A few days ago I've found a few interesting ed2k links, and decided to give the edonkey network a try.
I decided to try xmule, as it looks the most matured client for linux. I have Debian 3.0 stable installed, which lacks the neccessary libwxgtk2.4 library. Fortunately someone created a binary xmule and libwxgtk debian package, so installing wasn't very difficult. Same applies to Freenet with Java. Installation: 1:1 I've read the xmule documentation and set up the firewall. This is needed for freenet also, unless one is so braindead to surf the net without a firewall. xmule tells you if your firewall is not set up right, you get a so called LowID. This is similar to Freenet's transient mode. Two nodes with LowID can't connect to each other, a lowID node can see the network only through it's outgoing connections, and can't accept incoming connections. Firewall setup: 1:1 Then I configured xmule. There is no need to tell the external IP address, it figures it out on it's own, even though I have a separate router box with NAT. I Set up bandwidth limiting. There was capabilities, which is 512/128 kbit/sec (64/16 kbytes/sec) in my case. There was also the actual limit, which I fine tuned later to 288/72 kbit/sec (36/9 kbytes/sec). That way the actual uplink bandwidth use is around 110 kbit/sec. My uplink saturates at 120 kbit/sec, so it is OK that way. With that setting, xmule lets 4 simultaneous users to download from me, with 2.2 kbytes/sec. My sum download is around 32 kbytes/sec. There is a queue if someone wants to download from me, there is 1402 clients waiting at the moment, the time they should wait is 12+ hours. Of course they can download other chunks from other nodes meanwhile, and the chunks I've downloaded available immediately to other nodes. So, as you've realized before, there is no point having alot of connections open, transmitting close to 0 bytes/sec. In xmule in my case there is 4 simultaneous outgoing connections. I don't know if this is a hard limit, or depends on my settings in bandwidth capabilities. So far, xmule lacks two important feature which Freenet has. 1. anonimity. 2. FEC support. It is also not very stable, it crashed a few times, but as soon as I restart it, it continues where it was left off. Also, I can turn off the PC while I am away, and when I restart it will continue, and help the network at once. Freenet lacks: 1. quick integration to the network (at least 1-2 months ago when I tried, there was almost no traffic for days, and the log was full with failed announcements). In xmule, as soon as I started to download, other nodes connected to me to download what I already had. 2. automatic detection of external IP address, when you have a LAN router box. At least here more and more people have such a device, and when the IP changes every 24 hours, running freenet and changing the IP address manually is a pain. I know this has been discussed before. 3. unpredictable insert and download times. I know this will improve with new code introduced. Of course xmule is just a file sharing app, and freenet is much more than that already. I hope the new bw limiting code and ngrouting will work out well. I wish freenet with some file sharing app would be as usable as xmule right now, with all the anonymity and fec features freenet already has. Sorry if I was off-topic and/or too long. _______________________________________________ devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hawk.freenetproject.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
