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Gnutella: Alive, Well, And Changing Fast
Benno writes: "Clip2 has put up a nice story about the latest developments on Gnutella: Gnutella: Alive, Well, and Changing Fast." It's good to see that they're solving the scalability problems.
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Have you tried a side-by-side comparison of Mojo Nation and Gnutella? I haven't, but I would love to see the results. Mojo Nation is really pretty good.
Regards,
Zooko, who is off to run "apt-cache search gnutella"
P.S. Don't forget to read Evil Overlord Jim McCoy's response to the Shirky article. Judging by Shirky's later article, I would say that Jim scored some serious points and got Shirky to think again. (Not that Shirky blessed the Mojo Nation concept of integrated micropayments -- oh no... But he did start thinking more deeply about how different resources have different scarcity characteristics, which was one of our points in our response.)
You should check out this recent slashdot story to suggest why you might have had problems. Basically, if both users are behind firewalls that reject externally initiated conversations, they can't talk.
If Gnutella takes off, ISPs won't be able to prohibit their customers from using it. Cutting off Napster is a good way for an ISP to lose a lot of customers right now. If a sizable chunk of their customers want to use Gnutella, Napster, or something else, they'll serve thier customers if they can make money. If necessary, they'll implement bandwidth restrictions or raise the rates.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Mojo Nation dwells on solving the free rider problem. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't have that problem. When I'm not using my computer and my bandwidth, both of which I've already paid for, why not share them. They don't really cost me anything more. O'Reilly's OpenP2P site has the article " In Praise of Freeloaders." It clearly explains why Mojo Nation is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Closing the NetBios port will probably save many windows users from burning themselves.
Also, I don't know what a server is. It seems to have fuzzy boundaries with every definition that I've tried. The problem is that they don't know what it is either, all they know is that they can use the term, and most people will accept it as reasonable. And that some things definitely count as servers, and others definitely don't.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Try FURI, it's Java-based and works very well. Has a nice GUI, too.
For anyone with prejudices against Java, please try the program, don't just whine about how bad / slow / whatever Java is. Having a newer Java Runtime Environment helps, too.
I think they did this to keep people from running servers as well as to keep the overall QOS from dropping through the floor. Cable is a shared (on the local loop) connection and anything that puts lots of traffic there will constrict it. For most people having much smaller upload bandwidth is hardly noticeable, however it does put a hamper on P2P tech.
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+&x
the new version of Bearshare (2.0.4) seems to be working rather splendidly. My copy has been up (they fixed some major memory leaks) for about three days now, has transferred over 5 gigs of data and pulled down nearly a gig. This includes some resumes (check "auto retry failed") that have finally been able to complete.
;-) doesn't seem to support that although they are generally better quality in less space (note: I'm not really into hardcore descriptions of codecs, just how they work in the real world). It's not perfect (by any means), but is moving in the right direction. Now let's just try and keep it legal.
Quick hint: when looking for movies files search "*.asf" or "*.divx", asf's (and mpegs) are a bit better since you can watch partial downloads, DivX
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+&x
Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product.
Good point. Especially given the tie-ins between the content providers and the ISPs. (AOL/Time Warner for example.)
Another thing that I expect to see is deliberate sabotage from the likes of RIAA, in the form of both DOS attacks and attempts to corrupt the database or take advantage of any weakness they find in the protocol to attack the "evil pirates".
I can imagine them discovering a hole that lets them damage a server and exploiting it to trash a lot of people's personal machines, ala the DSS "Black Sunday" incident.
After which I can imagine a BIG lawsuit. B-) Unlike the DSS pirate takedown, THIS would be king-hell illegal.
Wouldn't it be pleasant if the RIAA was finally taken down, permanently, by legal action under the new anti-cracking laws? B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't mind them limiting what I can do. My issue is that they won't tell me what I can and can't do. If they tell me I can't run a web server, ftp server, half life server, or whatever, then that's fine. Those are the rules and I might abide by them. In this situation they are telling me that I can run some servers, but they won't tell me whichs ones I cant run. That is needlessly vague in my opinion.
I doubt I could provide that bandwidth for the price. But that isnt the point. If they want to keep normal usage down, they can. They can do what they did and put in the vague you wont use enough to disrupt others usage. They can also do what some ISP's do and disallow all servers. The point is that they can tell users the rules straight. And not hide the rules.
treke
I am not so sure The Man(TM) is going to have a choice with Gnutella and other P2P projects. I'd like to see figures on what percentage of useage for Napster and Gnutella is originating from US universities. Universities look the other way as students use their ethernet connections to download tons of warez and pr0n as well as MP3's because they are extremely adverse to trying to regulate useage, as they should be.
