What exactly are the good and bad things about forcing an ip-address ? I want my files to be accessible, but maybe there are also risks in forcing ip. Anybody ?

If you force the wrong IP, firewalled people will not be able to download from you.

That's what's the situation is now. I was actually thinking of something like making it easier to hack or so. If this is the only problem, I don't see the point of pretending someone really has to know what they're doing by forcing an ip.

If I understand the problem, than without force IP two gnutella nodes each behind a NAT firewall will not be able to exchange files. What makes me wonder is that if I use the force IP option than I get a flurry of connections, and these change all the time. I know that my IP number is correct (I checked with www.whatip.com), and I have also enabled port forwarding in my Airport base station so incoming requests are routed to my gnutella node. If I do not use the force IP option I do get stable incoming and outgoing connections in the connection window. I did also log in to a remote node I have shell access on and did a telnet myip 6346 and I do get a connect. This makes me wonder if the force IP option does work at all.

I have to think it does not work. A search for sex under "any type" returns nothing? That is extremely hard to beleive.

Looking at the Statistics window, I am getting local searches if I turn off the force IP option -- but if I turn it on, I don't even get that.

And, 50% of my messages end up under "Dropped messages".

OK, I tried a bit more today and I got it to work if I enter the forced IP and restart LimeWire.