This is an open letter to all Gnutella Developers

Three days ago I recieved a letter from my cable company warning me that I was using excessive bandwidth. Obviously this was due to the fact that I ran Gnucleus 24/7 as a dedicated supernode sharing my 20Gb media drive (movies and MP3's). Since losing my internet connection is not an option I turned off Gnucleus and plan on staying offline from the network for at least 2 months. The bandwidth usage when I was running Gnucleus is my responsiblity and I place no blame on it.

However, during the last 3 days my firewall logs indicate that I have recieved over 250,000 attempts (with my computer being shut down at night) at accessing my computer on the port I had dedicated to Gnutella. This represents a huge amount of bandwidth and possibly alot of headaches for me with my ISP. This is also resulting in slower network performance for me than what I normaly could expect when not running a Gnutella client. The effect on my computer is similar to that of a DoS attack on a web server. My internet speeds are suffering and I need to quickly come up with a explanation to my ISP for the continuing high bandwidth usage.

I would like to suggest that ALL developers make sure that their clients don't hammer computers not using the network with download requests. This harms the computers being hammered and also slows down the entire Gnutella network.

While I won't be on the network for a few months while I duck under the radar of my ISP but when I do return I won't be able to share much (especially not popular files) if it will mean being hammered with download requests for days.