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Gnutella 0.5c Still Going? UPDATED - NO 84

Tridus writes, "While popping around fileforum looking for new software, I happened to notice a link to Gnutella. I guess Justin and the other guys at Nullsoft aren't quite licked yet. " Update: 03/21 01:40 by E : I've been told by the folks from Winamp that this is the same code as before - sorry all - the letters simply referred a testing legacy.
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Gnutella 0.5c Still Going? UPDATED - NO

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  • >there is no Cabal

    You're just saying that because we didn't let you join :)

    However, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (VRWC) still has openings for people of all political persuasions (how do you think it got so vast?). BYOBH (Bring your own black helicopter).
  • Searches are substring matched against the file name and the path, although only the filename is displayed.
    No wildcards are supported, unfortunately...

    --
  • Go gnutella! Backtick
  • Can someone point me to a good book or paper explaining how peer-to-peer works? I've got a good idea how client server works, but how can a group of peers get together without one behaving as a server some how?

    Just Curious.

  • Give it up, the grits guy owns you. :)

    --

  • What about flooding?

    --

  • There is no "main" server here. Whatever node you first connect to is the "main" server. Try mine, digdug.dyndns.org.

    --

  • One theme I keep hearing in the forums here, is that some people are still having problems getting the original client up and running. Easy fix. If you copy the installer to someone, give them a copy of your gnutella.net file as well. It has every other "node" that you've discovered.

    The other trick that we did in the office here, is we have one machine that's almost never used, running a copy of the client, set to connect (see the gnutellaNet config page on the app), to 100+ other clients. So it seems to be doing a good job of always looking around for new machines out there. When we install a new copy of the client on someones machine, we just have them connect to that machine as their first peer. Wham, all the clients copy across.
  • It's already happened on the message boards at www.grits.com [grits.com]. And honestly, I'm surprised there aren't webpages at www.hotgrits.com or www.hotgrits.org, etc...
  • As one of the geniuses behind reverse engineering the protocol, I'd like to commend the Nullsoft folks. A Delphi drop-in component is in the works so every app can get on the gnutellnet. Ther are clone clients in the works for Linux CLI, perl, tcl, Java, C++ classes, and more I'm sure I'm forgetting. The script kiddies start to flood the network around 5 pm (+500) but network traffic shaping of the next version should help that. Interested parties should contact me [mailto] For complete details, or view a complete protocol reference here. [dyndns.org]

    Bry
  • For all the supposed tech experience slashdoters are supposed to have it never ceases to amaze me the mass of drones who simply just dont get it. From Jon Katz and his band of Blandeteers I expect it, but from others it still astounds the sense.

    Napster is tied to a central server. BAD
    Gnutella is not. GOOD
    Napster you are stuck using thier network structures. BAD
    Gnutella you can create you own nets of sharing. GOOD

    If you want to stay the slaves of prechewed and preapproved data flows then , as mick foley says, Have a Nice Day. If your into something a little more, get your heads out of the monolithic worldview.

    Your milage may vary

  • The clients connect to each other instead of to a central server. It's less brittle that way.
  • I got it. Is a binary installer.
    From the page it claims that it will be released GPL.

    Is it yet? Or, because AOL owns the source (because it was made on their time) then AOL should have the right too keep the source closed if it is not GPLed yet.

    Is it GPL? And is AOL able to keep the source closed? (After all they DO have the rights to it so they should be able to close it....)

    But I have a binary now... Do I have the right to demand the source or not?
  • A post above mine revealed the answer.
    The answers can be found here. [nerdherd.net]
    The faq sayeth all. :)

  • If colleges run into problems its time to say "You are suspended for the rest of the semester if we catch you using this software", rather than subsidizing peoples pirated music collections.
  • by ahi ( 29259 )
    How does Gnutella comare to the Freenet [sourceforge.net] project? Anbody know more about this?
  • look at gnutella.nerdherd.net
  • The /. peice said there was source available? Is it [insert open source lisence here]??? Thats my favorite part of open source? Why did they drop the project? Maybe pressure from another company, whatever. An open source project only stops when there is no one left willing to work on it. If the developers and maintainers quit and you really want to see this happen download the latest snapshot of the source, throw it into cvs somewhere, grab some friends and CODE!.
  • For a long list of possible gnutella servers to get you started, look at http://slapme.adotnet.net/~michael/ [adotnet.net]. There is even a short list of hosts that should work for those of us unfortunate to live behind a firewall.

