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.

You could run the LimeWire core, it doesn't require you to run X or anything.

LimeWire will not connect to Mutella ultrapeers because Mutella doesn't support certain additions to the Gnutella protocol.

Thanks for the suggestion

I tried finding some info on that, the only thing I found in the forums was labeled by its author as a "crude hack" and it wasn't clear whether one could get statistics from the core on the command line, in a log or if everything is simply run blindly. That wouldn't be of much use. Maybe there's a command-line UI that could be snapped into place instead of the GUI? The LimeWire dev docs hint at the possibility.

Mutella would be perfect in all regards so far. I will try using giFT now, but I'm not sure if giFT can act as an ultrapeer or how evolved its gnutella support is anyway.

Well, yet another possibility would be, simply to set up a private GWebCache foor your campus instead of having a single Ultrapeer handle all the other nodes.

If you were using a special GWebCache, all the nodes should be able to find each other and connect to each other in one or another way.

Yes, that's what I thought of as a final fallback. I'll try it out this afternoon and see if it performs okay with a bunch of clients -- I guess by far most clients today should support gwebcaches and allow you to enter the address of a specific one.

Thanks so far

It seems Phex overwrites its ~/.phex/gwebcache.cfg with a default cache list every time you start it, so I can't just put my GWebCache in there. Replacing LimeWire's gnutella.net with my GWebCache's address leads to LimeWire overwriting it with an empty file.

I guess I'm too dumb to figure out where to properly set up clients with a custom GWebCache address. But it looks less and less likely that a local Gnutella net can solve our problem

Ah well, it would've been a nice dream