i just thought i'd ask the dumb question, because i have had NO problems up till tonite connecting. now i can't connect.

i am on a small ISP, they would have said something. i have no firewall, i just talked to tech support today to ask them about hooking up a router, but i couldn't get it to work last nigth, so i disconnected. i tested via telnet, and it just hung and eventually after a few minutes said 'connection refused'

i'm sure it's something on my end, but i thought i'd ask the dumb question about the whole network maybe being down...

could my changes in my router/networking temporarily have disabled it?

sorry for the ramble!

No, the network's still up.

Just for the record, the Gnutella network doesn't operate around central servers which could possibly go down and take the network with it. Rather, every client makes a number of other connections to other clients. So, for the entire network to be down, all clients everywhere (roughly estimated at around 300,000 or so) would have to be down at the same time.

As for your connection problem, it does sound like a change was made that may be interfering with your ability to connect to the Gnutella network.