    Good Luck... gnutella'ing is lotsa fun!
  • From the site:
    Review of Gnutella .50c by GritsTroll on March 20th, 2000 11:31 PM *****
    Gnutella just helped me pour a hot bowl of grits down my pants!

    I'm saddened to see slashdot trolls branching out into the rest of the web, but I suppose it had to happen, since plenty of the slashdot trolls were probably originally usenet ones.
  • This thing should work a bit more like a dynamic
    usenet news system.

    To learn how Usenet used to work take a read of <a href="http://www.abnormal.com/~thogard/usenet/usen t.html">Rich Salz presentation on Usenet</a> from long ago. <i>(This is dated Aug 92 on my server)</i>
  • If its open-source like the web page says, why aren't I compiling it right now to get the thing running on linux? Can someone point me to the source code I seem to have missed it.
    I'm guessing I am not missing anything and the source code is not up, but....
  • thanks.
  • Yeah, you should have seen Segfault before they turned off comments and write-in poll options. If you searched for "Mae Ling Mak" on Google, Segfault showed up first (because of the Mae Ling Mak Naked & Petrified trolls), with Mae Ling Mak's own site in second.

    Then, upon their arrival to Slashdot, the Mae Ling Mak Naked & Petrified faction merged with the Natalie Portman's Clit faction to get... well, the pointless drivel you're familiar with. You've got to give the Anonymous Coward who said "Hi people. I've just poured a bowl of hot grits down my pants!" some credit - sure, it started yet another chain of copycat trolls, but at least he was original.
    --
  • Really, though.
    If this kind of stuff continues to be developed, universities will be forced to do something. I have worked rather closely with some of the "bigwigs" at my university, and I've been told that Napster takes up 20%(!) of all network usage.
    Now that's only mp3's. If you get even 1/3 of the people here on campus using Gnuzilla, that's around 3,000-5,000 people using it, and maybe another 1/3 using it at any given time. That's a lot of bandwidth that is being sucked from faculty and research.
    This doesn't apply only to academia. If the president of your place of employment notices that his email is going awfully slow, he's gonna wanna know why his $15,000/month internet connection is slower than his home modem (if he uses one).
    So the continued abuse of programs such as Napster and Gnutilla may end up in a tightening of overall internet freedom, because decision makers just can't afford to pay Sprint the huge "phone" bill every month so a bunch of students/employees can get tunes/videos/whatever.

    And I can tell you right now, I don't want no stinking firewall.
  • It was supposed to be opensource in that the source was to be released with version 1.0
  • "since plenty of the slashdot trolls were probably originally usenet ones."

    I think a lot of the /. trolls were originally the segfault ones...oh well, they come they go, they proliferate and go out into the world...the scary part is _recognizing_ them on different websites (I've spotted at least 4 in the last month). sigh...


    mcrandello@my-deja.com
    rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
  • OOG HEAR THAT ANY FILE TYPE SUPPORTED... THIS INCLUDE .EXE AND .ZIP AND LIKE??? IF SO, OOG FEAR GNUTELLA OPEN BACKDOOR IN USER COMPUTER AND LEAVE USER VULNERABLE TO VIRUS AND TROJAN!!! OOG NO LIKE BE HACKED BY SCRIPT CAVEKIDDIE!!!

    Then Oog should not use Gnutella to download executables. No warez for Oog! Stick to mp3s and text files and Oog be fine though...

  • It's just a binary win32 release atm. The developers intended to release the source under GPL once they got it to the 1.0 release. Not been able to find out whether or not they are still going to be able to do that. The website posted has enough information that it will be easy enough to clone if they can't though.

  • NO DOUBT SILLY AOL KIDDIE TRY GET WAREZ THROUGH GNUTELLA AND BE IN DEEP SHIT!!!

    No doubt they will. Right now they do the same thing from websites. I remember back when you had to get your trojan laden and/or viral warez from the local BBS. Will this be any different? I doubt it.

    Without W4R3Z K1DD13Z where would all the anti-virus vendors be? The unemployment line, burger king maybe?

  • Has anyone stopped to think that client/server isn't the worst idea for something like this?

    Think about conventional searches:

    • slocate: you create a centralized index of all the files on your machine, when you are looking for something, you need only to consult the index instead of iterating through every file.
    • dns: you need to find the ip address for a hostname. do you ask everyone you can connect to for help? umm.. no. primary server, then the secondary, and the request goes up the tree...
    • search engines (google/altavista/etc/etc/etc): they all are a centralized index of the location for files. Man, imagine that searching for stuff on the web was distributed this way, and everytime you wanted to find something you had to ask everyone you could reach if they knew anything about "spacemoose paradies."

    it makes it easy and quick to do searches with a centralized index. then yes, you have to address redundancy, but hey, just throw up multiple servers, what's the big deal?

