I go to and host Lan parties. Any idea if Gnutella can be "spawned" on the network so we can use it to swap files? Typically there are 30-100 people gaming and/or leeching and a search engine would make it much easier like the ones in limwire and the other gnutella app's.

my understanding is that if you change the connect string and connect OK strings to something else then yes you can create an isolated network. Gnutella clients check that string and if it matches theirs then they can connect to each other. So if you change it so your connect string is:

LAN PARTY

and your connect ok string is:

LAN PARTY OK

then everyone who want's to connect to it must have the same strings.

However if you want the lan party to work you'll need everyone's IP's and then you can either post them like the gnutella host cache's out there and have people connect to your host cache's or you need to distribute the IP's to everyone (and I'm gonna guess that not everyone is going to go for the second one.) So it may be a bit of work but if you could work it so people sign into the cache host and log their IP on it or something it may work out not bad... good luck

I've only used Gnotella, but I assume that all of the Gnutella-based apps have a similar option.

With Gnotella, under the setup menu, there is an option for private networks. You can define your own network, from there you can only access files from PCs with the same network name and only people with the same network name can access your files.

All the Gnutella-apps are free, why not just d/l the installation file and pass it on to everybody at your LAN party (or better yet, have them d/l a servent on their own before the party).

Thanks I got it to run on the LAN, for some reason I cannot get the uploads over 77 KBPS, it is a 10.100 network and using FTP on the LAN I get very fast transfers.

Any suggestions? I have the Gnotella set to 3000 kbps.

I switched to bearshare and it works much quicker than gnotella on my LAN. Searches are instant where gnotella was timing out on a LAN that only had two computers running

How can I do that with LimeWire? I need to create a LAN of 10 computer all using LimeWire to share files .. how can I do that? the LAN is private and not connected whatsoever to the internet

Try it. LimeWire will probably work.
Use the direct connect feature to browse each others' files.

Hi there

As long as all the computers are on the same LAN and can "see" each other - Limewire will work automatically on all on them, sharing all files in the appropiate "shared" dirs originally setup on each computer. The connection methods will show as "ethernet" and when uploads occur it will show the IP address on that PC on your network

Hope this helps
RW