I just auto-evolved to Gnucleus 1.6.2, and the release notes are quite unclear about this remote IP thing...

What exactly does it mean?

Right now I have to manually force my IP everytime my NAT router dials in; should I turn the force off now?

The Remote IP: is what another computer sees as your IP coming in to it. It just tells you back so you can use it if you need it. If the remote ip is the same as what your NAT is reporting, set the forced ip to it.
Someone could make a "rogue" client that returns a invalid or fake remote ip just to mess people up so don't depend on it totally, or only rely on it if it's valid from several different sources.

In that case, it would be very helpful if the ip was copy/pasteable, or even better, if there was a sub-option to automatically use this reported remote IP for a force.

Either case, for some strange reason the forcing of the IP no longer works for me at all since 1.6.2. I get no inbound connections anymore, with the very same settings that worked well in 1.6.1.

Should I report all that somewhere else or does a developer read this forum?

ok, here's an update on the situation:

If you DO NOT check the "Set Local IP" box, it is supposed to display your WAN IP in greyed out form and force it AUTOMATICALLY.

However, there seems to be a bug which prevents this feature to work in conjunction with a forced port.

When I use a Random port along with a DMZ on my router (ie forward all ports to my PC), I get Inbound connections immediately.

But when I want to force the port to 6346, and only forward THIS port through the router, I rarely get Inbound connections. This "rarely" would indicate that Gnucleus uses Random ports even when told to used a forced one when the IP is left to automatic remote detection.

Furthermore, manually forcing the same (and correct) IP displayed in the grey field doesn't work either. This behaviour is *definitely* different from 1.6.1, where a complete manual force of both IP and port *did* work.

Can anyone confirm/deny that? Is this even the right forum for this kind of technical stuff, seeing how little traffic there is?

Good suggestion. Swabby does read these forums, but you might also want to post a bug report on the sourceforge project page. I can't test this on my setup, sorry. But the concept is to make the IP that you "force" appear in search queries you send out, thus people will connect back to that address.
Any chance you can monitor your ethernet packets and see what is happening? If people seem to connect back to you via that port, maybe it's something with your shared files not showing up like they used to?

I too had a similar problem. I forced the ip address to be my cable modem port and I was not getting and inbound connections. I verified this with:
1. netstat on the local machine - local addresses never had 6346 and established.
2. tethereal on the masq machine and watching the syn and fin packets.
3. Connecting from the outside with a modem and nmap'ing my site and finding 6346 as closed.

I unchecked forced and all of the above tests indicated that inbound connections were working.

HTH
bob

p.s. is there a better forum to talk about tech stuff? like a ng.

Let me understand this, you have a normal every day cable modem and something like a linksys switching hub?

Then you turn off force IP and everything is OK?

So what is the problem? You don't need to force a IP unless you are behing a NAT ROUTER, which is like a firewall. Your switch or hub is not a router.

If you have a NAT router then you have to set it to pass the packets through to your 6346 port plus force the IP.

All the force IP does is set that IP and port in any query hit packets you send out (replies to any searches people send to you, looking through your shared files for matches)