AOL..ick!

Umm if you know his/her IP. you can try the following:

open up a command window (start->run->"command") and ping him (just to **** him off )

Then, if you are running an NT-based windows os (NT/2k/xp) you can type "Net send 12.239.146.24 who are you and what are you doing to my pc?" this will pop up a dialogue on their PC that will say a message (in this case "who are you and what are you doing to my pc?") NOTE: this will only work if they are also running NT/2k/XP.

Apart from that, if your firewall catches it, you ahve nothing to worry about

You have nothing to worry about anyway, this is harmless gnutella traffic. You've said this occured before you installed a gnutella client, understood. But due to DHCP your IP address changes on a fairly regular basis (depending on your connection) and you simply aquired the IP address of someone who had recently been on the gnutella network. No big deal.

BTW, a ping shouldn't scare or **** off anyone, it doesn't do anything. And "your firewall caught it so you're okay" is bullshit, you're okay anyway because you don't have a service listening for traffic on that port (even if you did, it'd most likely be a gnutella client which don't currently have holes to exploit). Noone can just aim a sharply pointed packet at your computer and "hack" it. You must be running some form of server (web, email, ftp, gnutella servent, etc) to receive and process the traffic coming in.

If you're not (*Remote access trojans run as servers, so check for those*) then you don't really have much to worry about (at least not on that front.)

Both Morgwen and I listed the possible reasons why you would get a ping or connection request. Please re-read these posts carefully.

It seem that you are upset because someone out in the Internet Cloud initiated some activity with your machine. If that is a problem, you can try to control the whole world, disconnect from the Internet, secure your machine, or relax and enjoy it. Pick one..........

When you drive on the public streets it may annoy you that someone toots their horn within your hearing distance. You may not be doing anything to cause a tooting.

Life's a beach.........

cheers,
jd

<<sigh>> I just don't think that it is a decent thing for a person who has not solicited Gnutella to even have to deal with it..if you don't download it, or visit its sites, you shouldn't have to deal with that...for what I do for a living, I need to have logs up, and having someone pinging me every 4 minutes for what turned out to be 24 hours is ridiculous. Sorry, I don't think that I should have to deal with a file sharing service that I have never asked for.
And the whole "tooting your horn" thing is reducing this situation to the absurd, and false logic. The true analogy would be someone tooting their horn for hours as you drove, then parking outside your house and continuing the tooting.
I don't care how determined someone is to love Gnutella..this is a problem, if random IPs can be victimized.

Considering that you think that this kind of traffic is someone "hacking" (I can't stomach to put the "pinging/" in front of that, implying that a ping is a hack attempt is just idiotic) your computer, you are woefully unqualified to be responsible for any kind of network logging in the first place.

You don't have to "deal" with it. If you're not running a gnutella client you are happily dropping the packets "dealing" with none of them. And ANY good firewall will give you the ability to drop this traffic without logging it (much as you can do with all the other random traffic floating around.)

Or you can just unplug from the net and quit bitching.

"Victimized"??? Noone's done you any wrong, get over it already.

Once you connect to the Gnutella network, you advertise your IP address to other Gnutella clients. Those Gnutella clients will forward it to others upon request. This is how others you might have never connected to before are able to connect to you now.

When you disconnect from the Gnutella network, your IP address will still "float" around among other Gnutella client. They are held in a cache. These caches do expire after a certain amount of time, so they won't hold your IP address forever. For some, it's just a few minutes, for others, it may be a few days.

The issue here, is when your IP address is about to expire at one Gnutella client (say, it only has 10 seconds left to live), but another client requests more IP addresses, your IP address will now be in another one's cache, who may again store it for another period of time as a "fresh" IP address. And so on, and so on. So it may take a while before your IP address is completely out of the Gnutella network.

But for that reason, you will keep receiving incoming Gnutella connect requests, which may appear as "pings" in ZoneAlarm or other firewalls, because your client's isn't up and running (thus the system needs to report it as "closed", or in your case, filter the request out). That may appear as a hack attempt, while in fact it is not.

Now, this isn't something considered high-priority for most developers to solve. However, with the intruduction of some new extension within Gnutella itself, a proposal might come forth that adds a "freshness" or "age" tag to your IP address, so it can be removed from the network if it is getting "old" - ensuring it will be removed faster than currently done.

Yes I thought the same way but the funny thing is that iriegirl never installed a Gnutella client...

Morgwen

She didn't inidcate what kind of connection she has (atleast, not that I have noticed). If she's using a connection with a dynamic IP address, then that could be the source of the problem. For example, someone else at her ISP might have had her IP address and used Gnutella.

Or perhaps, someone else has used her system (like, kids or a partner).

Thanks, cultiv8r for helping me with a very nice attitude...I appreciate that, unlike SOMEONE who is so blindly in love with Gnutella that they can't even think straight and must use insults to respond to someone seeking help. I know who has a partner here; the one who could even conceive of it. And, cult, I just got the puter, so there has be noone else on it yet. I realize now, since I have good help, that the fact that I have cable modem at home will be part of it. And yes SOMEONE (Mrgone) I am still working on my MIS degree and may be wrong at sometime, but that is what help is for, so to my friends cultiv8tr and Morgwen, thank you so much for your friendly advice...I appreciate you for being knowledgable without being information hogs and treating those that are learning with respect instead of contempt.
I'm trying to learn some things now, (my fiance being a software engineer) and I am dipping into some waters I don't know much about..I have a tracing program that he uses for work here, and the day I got the pings, they all came from the same area of the country and from the same person. This is why I suspected hacking, especially since this puter is used for some coding my fiance uses that are related to security. Obviously if I didn't know anything I was doing, I wouldn't have even known this. But whatever..Cult and Morg...thanks for the help

And, Mrgone...take your attitude..and turn blue I don't live my life on the computer!! And I forgive you your insecurities!