What do you think of OpenFT?

[Skotlex]

Is it a good network... is it destined to die... is it the "Linux community's p2p network" blah blah blah? It's like the first network ever that originally runs under Linux, therefore... I suppose it has a very selected "user-base". Last time I was on it it didn't even had 1K users, but the amount of shared stuff was over 1TB.
Think it'll be adopted by any other multi-network-access backends like mlDonkey? (I think there was once mention of supporting OpenFT under mlDonkey, but whatever happened to that idea is beyond me). Think it'll ever grow up to be good? Or will it just have some sort of niche user-base? Or will it just die...?

Ya might be wondering where all these questions come from... and honestly, it's because of how repeatedly I have failed at getting connected to it. Is anyone out there consistently connected to OpenFT? I can get connected to it for a few seconds before I end up kicked out from it everytime I start giftd. I have tried everything.. read every thread and followed all suggestions... nothing works. I always get connection refused from a lot of index/search nodes, and eventually am left without any connection at all to the network.
I wonder if the network itself is dying or it has just moved itself to another group of index/search nodes which I don't have? OpenFT is a free-p2p network, but it relies on index/search nodes for it to work, if most users don't become such nodes themselves, the remaining ones will just choke on the amount of user nodes, which will ultimately lead to the death of the whole network. Am I wrong here? Am I right? I don't know, I can't even connect so I don't know how many real users are there for openFT currently.
So will a non-centralized network which relies on nodes volunteering themselves as index/search nodes (which are required for the whole network to survive) work?

PD: No this is not a support question. I have tried it all and it has all failed, I gave up days ago; I just weep for the gigs of videogame/anime music and other such oddities which I won't get to upload =P

[Given M. Sur]

I've gotten plenty of things from OpenFT.

I use Apollon (giFT frontend) for filesharing, and connect to OpenFT, Gnutella, and Fasttrack all at the same time. When I have a choice, I download a file from OpenFT or Gnutella over Fasttrack because I haven't gotten any deliberately corrupted files from them like I have from Fasttrack.
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What is the best [insert-type-of-program-here]?

[MooktaKiNG]

i use Apollon as well. its a nice client. however the latest version keeps on crashing, i had to downgrade, however i can't preview video files, only music files.

Anyway i notice the weirdest thing. When i start Apollon giftd starts. Then it trys to connect to all the different network. Then i see FastTrack got connected. Later i see OpenFT got connected, however FastTrack is now disconnected.

This happens over and over. OpenFT and FastTrack can't coexist

its very annoying
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http://www.mooktakim.com
Athlon XP 2001, Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP MB, 640Mb DDR RAM 333MHz, MSI Geforce 4800SE 128Mb DDR, 40x12x48 Liteon CDRW drive, Flower Cooler, ADSL Router

[Skotlex]

Wee~
I got connected to OpenFT, and I don't know how ^.^
I just left giFT running for a day or so, and eventually it automagically connected to openFT ^.^
Altough from what I can see, OpenFT seems fragmented, the amount of users is sometimes 500, then other times 1000, now it's 1500, I am sure soon it'll break up again O.o Designing non-centric scalable p2p networks must be a pain -.-
I find it odd that ya get disconnected from FastTrack, that never happens to me (but then again, I could never get connected to OpenFT before). Right now I am connected to both. Maybe you are just unlucky or some bug is going on. Have ya checked running the daemon with -v to see if there's any indication of OpenFT actually colliding with FastTrack?

I really look forward for a new version of giFT that'll allow downloads of a file from different networks ^.^ (isn't Gnutella, FastTrack and OpenFT all hash-based? this should be possible). I also wish for more protocols... like the ones mlDonkey supports (Overnet, anyone?)

[MooktaKiNG]

Has anyone tried mldonkey?

Its a bit like giFT. it can download from a number of different networks, soon it will be able to do this silmontaneously(spell?).

