Gnutella network health

[t1m]

Hi,

This is my first post here, I'd like to ask your advice about the current state of the Gnutella network.

I've been using Mutella, a curses interface Gnutella client, for several years now with good results. However, in the last couple of months Mutella has been reporting a very limited number of files on the network horizon, and frequently no files being shared at all. This is despite having a healthy number of web caches to query, and plenty of connections to other hosts.

With reference to this page,

http://gcachescan.jonatkins.com/stathistory.html

you can see the number of requests and updates to a selection of popular Gnutella web caches plummeted at the end of October - right around when I started experiencing problems.

Does anyone know what's up with the network? Is this sabotage by the RIAA and their cronies?

Initially I assumed that a single badly configured or spamming web cache was to blame, so I cleared my ~/.mutella/webcaches.save file, and replaced the initial GWebCache variables in Mutella with a single source from the jonatkins.com page. I worked through a handful of apparently healthy high ranking sources, but all produced poor results, presumably because the caches feed results between themselves.

This has effectively prevented me from using the Gnutella network - any feedback that you could offer would be appreciated! Is there something I am overlooking? Perhaps it is time to jump ship to another P2P network, in which case could anyone suggest a good curses client for Linux?

Thanks,

Tim

[napho]

I "swear" I don't know what "curses" is, but lately Bearshare and to a lesser extent Limewire and Shareaza are the only Gnutella clients worth using. If you could use LW, or wine with BS, that'd be worth a shot. The other clients seem to be brutal, like you mentioned Mutella is.

[t1m]

Hi napho

Thanks for your reply. Curses interface = console interface :) I like to run all my P2P apps on a Linux box accessed by SSH, hence that requirement. The transfers keep running while my desktop Windows machine is off, and Linux suffers none of the artificial connection limitations that the Windows networking stack does. When it worked, Mutella was a very stable and powerful client.

I wonder if the working clients you mention are using Gnutella2? Any insight as to what went wrong with the network, or any recommendations for a Linux P2P client suitable for remote working (curses / HTTP interface) would be greatly appreciated. FWIW, I currently use Bitcomet 'btdownloadcurses' in a 'screen' session for torrents.

Tim

[napho]

Shareaza has Gnutella and G2 as well as ed2k and torrent. I don't know if this is applicable for what you want. http://wiki.shareaza.com/static/ShareazaLinux
Search results seem to have been sabotaged in Gnutella clients, though to a much lesser extent in Bearshare. Search results now produce samples from websites and legitimate search terms surrounded by garbage like "nude britney spears sex" type results. In BS I get 7000 legit movie sources; the same search in Limewire delivers 100 good results and 1000 bogus ones. That's why most clients are bad nowadays, even BS has fakes and garbage now to some extent.