  • i'm sure on the scale of nastyness, Gnutella isn't quite so evil compared to trolling

    Hey now, that's not fair! If you're talking about the cut'n'paste spammers or the "Taco ate my balls" idiots then true, but if you're going by the Jargon File definition then there really aren't that many of us here. It does actually take half a brain to come up with something which shows up /.ers as reactionary zealots, unlike posting the same sentance repeated a hundred times over. I think you'll find most /. trolls have user accounts and karma levels well over the _+1 bonus point (I know I do).

  • I beleive it searches the full path and filename of all files, but only shows the filename.

    It also seems to ignore the ., but gnu*.exe still works.

    ALso, I find you can use ; as an and
    where "Yes;no" would find everything that has yes and no in it in any order.

    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • Does anyone know of any similar projects that are available with the source? Gnutella, despite Nullsoft's claims that it will be opensource, is CLOSED SOURCE. If it'd been opensource to begin with, there wouldn't be the problem of AOL shutting them causing all development to halt.
  • Damn moderator. Ruined a perfectly good joke.
  • Yeah, the hot grits guy was cool.

    I totally shit myself when I first read the 'hi people, I've just poured hot grits down my pants and it feels great!' post. I just couldn't believe it. Read it again and completely cracked up.
  • Usenet isn't centralized, but we all know it's regulated by the Cabal (there is no Cabal).

  • If it hadn't been publicized on /. in the first place, it might not have been taken down so fast.

    On the other hand, now that it has been publicized on /., there is a huge community working on reverse engineering it and creating cross platform implementations...

    You do the math.

  • It looks like the main server, however, is still down. While it would still be possible to configure this for local nets, widespread Napster-esque usage wouldn't be possible until the main server is back up.

    Frankly I'm surprised that this is still in development. I guess we'll find out just how tight a hold AOL has on them.. More interesting will be what exactly AOL will do if they don't cooperate.

  • Alright, so if napster goes under anytime soon in the near future, thanks to slashdot, i have my own "post-napster's shit has hit the fan" (tm) backup. Sure it doesn't have flooding control...yet. And I could sure use some way to search what bitrate those MP3s are, but hey, it's free, and i'm impressed the aol exec.'s let it slide as long as it did. Hopefully some carmack-type-gods will take it upon themselves to write in some basic fixes, and hey, maybe next they'll skin it! Just like winamp! haha. no. sombody email me if they figure out how to hack somthing like that : )

    ~Hadlock

  • Usenet is centralized? I'm not being sarcastic -- this contradicts what I thought I knew... Oh, well, un-learn a new thing every day, that's me.
  • Is there any way to? Please email me at roadgeek@hotmail.com
  • I feel that gnutella is better than napster in many ways. 1: Better topography 2: Better and Faster searches 3: Better content If i am going to get mp3s i will still use napster(for some), but if i want to lok for anything else i will use gnutella. Soon i belive that gnutella will become better than napster and then i will start looking for mp3s and that instead. Until then i hope that it is a great success.
  • I was in #gnutella when justin(the developer) was in there and someone asked if the newer releases were real and he said yes. If you wanted to change it there is something called a hexeditor... You just look for the string and then change it and save. Magic
  • Can Gnutella connect to a Napster server? Or does it have servers of it's own. I know very little about the other side of this stuff.
  • Where can I get a program like gnutella and napster that allows transfer of many different file types?
  • by Anonymous Coward
    The protocol is peer to peer, not server-oriented like Napster. You only need to know the address of one connected host to join the network. Here is one: findshit.geekpalace.com:6346

    More details can be found here [nerdherd.net].
  • If some really wants to they will create a clone of this clone. Remember it is not about the software but the value it brings to us if some though this valuable then they would have created an OSS package.


    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • I was wondering the same thing. From poking about a little here's what I came up with:

    Both are peer to peer networks designed for sharing files. Both avoid at all costs a centralized server (hence peer to peer I guess huh?).

    The main difference is that Freenet aims to divorce data from its physical location. A chunk of data in Freenet moves throughout the network after it is inserted, moving closer to where it gets more requests from, etc. The data is also duplicated so there can be more than one copy of it throughout the network. Freenet also will expire data if it's not accessed for a while. Freenet server admins theoretically have no way of knowing what is stored on their server. This is basically a whole new paradigm where the data no longer resides on a certain server which you have to be able to find, it is instead an entity unto itself, propagating throughout the network.

