command)

The install creates a SimplePongCache directory in which you will find all that you require to run it. It will use port 6346 by default with a background task running on 6347. You might need to "chmod a+x startup.sh" and take out the "-l" if you don't want logging on.

It works by using a core piece of the LimeWire client and a front end piece similar to our main pong server. The client core will hold 2 permanent connections to the Gnutella network and listen for and collect pongs. It communicates all of these pongs to the pong server. The pong server will randomly give out 10 of the last 1000 pongs that it has seen to incoming clients. Note: it closes connections too fast for old clients like Gnutella 0.56/ToadNode so you will only see 1 pong in these.

To get available pongs, it is much more efficient to just hold 2 connections to the network rather than try and crawl the network. The pongs fill up quickly. This software works well for up to 100 connections per minute. Over that level of activity and you might start missing requests.

Check the readme.txt for further information. This is an early version so let us know any problems that you experience.

If people decide to run these servers on stable IPs, we can discuss making a list of available pong server and other improvements.

Note that this is experimental code with no warranty.
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Anybody out there who has done this on a Mac before?