I want to use a gnutella network inside an intranet. It should not reach outside. I need it to share confidential information within a company. Is there a way to prevent a gnutella servent from reaching outside? The network uses DHCP. Which client software should I use?

If you close port 6346 on your router ... its pretty much a gurantee that no gnutella client will reach the internet, unless of course you have users with dialup modems on their pc, and an ISP account (e.g. AOHell). Personally ... if I were the netadmin ... I'd setup up win2k server with IIS ... set up a simple website or ftp site with the information you want to share as downloadable links. That way you are certian to restrict user access to your 411 ... and if you have port 21 closed on your firewall ... no one will be able to get to that from the outside either ... or if you dont have access to the firewall ... set the internal share port to be something different ... but then you run the risk of someone scanning your network with a port sniffer and finding it anyway .... the choice is yours ... but for the security of "confidential doccuments" that you intend to share on a network ... almost purpose defeating ... IIS or some other sort of server is the way to go.

You can use Gnucleus.
(Gnucleus.net or Gnucleus.com)
There is a LAN version for Gnucleus made just for internal use.
Maybe you should check that one out.

Or you could use LimeWire which allows you to specify a set of IPs that will be the only ones allowed to upload/download/connect.

Denying access to router4.limewire.com:6346, connect1-4.gnutellanet.com:6346 and all the other hostcaches will also effectively keep LimeWire clients from ever reaching outside, even if somebody of your staff overrides the host filter.

LimeWire will run on any plattform and you should check out LimeWire's peer server at www.limewire.com too.

Kreiger88 and Paradog have excellent ideas ... but what about logging? authentication? and other security issues? He needs to share "confidental information within a company." Does everyone in the company need to see it? Is anyone within the company going to change a doccument, then reshare it ... who has the original on the network .... which revision did I just download? Damn ... thats a lot of headaches for the netadmin.

If he wants security he shouldnt choose a decentralised
system. I didnt understand it anyway why he wanted to use Gnutella for his firm intranet...
Everyone could join your Gnutella network.
Plus, how do you want to share confidental stuffs? I mean, hey.
You cant tell your employee: "Hey, there's a file I prepared for you. Look it up with your Gnutella client. Search for confidental"
Haha.
I would still use a central system like Intrexx or just a domain server?

With Phex you can set up a private network.
You can set the network name and set a password.
But I don't know how secure that would be......

__________________
Het algemeen gnutella forum in Nederlands

I wouldn´t use a Gnutella client for this... there is sure better software for this... one "fast" idea, use a ftp server and allow only connetions within the LAN (with your firewall), there are very good server applications but NOTHING is really secure!

Morgwen

Thank you for your ideas. We started to use Phex and it seems to do the job. But we will definitely try some of your recommendations.

The reason why I want to use Gnutella and not a central server is mainly network bandwidth. We are developing software (70 programmers) and have to distribute new builds frequently (and branches etc.). A build has about 800 MB. If everyone fetches 800 MB from the server, things slow down significantly.

Actually it's even worse. Traditionally the compiler runs on a local machine and accesses C++ files on the server. Because of include file nesting many include files are accessed multiple times, which increases the total network use to even more than 800 MB. This results in turnaround times (edit, compile, execute) of about 60 Minutes.

Gnutella seems to be a rather efficient solution to this problem. Using faster equipment (100MBit Ethernet, faster server, switches) may be even better, but it takes some time and a lot of money to install it.

I recommend the Gnucleus client but if you do not want to then just make your own client.