    Gnutella on the other hand is basically a decentralized Napster. The data still stays on your machine and other 'servants' query you directly (sorta) to see if you have it. If you do you send that data to the machine looking for it. This is really just a nice way to have a bunch of searchable files shared on your machine, so others can download them from you.

    Did that make any sense? It's 5:30 am and this is just my take on it...

    peas
  • Yes, but unlike Usenet, Napster, IRC, BBS's, and others, Gnutella isn't centralized. It's peer-to-peer, just like the Internet itself. If you shut down the Napster servers, the Napster clients are useless. But Gnutella uses no such central server -- you'd have to shut down every single person using it in order to get rid of it. :)

    I know that it has become a cliche now, but the phrase about the Internet rerouting around problems, including censorship applies to Gnutella as well. And as you stated, it's virtually impossible for college admins to block it.

    I think it's time for the colleges to invest in some OC-48's :)

    --

  • What about flooding?

    From the FAQ [sourceforge.net]:

    3.2. Is Freenet vulnerable to flooding attacks?

    Short answer: no.

    Long answer:

    We don't think so. Aside from protecting freedom of speech, Freenet is also designed to be an efficient dynamic caching system. If information is requested a lot from a limited number of nodes, the nodes that the requests pass through will cache the information, lowering the load on the network. If information is inserted on a limited set of nodes and then subsequently requested a lot from a separate set of nodes, with repetition, the sets will close in on one another in the network topology until they are "neighbors" and only the originally targeted nodes are suffering from the attack.

    In other words, in order to harm Freenet with a flood you need to consistently change your point of entry into the network and continually insert and request new data, and you will still only increase the workload for the network that is linear to your own. Given an immense will and capacity greater than the total of the entire network, it is possible to cripple any public network (including the Internet itself) with floods, but it is our intention to always keep Freenet as resistant to this as theoretically possible.
  • here here.
    I think OOG could be this millennium's Meeept!

    Not posting anonymously, so to post at +2 :)
  • They'll just have to cap the bandwidth of each user. Then people will miss the freedom they were allowed before :)
  • I think it's great that this avoided complete annihilation(sp?) but the fact that it's getting the publicity on slashdot probably points the cannon right at it again.

    just pointless thought.
  • he actually brings up a pretty good point...in some cases, grabbing software off of slashdot is almost as easy as grabbing it off of IRC; i've been known to do it once or twice (on IRC), but i don't think it's the main reason people stop by /. each day. slashdot so far has been pretty good about being open-minded about just about everything, including trolls... i'm sure on the scale of nastyness, Gnutella isn't quite so evil compared to trolling. either way, if enough people end up whining about it, the slashdot gods (cmdertaco, ect) will have some sort of workable fix in store for us. In the end, at least looking for shady software wasn't the reason people started coming by here in the first place. I guess you could consider Gnutella a side frill to being one of the slashdot (semi) elite : )

    ~Hadlock

  • They were providing a link, I think it's here [allskin.com] where they wre providing a list of alternate IP's because the main server was down.
  • by tilly ( 7530 ) on Monday March 20, 2000 @07:56PM (#1188324)
    The first thought that I had when I heard that it was going to be a peer-to-peer network was that there was going to be a *lot* of polling going on transferring information about what was available, and checking what was still up.

    Scalability, needless to say, was something that I was curious how they planned to address... :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • by LucVdB ( 64664 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2000 @02:34AM (#1188325) Homepage
    It's called FileFury [filefury.com], and also works peer-to-peer. Now, if it had as much hype as Gnutella perhaps someone would use it and the network would have some value.

    FileFury allows you to share files of any type, and search over other computers with FileFury, all over the Internet, instantly. With FileFury, you can find and obtain files easily; allow your friends access to your files; and surf through any computer with FileFury installed, copying whatever you want

    According to the FAQ [filefury.com] they plan to introduce some kind of central server (if I interpret well) that would allow you to find some random 'friends' (avoiding the 'problem' that Gnutella has with finding a first connection to the network).

    For a lot of people, this is not a desireable feature; you should not have to coordinate with your friends to start searches. For this reason, Tenebril has elected to introduce a new feature in the next release of FileFury. In addition to starting searches on all your online friends, FileFury will also start searches on some number (say 5) of random online computers. No matter where you are, or when you run your search, you'll get results, instantly. And, at each hop, the search will be forwarded not only to friends but to five more random computers. So, for any search, you're likely to hit at least (5^6 = 15,625) over 15,000 computers. Instantly.

