Freenet - a waste of time?

[seeto]

Well, I have struggled with Freenet for too long. This has to be the biggest waste of time I've ever spent trying to get something to work. Yes, I know the key-word here is "patience" but Holy Mother of Christ!!! how patient!

I've managed to get the Help portal and thats it. "the network is busy" or "have you configured Freenet properly?" or even worse "Are you connected to the Internet" What a complete waste of time. Sorry but this is bollocks.

Yeah, send me an email - [email protected]

[Lofty]

It can take 48+ hours of leaving it running before it works well. After that, you should be able to reach between a third and a half of the pages on there, though they often take a couple of minutes to download. If not, it could be a NAT/Firewall/Configuration issue. You could try the 'unstable' version, which is at the forefront of development, and which many users seem to get better performance with.

[eivioolla]

I've been testing the unstable branch with a couple of friends and we were able to insert and retrieve files from eachother trough it. Sure it's slow, but not impossible.

[hailstorm]

I've been using Freenet now for a long long time out of curiousity but not for anything serious. Unfortunately with my ISP suspending my account becuase of filesharing I now have no other choice apart from Freenet, at least in my eyes that is the case.

Performance at the moment seems to be acceptible. It's not as great as when I first started out using it but then I don't think the network was quite as big as it is now. It has improved though, a while back it was virtually unusable due to some big problems with the new routing implementation. Really as Lotty pointed out, making sure your port forwarding settings are correct is one of the most important things to check. You may also need to get a dyndns.org account if your IP address is dynamically assigned.

[Miniver]

in a word, currently, YES.

[Cardinal Number]

ive never been able to get it to fully work, so i would also say yes , its a waste of time.

[jimmy90]

Freenet has always worked for me. It is slow, but then it is encrypted and proxied to hell and back, and it is still not wide spread enough to get very much bandwidth dedicated to it.

If you choose to support it now then good for you. If not - good luck with the non-anonymous networks.

[hailstorm]

I've just managed to download a 630MB movie in 2 days. It's not great by other p2p networks standards but its not completely bad either. I'm using a 512k/256k DSL line.

[JiMiThInG]

I have never had much luck getting anything larger then an mp3, but I have not really tried all that hard.

[Roamerick]

Using unstable, I have several times downlloaded (and uploaded) full 700MB files in less than a day and a half.

The original poister would do well to check his IP settings in freenet.ini (windows) or Freenet.conf (linux) to ensure his router's IP, as visible from the internet, is correctly stated.

[none90810]

I think uploading films on to freenet is a waste. Uploading torrents makes more sense. They are small and shouldn't take long to spread around the network. Freenet could be the best solution for Torrent indexing sites. There is no way that the RIAA or MPAA could take down those sites. I've used Freenet before its slow but the sites that load the fastest are those with low bandwidth material (Mostly text and small images). Entropy is another "anonymous" network that could be used for Torrent Indexing websites. http://entropy.stop1984.com/en/intro.html

[adamized]

Yeah I know the post is fairly old, though I think this is probably the best place to post this info...

Recently entropy has underwent a major update, now it's homebrew cryptography has been dropped and replaced by standard rsa crypto. :icon_pira

There is a new entropy_rsa network and development seems to be quite active at the moment.

Entropy_rsa's networking is now even faster.

Freshmeat Page (http://freshmeat.net/projects/entropyrsa/)

As to using it for torrent indexing sites, that soon might become a good idea, once the network grows and gains more users. Considering how many of the large torrent sites have been taken down, it does seem like a good solution.

So far entropy now seems like it will be a very sweet replacement to freenet. During one test it took roughly a minute to insert a 1mb file into the network. While with freenet who knows how long it would have taken, considering lately freenet has become much worse than it was (yeah I didn't think that was possible either).

A irc style chat feature has also recently been added to entropy (yeah entropy's networking is fast enough. Though the chat is much slower than irc, it isn't too slow).

[Lofty]

Freenet is also undergoing a fairly major re-write at the moment, but it might be a while before the new version (0.7) is released.

[adamized]

Yeah I know, but guess what we already had a complete rewrite, it's called entropy and it worked far better than freenet.

Now we have a major upgrade of that, which resolves the single most critical concern people had with running it, which was the homebrew crypto, since that is no longer used and entropy now has strong standard rsa crypto.

I'd imagine not too many people will be all that interested in the new freenet when and if it rears it's ugly head.

The question is which would you run now if you were to run either of them? The current really borked freenet or the brand new faster more secure entropy?

I guess it's more of a question of what is noobie friendly and easier to use. Personally I don't like waiting forever for transfers to start, let alone eventually finish.

Sorry if I seem hostile about this, it's just that many of us are fed up with freenet and desire something better.

[iShadowcat]

you could avoid looking hostile by proving it ;)

...which i'm sure wouldn't be THAT hard to do.

[Lofty]

Sounds like it's worth a try. I can well believe it's faster, but is it really as secure?
I don't know anything about Entropy, but the developers of Freenet do seem to put a lot of effort into the anonymity and resistance-against-attack side of things.