Hi,
I hope this is the appropriate forum to put up this query.

I have been trying to get a direct peer-to-peer connection up and running between two firewalled clients. I checked out the GNUTella protocol and it seems to use peers for discovery and data-routing which I can't use.
In my scenario, there is a single public server which stores the IP Address of the clients..and then passes them onto any requesting clients to try to make a connection. This obviously doesn't work behind any firewalls .. but I read somewhere about SOCKS which can allow clean traversal thru a firewall! Is this truly possible?
My ISP gateway does not have Port 1080 running, so will this not work? Do ISPs in general open up these SOCKS ports or is too big a security risk?
Am I correct in assuming that GNUTella uses peers for the data transfer and that is why firewalls can be bypassed??
The new WInXP P2P API seems to allow something called IPv6 to IPv4 tunelling? Anyone have an idea if that is a viable solution to my problem?

I am really stuck on this issue and would truly appreciate it if someone could give me some feedback ... or point me to more appropriate networking forums which might have the answer.

Thanks in advance!

Well, socks can be used for certain P2P programs only, there are quite a few that do not support socks. Socks does bypass certain firewalls, but it is not as secure a http proxy. The best way to find out how to get this working is to install a socks port service, i would strongly recommend using hummingbird socks. What this allows is a simulation more or less of an active broadband connection to your computer, but like i said your are limited to the programs capability. Give it a go and see what happens.