Is it just me or is there a big movement to remove all the private network features from Gnutella clients?

I've spent hours in Google, installed around a dozen Gnutella clients but I just can't find a half decent one which supports a private network (specifying of a value for the handshake so only other people with that value can connect) and which support swarming.

If anyone could point me in the right direction I'd be most greatful, pulling my hair out here!

LimeWire will introduce an enhanced blacklist/whitelist IP-filter in version 2.5 that enables the user to specify just a few hosts or subnets which will be the only ones allowed to connect to your node. The problem is, that you'll have to get the sourcecode from www.limewire.org if you don't want to wait two or three weeks until LimeWire 2.5 is released.

Gnucleus also has a LAN version (I think).

passwords and quotas sux! if you don't like filesharing then perhaps better go back to irc and ftp warez.

high society filesharing sux too.

Direct connect and 'private network' operations on Gnutella Network are in no way harmful for the network.
They are more often beneficial to everyone involved in sharing, because it normally affords the opportunity to move a much larger volume of files in a shorter time. If only 3 or 4 people join in a 'private network' and what they share is subsequently shared in general, than the 'speed of distribution' of those files to the network at large is increased. I am doing this sort of thing all of the time and it really moves the files out to the maximum people in the quickest time!

Hi Lurkah,

Unless I am completely missing the point of what you wish to do and about which you sense a decline in availability -
You can easily establish private network(s) with both BearShare and Gnucleus. From one to one on up to as many as you like.
It only takes a bit of discipline from all involved in the direct connections. First person to 'allow' others outside the private network blows it and all participants are then connected to the network at large.
The situation could be improved, but it is available do do now.

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What I don't understand is that the localisation file for Limewire actually has the strings for the handshake settings. It says it's in the advanced tab, but it's not there. Plenty of other programs actually appear to have removed this functionality such as Toadnode.

blacklist/whitelist strikes me as not idea if they're ip based because some of the network members will be on dialup with dynamic addresses.

My god, what a tool you are. Did it occur to your feeble little mind that actually what we want to share is not warez and we do not want to have it shared with the world but the rest of the features of a P2P filesharing network with swarming are desirable.

No, didn't think so.

Well exactly, it's a huge security risk. The protocol handshake feature (or rather the ability to change it) was in plenty of Gnutella clients before but now it appears to have been removed. This is what I refer to regarding decline in availability of those features in Gnutella clients.

It seems that most Gnutella client authors are of the same opinion and the feeble minded chap above, that the only reason you'd want to use this is to swap stuff which ought to be swapped with the world. I appreciate they want the Gnutella network to be busy but this is kind of irritating nevertheless.

We'd pay for the right client, even.

So it seems likely we'd just use opennap with user accounts instead, it's just that this doesn't offer swarming capability which is rather handy for broadband connections which don't have particularly fast upstream rates as is common in the UK.

Just a quick comment to mention that with both Gnucleus and BearShare swarming is certainly available while doing multi-party direct connects..... Is it ever! If there are four connected, for example, and three of them have the file you wish than the transfer speeds are really amazing!
I do agree with you, though, that there does seem to be an overall negative attitude about 'private' direct connects. There is no justification for this negativity, but..... there it is anyway

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Tomorrow's forecast:
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Yes, there's plenty of good looking swarming clients but unfortunately the private feature is essential while swarming would be 'nice'.

I think we'll be using Direct Connection.

Phex supports swarming and private networks.
Additionally you have IP filtering and port filtering. ;-)

Gregor

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Heh, that was about the only reasonably well known client I didn't download and try. The reason there being there wasn't a hell of a lot of documentation on the web site and I was really quite tired of downloading stuff only to find there's no private network feature.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out immediately.