Bandwidth Abuse
 

This is an open letter to all Gnutella Developers

Three days ago I recieved a letter from my cable company warning me that I was using excessive bandwidth. Obviously this was due to the fact that I ran Gnucleus 24/7 as a dedicated supernode sharing my 20Gb media drive (movies and MP3's). Since losing my internet connection is not an option I turned off Gnucleus and plan on staying offline from the network for at least 2 months. The bandwidth usage when I was running Gnucleus is my responsiblity and I place no blame on it.

However, during the last 3 days my firewall logs indicate that I have recieved over 250,000 attempts (with my computer being shut down at night) at accessing my computer on the port I had dedicated to Gnutella. This represents a huge amount of bandwidth and possibly alot of headaches for me with my ISP. This is also resulting in slower network performance for me than what I normaly could expect when not running a Gnutella client. The effect on my computer is similar to that of a DoS attack on a web server. My internet speeds are suffering and I need to quickly come up with a explanation to my ISP for the continuing high bandwidth usage.

I would like to suggest that ALL developers make sure that their clients don't hammer computers not using the network with download requests. This harms the computers being hammered and also slows down the entire Gnutella network.

While I won't be on the network for a few months while I duck under the radar of my ISP but when I do return I won't be able to share much (especially not popular files) if it will mean being hammered with download requests for days.

Have a look through the BearShare Labs Forum.
You will find many posts on this same subject.
They will not necessarily be very recent comments, so you must dig a little. It is for sure not a problem which you alone are experiencing.

BearShare is likely to be one of the servents responsible for those requests.

BearShare... argh :(

However, they promised to fix it in their latest version.

Personal opinion about the ISP: I'd write them back to ask them where in their agreements it states what "excessive bandwidth" is, and whether there's an actual bandwidth limit for your type of account. They may argue you're not allowed to run a "server", but that's not the sole function of your Gnutella client, it's part of its whole operation. it is just like MS Messenger, AOL IM or ICQ also have functions that require incoming connections as part of it all.

Nevertheless, more on the topic itself, yes, because of how Gnutella constantly communicates with other Gnutella clients, it does take a fair bit of bandwidth, especially with more connections and shared files. If is a burden to you, which it appears to be, I'd recommend using a Gnutella client that uses "Ultrapeers" (currently, LimeWire and Swapper). When your client functions a leaf, a more capable Gnutella client will handle most of the load for you.

Certainly wouldn't like to see you "disappear from the scene". Good luck though!

While being a supernode does use some bandwidth, I am guessing that most of your bandwidth was going towards the uploads instead of just the network connections. If that was the case then setting up your client as a leaf might not make a difference as it would just allow for more bandwidth to be spent on uploads.

As for the connection attempts, I would agree with Taliban that it is most likely bearshare clients.
I noticed the same thing happening with all the connection attempts. I made a program that just listens for connections and logs them. After closing the gnutella client and starting this program I was pounded with download requests. Almost all of them came from bearshare clients and were constant (ie client connected, i closed connection, it would reconnect ).

those *******s, they have ads all over about how fast their service is, then you sign up and now they limit you?
if you pay for fast speed, and they advertised it when you purchased, then they need to give you that speed and bandwidth, or sue them to the hilt
if they dont stop advertising fast access and bandwidth, like "1.5 megabits per second download" in their stupid ads, does that say its only 1.5 for a jpg file every day? *******s, sue them and sue them big time! make everyone know out there that cable modems suck

Hummm, I have upload at that speed many times when people are sharing.

I agree with you here that cable modems such, but damnit there isn't anything else out there for me at my location right now, that all I can do. Sorry for being a *******.

I have also shared with you guys alot of mp3/movies from your clients and I don't mind at all, it the way I am. I only use the program, I don't abuse it. I have also got nocked off or refused from alot of you guys and limewire, hell I do mind yes, when I don't stop letting you guys come in and tap files from me, never once did I ever stop a upload from uploading from anywhere. There are times that my computer freezed up when I was low in RAM at the time and basiclly saying I had to crash party it.

We all should stop fighting about the crap and just get along. Please.

I don't mind sharing to anyone, but is that just me and because I have a good heart, hmmmm it seems that way sometimes. I see everything getting better soon for everyone. IMO

Jay

I have a bearshare client connecting to me requesting a movie every 45sec 24/7.. I deleted this movie from my hd [space issues, I share over 90gb] months ago.. Isnt that a bit rediculous? The originating ip is the same.. On the plus side its useful in the work im doing on developing a gnutella client of my own =)

Also, note for all.. CAREFULLY read your isps TOS agreement which you agreed to. Almost all say [in a nutshell]

We may force you to pay for a business line at our sole discretion.
We may limit you in any way we please.
We may kick you off our network anytime we want..

Sad but true -- and its usually all there, although its worded in a decieving way..

the telcos have found out they have a golden goose and are laying the eggs very slow so they can make all the bucks they can.
Just like the RIAA they are greedy and hold back technology so they can make a buck.
We have technology now that can easily X5 all bandwidth but they hold it back so they can keep the charges high.
Gnutella and P2P will make the RIAA price CDs reasonable and make MP3s at 99 cents (so far)
So what will it take for us to get cheap unlimited bandwidth?
Will we have to provide our own home free for all netowrk via wireless before they wake up?
These big corporations suck, we shouldn't allow them to exist unless it serves the people in general, anything else is banned from "government approval".
We allow corporations to exist through our governments, which is through we the people, so they should serve us or be banned.

Gnucleus is also guilty
 

Well I don't know about Bearshare, but Gnucleus has a habit of retrying "dead" hosts pretty much forever, regardless of how many connection failures it gets.

So if someone's nucleus client tagged you as a potential source for a file, you will keep getting pinged by that client until

a) The download is finished (which could be days later)
b) The user cancels his download and re-starts it from the Partials section of the client, thus resetting all sources to 0.

If you have a static IP, Gnucleus clients trying to use you as a source can become a serious nuisance. The bug has been there pretty much forever but for some strange reason no one seems to take it seriously enough to get rid of it.

From the user's standpoint, the bug means that the longer the client is used (regardless of restarts), the more dead sources it accumulates for its downloads, increasing the ratio of "pointless" connection attempts to valid ones and generally making the download harder to complete, which in turn allows it to rack up even more sources etc. etc.

But don't try and mention this in the Gnucleus forum - You'll be flamebait in no time :)

Ask your ISP to block traffic to the port Gnucleus was on at your IP address or ask them to change your static IP address.

Yes, it sure is. BearShare 3.0.0 will give up much more easily.

If the source returns "not found", or it times out or refuses the connection too much then the source is trimmed from the list and will not be contacted.

In addition, BearShare will attempt to establish one connection per IP address at most when downloading files. If you are using BearShare to get multiple files from the same host, it will interleave blocked requests over a single keep-alive connection.

I would also like to point out that BearShare 3 supports full bandwidth controls, including the ability to limit hosts, uploads, downloads, and overall bandwidth.

I'd like to suggest write that in bold and blinking again.