I'm trying to set up our own little campus P2P network so our students stop wasting our bandwidth. Gnutella seems the only reliable option that is available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, which is what I have to support.

I tried setting up an ultrapeer using Mutella and explicitly connecting to it from Phex on both Windows and Linux, which works fine. gtk-gnutella can also connect.

LimeWire is the only gnutella client I tried that is not capable of connecting to my Mutella ultrapeer. The error as discovered through tcpdump is a 503, explained as "I am a shielded leaf node". After giving that 503, LimeWire immediately drops the connection.

Are there any hints for setting up your own LimeWire-compatible ultrapeers with a CLI-only tool available on Linux? Is there anything special that LimeWire does that makes it incompatible with other clients? Or does my ultrapeer need to do something fancy to let LimeWire connect? Would be great to receive a few hints.