I don't like all these server/client type p2p apps. When i'm using my laptop i just want a normal p2p app

However, when i go back to my server after the holiday i will be trying out both these p2p apps.

mldonkey seems to support a lot more networks then giFT.
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http://www.mooktakim.com
Athlon XP 2001, Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP MB, 640Mb DDR RAM 333MHz, MSI Geforce 4800SE 128Mb DDR, 40x12x48 Liteon CDRW drive, Flower Cooler, ADSL Router

[Skotlex]

mlDonkey follows the same idea of giFT: a backend which supports multiple protocols. Among the popular protocols there is supports for FastTrack, Gnutella, Overnet and Bittorrent (how does this one works, I wonder?), other supported networks are either in alpha or beta stage.
The cool thing about overnet is that it's persistant. Choose a file to download, and it WILL be downloaded eventually. Overnet handles querying for new sources and getting a queue position for download automatically. The downside is that since the network is so "efficient" at catching files, when you want a file you'll be the last one on the queue and it might take a long time before you even start downloading at all, on the plus side, you can do a search and leave a dozen files on your download queue, come back in a week and they all will be done ^.^

One thing that puzzles me about mldonkey is their brand-new (well not that new) Gtk-2 based client "G2gui" which is vastly superior to the old client. What puzzles me about it? That I don't have it. I have mldonkey 2.5.4, so I'll try upgrading to see if I get the new client... because so far there is no ebuild for it.

Generally speaking I kinda prefer giFT, it connects a lot faster (when you launch mldonkey it can take a long while before you get good servers), it searches and starts downloading a lot faster, so it's more of the kind "launch seek download" while mldonkey takes it's time and guarantees downloads on the long-run.

As for not liking client/server kind of p2p apps, well it's convenient. I love launching the daemon and only opening the client sometimes to check on the status of downloads or to add new queries. Later clients have the option to automatically launch/terminate the daemon on start/exit, so the whole server/client issue is transparent (if you meant server/client side in the sense of the application, not the network, of course).

[mlsfit138]

OpenFT is a great network. It takes all of the good qualities of FastTrack and improves on them. All of my OpenFT downloads have been very fast.

The network is small however, and will almost certainly remain that way until it eventually dies. The problem is the RIAA. People are just too damned scared to share.

If the RIAA is allowed to continue it's p2p witch hunt, then the future is in anonymous networks like gnunet, freenet, MUTE-net, etc.

MUTE is the easiest to use (It feels like early gnutella), but from what I understand it's security and scalability are suspect.

Gnunet is probably the most secure, but is too complicated for average users, and it _may_ suffer scalability problems. There are a lot of very interesting ideas behind gnunet. I hope it works out.

Freenet is very secure, solves many scalability problems, yet is _way_ too complicated at this point for average users, and probably unsuituable for normal file sharing. It's also the biggest resource hog I've ever encountered- It's a very large and ambitious project written in java. (I tried it, but It frequently ate up more than 400 megs of memory!)
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"Everytime you justify
another good in you dies"

-Converge, The Saddest Day, Petitioning the Empty Sky

[totengraeber]

Freenet may be far from perfect but it is the only working anonymous net (I tested gnunet/mute/entropy too). And its improving fast you can even download movies, I got a 700mb avi with 20kbyte thats twice as fast as emule ...=)

[MooktaKiNG]

i must sayd though, bittorrent is fairly annonymous if you think about it.

There is no central server. Each file is not connected to another file in any way. Each tracker has no idea about another tracker.

Its only when you have the torrent file then you can get people's IP's.
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http://www.mooktakim.com
Athlon XP 2001, Giga-Byte GA-7VRXP MB, 640Mb DDR RAM 333MHz, MSI Geforce 4800SE 128Mb DDR, 40x12x48 Liteon CDRW drive, Flower Cooler, ADSL Router

[Skotlex]

Well the Author of Bittorrent has explicitly stated that anonymosity was never a design consideration.
On the Downside: Anyone who starts a torrent file can catch the whole list of peers (all the ones who are downloading/uploading), that's no good. But if you had to join into the peer list to grab their ips, doesn't that makes you an uploader as well? The "crime" is supposedly people who Upload, but if you have to Upload in order to catch other Uploaders, won't that strike back at yourself? I don't know how well this argument works, but I've read it a few times around in /.
On the Upside: As long as the place which hosts the torrents is not hosting the actual contents, sites like suprnova shouldn't have problems existing... I mean, can they really take them down for having files which lets other people download copyrighted material? Is like taking a site down for linking to another site who has such material (but then again, they would try to bring down such a site).

The problem with bittorrent is that it was meant as means for distribution of highly demanded material. I can't imagine myself running a torrent for each of the 10K files I share... bittorrent just does not matches to the realm I am used to of p2p if you ask me.