I have worked with Windows clients that allows for private networks, such as colleges LANs, to host their own Gnutella network. This is great because many colleges either give low priority to P2P transfers to the Internet or block them completely. The program I like best is Gnucleus (www.gnucleus.net). It has a LAN option where upon startup, it sends out a small UDB broadcast to the network, allowing other clients to find it.

The broadcast contains IP, port, and private network name (can be anything). I have a strong user base here at Luther College that love the program, but there are many MAC users that would like to join, and currently there is no program that I know of that can do the above. Please, let me know if you have any ambition to implement such a useful feature.

matt@mattjanssen.net