i just downloaded gnucleus, and i'm having trouble establishing connections. i've never had this problem with file sharing programs before. the majority of files i attempt to download are immediately deemed "unable to connect". the rest keep trying and retrying, but to no avail. what should i do? thanks.

unable to conect means the server is offline or wont let u download and has given up - try downloading a difernt file or searching for the file again or try again later.

waiting to retry means the server is busy, it will keep retrying untill it gets the file or the server becomes unavailable.

most networks that ive used have these sorts of problems all the time but it does depend wot files u r trying to get hold of. many clients just seem to give up cvompletly, however if it is busy gnucleus willl keep searching for it untill it gets it .

if a file is available on many hosts it is a lot quicker to download.

ever since morpheus jumped on this problem has increased. I think it will get better as these people share back what they get.
You can help by pushing Morpheus users on the forums to share back (if they ever work over there, all that money over there and these forums here are the best).
Morpheus should push sharing real hard on their web page if they want to see this work. THe way it was there were "planted" servers with zillions of mp3's on them to keep their customers happy.
No way now they will have any of those servers connected to them in any way because of the law suits.

Yes, it's also important to make sure they keep allowing incoming connections or the network will definately suffer. The worst part about the "Morpheus Dump", is that many of these users are not very tech-savvy and are not aware of the differences between the Gnutella network and the Fasttrack they knew.

Remember Musiccity was a large OpenNap server farm before the Napster lawsuit got stinky, so they already had the equipment, so they figured why not....

I was a Morpheus user, and I am sharing lots of stuff. But I can't download anything, and my searches are pretty awful, too. I am about to stop sharing, because I wonder if allowing others to upload my files is clogging my downloads? I am computer literate, also, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

I use a 56k modem, Windows 2000, and I have tried LimeWire, Gneucleus, the new Morpheus, and Peerhana. All of them are pretty much the same... unable to connect.

I've been using Gnucleus for a while and I too have noticed a higher-then-normal percentage of "unable to connect" messages recently. OTOH, ever since the Morpheus switch, my five upload slots are *constantly* filled, so someone out there is connecting just fine

It's not clear to me why a server should return a positive search result then refuse a connection for the file transfer. If all the upload slots are filled, we should be getting the "retrying in x seconds" response that was pointed out above. I guess it's possible some clients are misconfigured or there's some client incompatibility issues, but I don't know what else would cause so many "unable to connect" responses.

In any case, I found that it just takes a little perseverance to get the files you want (especially those 192 kbps mp3s!). Eventually a server will allow you to connect. You may have to recycle your connections a few times and re-search, or try at a different time, but eventually I've gotten every file I've looked for, no matter how rare.

thanks, xtrm, for taking the time to answer me! I love message boards... anyway, how do I "recycle connections"?

Hi Linda:

Go to the 'Connections' window, click the 'Advanced' tab, select one of the nodes listed on the right hand side, then click 'Remove'. Repeat with the other nodes. Gnucleus will then use its host cache to establish connections to new nodes to meet the minimum number specified in your connections settings (Edit|Preferences|Connect). I referred to this process as 'recycling your connections'.

The reason this works is because the way Gnutella is designed, you are only effectively connected to a subset of the network at any given time. When you send a search request, the nodes you see listed in the 'Connections' window relay that request to all the nodes they're connected to, and so on *upto a point*. Even though this procedure searches a large number of nodes, you're still only searching a subset of the whole Gnutella network. When you 'recycle connections', you're effectively connecting to a different subset of the network which may have the file you're looking for when the first subset didn't.

Oh, and if you love message boards, you'd probably enjoy Usenet immensely . I really wish all these boards were hosted on nntp servers, instead of this ungainly web interface.

HTH,