i'm a long time linux user and have been using gtk-gnutella for the last year or so. i recently used kazaa for windows at a friends house and was surprised with the results it returned. i'm working on a pet project commandline based gnutella client and the thought of supporting the kazaa protocol seems intriguing. i've heard that it uses fastrack, which is proprietary. does anyone know if there are any resources regarding backwards-engineering projects for the fastrack protocol? i'd like to experiment with this and haven't been able to find anything on this on the web. i don't even have a windows box to use for tracing packets in/out of kazaa, but i'm hoping this has already been done. anybody have any info? anybody want to help out with this kind of project?

ha! well, i guess i'll scratch that idea. of course it could be done (illegally and after a painstaking backwards engineering effort), but i see your point. ultimately what i was hoping to see is the ability for a linux app to take advantage of all the mp3s that those windows users are sharing on that kazaa network. it blew my mind how many results were returned for something like "sonic youth live". i'm assuming the reason is more users, or maybe their network strategy could be something gnutella can learn from. i'm talking out of my ****, and i'm new here and don't want to rant, i just thought it would be an interesting study for our (gnutella users and developers) benefit.

i still have much to learn as far as what's good for this network and what's not.

Actually, it's the other way round. That's what WinMX did.

Ivan
"In the dark we make a brighter light"

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Could you explain more about that?.

I mean, if you have some knowledge about how Fasttrack or WinMX improve its network, then will be useful to Gnutella learn from it.