    Actually, I much prefer the grass-roots Gnutella. Tenebril [tenebril.com], the company producing FileFury, has released the source code [codeguru.com] to much of the program - but not the critical peer-to-peer network library. They claim to have Open-Sourced the app, while actually it looks more like they've released some code to advertise their networking library. Still very nice of them if you're into MFC, mind you, but calling it Open Source won't go down well on this forum, will it?

  • by jon_c ( 100593 ) on Monday March 20, 2000 @07:42PM (#1188326) Homepage
    my roommate talked has been talking to 'Tag' from nullsoft recently. the current attitude is that this piece of software is really going to shake things up. not that I've looked into it that much, after all the site is down. but here's what I've heard second hand.

    practically un-stoppable. ITG and edu's can't just block ports to stop this baby.
    not just mp3's but basically anything. I just downloaded the alpha and noticed the following default extensions.mp3;mp2;mp1;mpg;vqf;avi;mpeg;wav;mod;vo c;it;xm;s3m;stm;wma;mov;asf;zip;rar.

    wow..

    so it's basically like napster except it will have some type of web of servers connected so it won't have the centralized problem that napster does. someone clear this point up for me.

    what will also be interesting to see if this really fly's., I mean this really isn't anything new. back in the days I used to download a bunch of funny stuff off BBS's. now you can get lucky with USEnet, IRC and hotline. but the really success comes from the number of people using it. none of the mentioned have really worked due to popularity. the main reason napster does so well is that there are so many people, so more people get on, like eBay, or shoutcast. it feeds on itself.

    -Jon
  • by pen ( 7191 ) on Monday March 20, 2000 @07:33PM (#1188327)
    Here's a short summary of why Gnutella rocks and how it compares to Napster.

    Napster is client-server. Everyone connects to the main server, drops off their list of files, and the searching is done through the server.

    Gnutella is peer-to-peer. All packets are routed around the gnutellaNet. Each client is also a server. Together, it's a "servant". The whole thing works very much like the Internet itself. Each search request has a TTL. Each servant routes the search request to every servant he's connected to, subtracting 1 from the TTL. When TTL reaches 0, the search request is no longer forwarded.

    Now, the best part(s). It isn't centralized. You only need to know of one working servant IP to connect to the network. When you connect, the servant sends you a list of all the servants it knows of, so you are immediately supplied with a list of working servant IPs. If you connect at least once a week, you're set.

    Also, Gnutella isn't MP3-only. Any file type is supported.

    Now, the bad parts.

    • Regex (regular expression) searches are not supported. I've yet to figure out exactly how the searching works, but it doesn't match any pattern i can think of. I think it searches inside of files as well?
    • It doesn't seem scale well at all.
    • There is a crowd of kiddies using a pre-written Perl script to flood the network.
    Hopefully, all of these problems (and all the interface glitches I didn't mention since this is still a beta) will be fixed in 1.0. Oh yeah... hopefully, there will be a 1.0.

    --

  • by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Tuesday March 21, 2000 @03:54AM (#1188328) Homepage Journal
    Thanks for your outline of how Gnutella locates information. I have spent over 18 months working on a system called Freenet which seems to have similar aims to Gnutella (peer-to-peer, no centralised server) but is much more sophisticated. It does scale well (in fact, the bigger the network, the faster it is!), and it incorporates intelligent caching and mirroring. It is also designed to make it difficult to find out who is doing what on the system. Feel free to take a look at our homepage [sourceforge.net].

    --

  • by pen ( 7191 ) on Monday March 20, 2000 @07:23PM (#1188329)
    Gnutella 0.50c is quite stable, and the unofficial official page is hosted by Nerdherd [nerdherd.org] here [nerdherd.org] (as mentioned by the post). A number of clones are also in the works, and the protocol has been reverse-engineered. All info is on the page.

    However, it's recommended that you do all your stuff before 3 PM, because that's when the kiddies come home from school, and the flooding begins. Gnutella currently has absolutely no provision for flood protection, and effects are severe. I guess I've just encouraged them more... heh.

    Another good source for stuff is #gnutella on EFNet. There is also #gnutelladev on EFNet. Please don't go to the second channel unless you have some question about the interal workings. All other questions should be directed to #gnutella. Also, #gnutella is a good place to find the available hosts. Here's one, digdug.dyndns.org. Let's see what happens to my dialup. :)

    --

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