Peer 2 Peer – How do I download stuff from tinternet?
People are always asking me how to use filesharing programs to download stuff from the internet, so I have written this quick guide to point people in the right direction (remember kids, you can only download content that is royaty free, or stuff that you already own. Tharr be no pirates 'round ere, Arrr).
This document covers how to download & install a couple of what i consider to be decent filesharing apps, and where & how to find content. If you want to know more about p2p or the legality of all this then wikipedia is an excelent resource.
There are two broad categories to p2p. Swarm downloading (BitTorrent) and Filesharing (everything else). Swarm downloading is good for the most popular things, or things that have just come out. While filesharing is better for things that you can’t find torrents for.
To download with bittorrent you neeed a bittorrent clinet installed. This allows your computer to understand .torrent files, and take part in the bittorrent network. I recommend Bitlord or µTorrent either are good. (I use µtorrent) Once you have installed a client you need to download some .torrent files that tell the program where to look for the data you want to download. There are many .torrent sites out there, some paying, some free. P2P Core keeps a list of the most popular free sites. I personally use ISOHunt quite a lot. It is also a good idea to forward the ports that the program uses (in µtorrent, go to options, prefeences, network & make a note of the randomly assigned port, then log on to your router and forward that port to your machine)
Downloading with filesharing can be a bit harder to set up. I recommend IML Peanuts as a client, it covers Ares, FastTrack, Gnutella, G2, iMesh2 & OpenFT. The notable exception to this list is the eDonkey network (see below). A good alternative to Peanuts is KCeasy, they both run over the same back end (giFT), but KCeasy has pulled fasttrack support for legal reasons, so you have to reinsert it yourself with a patch tool.
To download from the eDonkey network you should use eMule. eDonkey is the biggest P2P network by far, but it is unfortunately usually quite slow (for me anyway), sometimes taking upwards of a couple of weeks to fully pull a file. It’s big advantage is that you can find links (called hashes) on the web, and there are sites that, like torrent sites, are dedicated to serving them. This isn’t as silly as it sounds, as the inbuilt search function will only search for files on the machines that you can see, and you can’t see the whole network.Drunkendonkey is a good example. After you have installed eDonkey you should upload a server.met file like this one http://2z4u.de/vb2a7unt/min/server.met from the server tab, just paste that link into the update from URL box.
It can be a mission to get all of the networks to connect with peanuts & KCeasy, and there are a number of things that you need to do to achieve best results:
You should forward the following ports on your router/gateway to your filesharing machine as(aside: there is an inherent security risk when doing this, and for that reason I have my filesharing machine on a separate, firewalled area of my network.)
Ares: Forward TCP port 59049.
FastTrack: Forward TCP 1214 and UDP 1214
Gnutella: Forward TCP port 6346.
OpenFT: Forward TCP ports 1215 and 1216.
eDonkey: forward TCP ports 1211, 1212, 1213, 1214 & 4662 UDP port 4672
This will allow you to connect to other machines that have not done that, as p2p can work through NAT, but not NAT-NAT.
Portforward.com has some good instructions on how to do this
You should also do this to get gnutella connected quickly.
It can take several hours to get connected the first time that you run peanuts, especially to Ares, which has splintered recently as it is being upgraded.
If you are using windows XP Service Pack 2 you will need to run this patch to modify the windows firewall so that you can accept 50 connections at once, this will make your filesharing work much better.
Or install this tool After you install, on the top Tab, click on "Special" and then "Connection limit" then you can change the limit to 50 connections. Immediately close all programs and restart your computer. xp-AntiSpy also will help you control the Microsoft based spyware.
Windows updates have been known to reverse the effects of these patches, so it’s a good idea to re-run it after you update windows. If you are using another Personal Firewall like (ZoneAlarm, Sygate, Outpost, etc.) they will also limit your connections to a port for security reasons, even if they are disabled, so get rid of them.
Software is constantly changeing and evolving, P2PCore and Zeropaid are two good resources that should help you to keep up to date.
There are tools that plug into the above programs will automatically search for things for you (like iptv episodes, or new linux distros) and download them automagically. They are however beyond the scope of this document. I will write something on them at a later date.
I hope this helps, and isn’t too confusing. Feel free to let me know if you think I have got anything wrong, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve this doc.