You can't really split the network up, it has a pretty much random design.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
They may be searches in double-byte code (for example, Japanese, Chinese encodings, or Unicode) which would look like garbage unless you have the fonts, the locale and other things set up to view those codes.
Keith So GnuPG fingerprint = 168F 874B 4E26 DCA8 B8BF 57F4 80F9 412E F82B AE4C
This is a very good point, and it touches on a much larger issue. Should ISP's be allowed to regulate how we use our connection? IMHO we are just _leasing_ the connection, and as long as we don't participate in illegal activities (sorry, Gnutella != illegal), which should go without saying. If I wanna run a server, fine. That's why @Home limits me to 128Kb on the upstream - it prevents me from running a 1,000 user FTP!
This is like the phone company making sure you don't use your phone to read someone a copyrighted poem (assuming a bad fair use law). Even though reading literature in and of itself is perfectly legal, the phone company bans it "just incase" - plus it takes up too much phone time on their systems ($). People would be outraged if our leased phonelines would be treated the way some ISP's treat our internet connections.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I seem to recall someone on Slashdot a while back theorizing that this is a vast attempt by MegaCorp to sabotage the Gnutella network. Anyone have any comments/info on this?
As a Gnutella developer of sorts, I'd love to see an alternative emerge and add support for it. Of course, I'm not actually taking that initiative myself, so I can't point the finger at anyone here. But if I have some time to spare when and if someone does something truly new, I'll do what I can to add support to Gumshoe. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to catch up with the improvements made by others.
Since I started work on making a Gnutella client/server; I've noticed lots of bad protocol usage. ( I'm going to focus on using my server as a gnutella 'proxy' to my apche server to serve files. )
Here's a breif listing of little things that are easy to fix:
1. I've see
n TTLs set up to 256! We shouldn't forward these packets at all or at least reset the TTL to like 4.
2. New packet types should be rejected. Here's a few examples my client logged one night:
UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0x69
UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0xdb
UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0xfa
And here is an example with it's data field:
UNKNOWN FUNCTION 0x97
'^@^@^@)^Xt^Q^QH^@^@^Oj@^A^F^Z^@
^@^@R{.!^?-C"?^B22^@^@)^X'
3. Reject unsupported unicode queries until we have a standard! I know I don't serve files in japanese, so I shouldn't forward it to other clients that don't either. These queries are often 256bytes!
We might need to start a gnutella steering committee and just rethink some issues. Just fixing these 3 minor things frees up a lot of bandwidth. Also we need to use Pongs for finding new hosts more than pinging the fuck out of ppl like me that are on dail-up 50% of the time. =)
.. because Mojo Nation is horrible to use. I spend > 3 hours trying to get it work and failed. ...)
(because of weired proxy configurations
BeShare is only a matter of "click install".
Samba Information HQ
: A few folks accused me of promoting freeloading and giving back nothing to the gnutella community.
First gnutella.it was born for the following reasons :I'm italian and when I discovered that the gnutella.it domain was still available,
(In June 2000 I believe), I registered it and put up infos related to the Gnutella technology in italian. (before some jerk would have used it for something different)
A bit later I wrote a nice MySQL + PHP + C++ engine which acts as a gnutella web search engine ad that permits you to download directly from a browser. Just as the zillions out there, but with a few special features (cached+realtime search,sorting,timelimiting etc).
It became quite good and the most read italian newspaper "Il Corriere della Sera" interviewed me , writing an article about it. see here (hehe nice publicity for free :-) )
Eventually downloading from gnutella via a webbrowser became so popular and easy (thanks to gnute.com , mp3board.com and others), that the network began to feel the load of these browser-freeloaders.
I want to point out that the goal of this searcher was not to permit the folks to leech off the gnutella network without giving back anything.
Some have me put in the same league as gnute.com and mp3board.com.
That's just plain wrong !
The LimeWire folks worte such a notice on their pages too, but after a clarification they corrected the stuff.
On my site I've placed notices (even on each search result page) that you should contribute to the Gnutella network using a servent and share files, otherwise there would be no files.
But why worry about webbased-freeloaders ?
BearShare and LimeWire block now browser downloads, rendering all gnutella web search sites basically useless, since as soon as you try to click on a download link, you get redirected to a HTML page which informs you not to freeload and use a standalone client instead.
So basically all these sites, suddenly promote gnutella, which is a good thing.
And in fact this has caused a boost in terms of # of gnutella users , the download success rate (less "Busy" signals) has increased and compared to a few months ago, you find now much more stuff on gnutella.
I'm currently working with the authors of BearShare to find a way to make gnutella web search working again and reliable. This will require a few things like sending out informations (in the query_hit packets) whether or not the user DESIRES to share his files with browsers. And incorporating some protection from mp3 leeching sites (like gnute.com , mp3board.com etc) since this service can be easily abused.
