Hi.

If you're using NAT, for instance on a hardware firewall/router, or a Linux firewall/gateway, please, please, please, set your ip addy in your gnutella client to reflect your EXTERNAL internet addy. That addy is the one assigned by your isp. I've seen about 20% of my searches returned with either an ip addy of 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.111.x ... this is because your client is detecting your INTERNAL ip addy. Unfortunately, that isn't all that useful to those trying to download files from you. Most clients allow you to specify your ip addy. Please take the time to make sure you're setting it correctly. Doing so will help the community greatly.

Your effort is well placed, but unfortunately it just cannot be expected for all users to properly configure their software.

Thats why the GNet Wizard effort has been launched:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GNetWiz

Perhaps you can become a contributor?

We need people to author tutorials and documentation for the different hardware/software devices so we can make a comprehensive tool for automatically configuring settings and educating users.

BearShare will *require* successful completion of the GNet Wizard in order to launch. The GNet Wizard will auto-configure the servent.

The GNet Wizard is independent of BearShare, and includes a license allowing any developer to bundle the product.

Why will specifying my external address help? The firewall is going to reject all incoming requests anyway...?