Couple of strange issues with phex over a WAN
 

I'm trying to set up phex to run a gnutella network of about 15 nodes, all within a couple of hops of each other. While I've been able to get basic connectivity running, some of the behavior seems strange.
-searches either return no results, or 64, regardless of how many there should be. Searching for the names of files known to be shared frequently returns nothing.
-a peer only returns results from it's neighbours, the query doesn't seem to be passed along.

What are some suggestions to fix these issues? Are these mis-configuration issues or limitations of the design, or random bugs? Thanks for your help.

Its possible caused by a combination of things..

Are the 15 nodes only connected among each other, or is there also a connection to the public network? Are all 15 nodes configured to be in forced Ultrapeer mode?

When no results are returned it could be that both Phex report to be firewalled (status bar icon on lower left).
There is a agreement that search results are limited to 64 by default to prevent flooding on the network. To relax this add a configuration in your phexCorePrefs.properties:
Library.MaxResultsPerQuery = 100
The maximum this setting supports is 255 results.
You must not connect to the public network with a value higher 64. Other servents could ban you.


Are you using the official Phex release or did you build Phex from the latest source out of SVN?

There are a few source tuning you might need for private networks. They are already talked about here in the forums.
I think the most recent one was here:
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/help-s...candidate.html
And an older thread here:
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/genera...e-sharing.html

If you need any more help feel free to ask.

Thanks hugely for your help. I've already read through those threads, but I assumed firewalling wasn't an issue as Phex doesn't show the flame icon. Could it still be an issue that's preventing search results, and could there be any other reasons?
Thanks for the info about Library.MaxResultsPerQuery.
I'll start implementing a few of those points and see how we go.

Another thing could be exchange of QueryRoutingTable. Phex checks for hits against a bit field that was received from connected hosts. When the QRT is not up to date or wasnt send yet, it might not forward the Query to the host.
One more thing is dynamic query. Dynamic querying will not broadcast the query to all hosts in the network right away. It will forward the query to a selected number of hosts with a low TTL and waits for results. If not enough results are returned dynamic query will slowly extend the TTL and forwards the query to more hosts. If you already receive many results ~150-200 on the first hop. Phex might not ask for more results or only continue to query with low TTL, so you might not reach hosts not directly connected to you.

Read this to understand the details:
Gnutella Developer Forum: Gnutella Dynamic Query Protocol v0.1