Another way to use a gnutella web search like Gnutella.it is to use a Gnutella client which supports drag'n drop as BearShare does. That way you can use the web searcher to search for files, and most of times it finds much more stuff than a regular standalone client because it caches a huge amount of links to files. (the drawback is that some liks could be a bit outdated, but you can look at the age of the file to estimate its reliability).
As soon as you find a link, you can drag it into BearShare which in turn will try to download it. It will not get blocked since the download does not occur via browser.
And if the download succeeds, then the file will get automatically shared and made available to others.
For modem users it is perhaps more lightweight in terms of traffic to use the web searcher and drag the links into BearShare, since you will save bandwidth comprising search / searchreply and host connection traffic. If you share files, then ONE single host connection will suffice and you will still be reachable by other gnutella users. That way you will be able to devote almost all of your limited modem bandwidth to downloads/uploads. (although the whole process is a bit messier than using a gnutella client alone)
I admit that Gnutella has its drawbacks and may be viewed as crappy and unreliable compared to napster.
But I think the protocol has many possibilities to become a nice and efficient distributed filesharing protocol. (check out the gnutella developer forum: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gdf )
Plus I have not seen a truly distributed filesharing protocol yet, which works much better than gnutella and does not depend from a central entity.
Every centralized filesharing system will sooner or later get attacked (or bought out) by the various RIAA/MPAA etc. So only decentralized system will survive over the long term.
Yes, freenet may become much nicier and efficient, but they have a long way to go until this becomes reality, plus without searching capabilities, freenet will not be that useful. (if you are searching for files, you need the key first, and there is no way to search for keys on freenet). One combination would be to use Gnutella to store keyfiles (with some fulltext extensions) so that you could search on gNet for filename->key mappings and then download the real content off the freenet network.
The important thing is IMHO to become indipendent from centralized filesharing systems (ala Napster,Imesh, etc), at this point users will choose the system that works best AND is easy to use. Unfortunately the holy grail has not been found yet. But I think we are not THAT far away from an easy to use, efficient and distributed system which will attract millions of "Joe Average" users.
We will see ....
cheers,
Benno.
Gnutella.it
I just have to comment on this remark. Consumer-level connections are not designed to accomodate continuous load at the maximum bandwidth level. They are designed for high peaks with a low average load, because most consumers are interested in pages that load quickly, not sustained performance.
You're not paying for "all the bandwidth" you can consume; you're paying very low prices for bandwidth, based on the consumer usage profile. If you really want sustained bandwidth at a specific level, bite the bullet and cough up some serious cash for a commercial connection. Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules.
You'll be glad to know that we stopped requiring the weird proxy configurations a couple of versions ago. To run the new version is simply: "tar -xzf ./mojonation-*.tar.gz ; ./mojonation/evil/Broker --no-tail ; netscape ./.mojonation/broker/intropage.html".
The windows version is apparently even easier to install -- it has some kind of gui point-and-drool installer that untars and executes these things for you, or something. ;-)
We also recently fixed several really nasty "distributed bugs", which didn't show up at all on any particular broker, but which caused the entire network to degrade. Nowadays Mojo Nation is much faster and more robust than it was last time you tried it.
Regards,
Zooko
>Otherwise, quit yer whining and accept the ISP's rules. Its a great theory to try abiding by the rules, but it doesn't work. My ISP Mediaone/RoadRunner/AT&T/whoever buys em next month) allows servers but has a list of server users aren't allowed to run. I called to get a copy of this list, and guess what? They refused to give me one stating they don't have one available to subscribers. Sure makes it hard to be a good little boy and obey the rules when I'm not even allowed to know what those rules are.
treke
Even if we get Gnutella to a point where even those folks on dial up modems can participate in the grand link-up, I'm a bit worried about what the broadband ISP monopolies (@home anyone?) will do to dissuade their customers from using such a product. Most broadband providers prohibit their users from running 'servers'. .02$
Now you know what a server is, and I know what a server is, but my ISP seems to have a very broad definition of what a server is, and they seem to change it to suit their needs. I think that it will be used as a very unsubtle smackdown for anything that threattens to use all the bandwidth I pay for.
The media industry will whine about a functional Gnutella, and the media providers will be happy to try a ham-handed solution.
just my
These are breasts; this is source code.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
This article calls it the download failure problem. Basically, whenever I try to download something from Napster or Gnutella, it either times out or it comes in at less than 1 K/s and then times out halfway through. These problems don't happen nearly as often with Mojo Nation.
Even ignoring all the stuff about freeloaders and economics, Mojo Nation solves other problems, too.
The article mentions that Mojo Nation has already solved the largest problem that plagues Gnutella (and Napster in my experience), so why keep Gnutella on life support? Why not just switch to Mojo Nation?