Thanks... I believe your suspicions are correct. After the central host shuts down the rest of the network is still up and ready to connect. Unfortunately, the network I'm trying to do this on is too complex. There are many many broadcast addresses, and the network is very segmented that way. I'm trying the phex alternative, and while it keeps a network segmented and is cross-platform, it doesn't do any automated host discovery, even within the broadcast range. Anyone know an easy way to do this?

Here's the actual scenario: maybe people have some better ideas. I'm on a college campus, and we used to have an on-campus p2p network that was great (only campus sharing, no connection to the internet, so it was fast, and we didn't have to worry about the riaa and mpaa). Only problem was it used direct connect, which, by it's model, depends on one central host for everyone to connect to, and that facilitates searching, indexing, etc. of the files on the network. Problem with this was that it was easy as hell to shut down. Just cut off access to the central node hosting it all. So, I'm looking for a solution without central nodes to connect to. I know this is the idea behind gnutella, and that once I get the network set up, it should very difficult to shut down. (Yes, I know they could filter at the routers, cap bandwidth to certain ports, etc, but I'm not too worried about that now.) So my problem is that I want people to just be able to load up their client, maybe have to enter in one address, and just connect and not have to worry about it.

Help would be great! And don't worry about things being too complicated for me, I know exactly what I'm doing, I just don't know a whole lot about Gnutella. Thanks!