am i always connected to the same sorces? how do i pick them if there are others.

in the old days, there was a Frog site or something to pick servers or something.

sorry for being so vauge...

by sources do you mean in the connections window? If so, those are read from the gnutella.net file in the preferences folder.

You can move it out and a new one will be created on startup.

There hasn't been an option/site to choose LW sources in the last 2 years AFAIK.

Maybe that was with some other program?

I knew it was a while ago.

by the Leaf area under connection i have 6346. what does that mean. are there people that i am not able to connect with, that by changing that number would allow me to be.

by the way, i don't see red, only hosts downloading in black. i may not be downloading any files at the moment.

the box is blank where you can add an IP to force the connection to try a particular host. The 6346 is the default port, but can be edited if you know the host uses something other than the default.

I guess if you knew the IP of a particularly good host, you could enter it there. I recall using that to connect to a friend so we could browse each other's files, but the new "Direct Connect" in Search makes that old trick redundant.

email me if you want to try my gnutella.net file to see if that gives you a different set of connections.

Perhaps I will.

My post though boils down to things like why would gnutella.net files be different, or rather, what determine the connections one is able to make and not make. Am I not necessarily connected to everyone?

I can't answer your question in detail. AFAIK the gnutella.net file stores a list of hosts that are tried on opening LW, and I think the list is upgraded while LW is running (so the list "evolves" dynamically). Each LW thus develops its own preferred startup list, to avoid having to call in to overloaded central caches.

Greg Bildson posted once that people with connection problems should try a buddy's gnutella.net file, when the last-resort caches ("gwebcaches") were being strained a few months ago.

Only a few ultrapeers are really needed to handle a leaf's search traffic (more are really just for redundancy). The ultrapeers handle how far to send your search so it will reach the optimal number of hosts, and I think the formula is dynamic. Our clients cannot be directly connected to 1M hosts. The developers are constantly looking for ways to optimize the network, so the formula is dynamic.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gdf/ is where the current technical details are publicly discussed/decided; arne's http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=22696 gives a better intro to how the network has evolved.

cheers