Winny - some very newbie questions
Marc Brown
software.
I just started using Winny after having recently attempted to return to
WinMX after an eight-month hiatus, only to discover that the trading with
WinMX isn't what it used to be. Eh, I never really enjoyed the WinMX
process anyway; one needs to literally sit in front of the PC until
they've negotiated a hopefully lengthy trade, at which time they may risk
leaving the PC and probably suffering whatever fun consequences WinMX
decides to unleash.
Anyway, after fiddling around with Winny for a bit, I'm left with a few
probably stupid questions:
1) First and foremost.. If Winny is the new #1 P2P app for Japanese users,
why am I not getting very many hits with my searches? As an example, a
search for "anime" (katakana, of course) in WinMX, even today, tends to
yield hundreds of hits.. more than enough to justify something a little
more specific, anyway. Plus it's painfully obvious that WinMX's search
process never has access to the complete filelists of everyone, because
one can browse somebody's files and discover things which do not show up
with a search. Meanwhile, Winny doesn't fare so well. Last I checked,
I got about 75 hits. And this fluctuates quite a bit. It dips to 10 and
rises to 90, but it never approaches what I would call "a lot". I have
more anime files in one subdirectory of my own personal collection than
what I can find with a search for "anime" on Winny.
So my question is, naturally, "Why?" I feel confident that I should be
seeing better results than this. Narrowing the search down serves only
to truncate that list of 75 down to 6 or whatever.
2) Second. I'm behind a firewall. I also use cable, which I have read
can be cause for complications if one wishes to fully utilize Winny. For
the time being, I have switched on the "port 0" option, which seems to
have shut up the warnings about excessive port warnings (?), while still
allowing transfers to proceed at a seemingly agreeable rate. Winny wants
port 4444 opened. I have read that doing so is a good way to introduce
old vulnerabilities into one's lan. (Which prompts one to question the
choice of port 4444, but I digress.) Would opening this port allow Winny
to operate in a fashion noticably better than what I'm already
experiencing?
3) Winny also seems to want port 5810 open, for scenarios involving, if
I've read it correctly, lan-based BBS's. I think the question here is
one of terminology. When I think "BBS", what leaps to mind first is a
text-based forum. Going by context, however, I have to suppose that this
is not what Winny means by "BBS". There seems to be quite a chunk of the
software devoted to this anacronym. Anyone know what it's all about?
4) Right now, it appears I'm set up for two upload and two download slots.
I can't seem to find where one increases these numbers. I'm perfectly
okay with increasing them at a 1/1 ratio. With only two of each open,
a lot of potential bandwidth is going to waste. Anyone know where I
should be hunting for these variables?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Bryan Parker
>Sorry in advance if there's a more appropriate place to discuss this
>software.
>
>I just started using Winny after having recently attempted to return to
>WinMX after an eight-month hiatus, only to discover that the trading with
>WinMX isn't what it used to be. Eh, I never really enjoyed the WinMX
>process anyway; one needs to literally sit in front of the PC until
>they've negotiated a hopefully lengthy trade, at which time they may risk
>leaving the PC and probably suffering whatever fun consequences WinMX
>decides to unleash.
>
>Anyway, after fiddling around with Winny for a bit, I'm left with a few
>probably stupid questions:
>
>1) First and foremost.. If Winny is the new #1 P2P app for Japanese users,
>why am I not getting very many hits with my searches?
I've heard from 3 different Japanese users that say they like Winny
because they don't have to share in order to use it. Nice huh? Hmmm,
100% of the people that I know share a grand total of 0 files.
I thought Winny sucked a winny, and gave up on it after 2 days.
--
Bryan with a マ-ファキン "Y"
Michael Cash
the alphabet and kept on going with:
>Sorry in advance if there's a more appropriate place to discuss this
>software.
>
>I just started using Winny after having recently attempted to return to
>WinMX after an eight-month hiatus, only to discover that the trading with
>WinMX isn't what it used to be. Eh, I never really enjoyed the WinMX
>process anyway; one needs to literally sit in front of the PC until
>they've negotiated a hopefully lengthy trade, at which time they may risk
>leaving the PC and probably suffering whatever fun consequences WinMX
>decides to unleash.
Uhhhh.....no. That's just you.
I routinely get several hundred successful downloads per week from it.
I've only been using it a very few months, and have gotten from it
enough to at least fill a 120gb drive, with lots of other shit stashed
off on other various drives on my other machine and some of it burned
off to DVD-R.
If you don't like it and choose not to use it, that's fine. But you're
totally mischaracterizing it.
Michael Cash
<puntspe...@yahoo.com> belched the alphabet and kept on going
with:
>On 18 Nov 2003 21:32:50 -0800, ret...@hotmail.com (Marc Brown) wrote:
People like them, and the ones who create MX chat rooms and tack
"JAPANESE ONLY!" onto the name of the room, eventually led me to tick
the little option on MX Moni which lets me auto-ignore people with
multi-byte characters in their user-names. I cut out a major portion
of the Japanese who use MX, in other words. I hate the way they tend
to use the network as a file-trading net instead of a file-sharing
net. I spend my entire day surrounded by Japanese who think they can
be complete assholes because a car is some sort of cloaking device
giving them anonymity and freeing them from having even the slightest
bit of consideration for their fellow man. I'll be fucked if I care to
come home and put up with them doing the same shit online.
Pass the Maalox.
Bryan Parker
So THAT explains all of the "Trade?" messages I got in WinMX. I was
already frigging trading! I always thought that they just wanted me to
bump them up in my queue. What pisses me off most about this little
knowledge nugget is that they were gonna sneak me into one of their
private "JAPANESE ONLY!" chat rooms, and I didn't even know it!
I had to quit checking out the chat features of the P2P programs about
a week into Napster anyway. I turned and ran from the "Any girls in
here wanna go private?", "A/S/L?", and the "LOL!"s and never looked
back.
>I spend my entire day surrounded by Japanese who think they can
>be complete assholes because a car is some sort of cloaking device
>giving them anonymity and freeing them from having even the slightest
>bit of consideration for their fellow man. I'll be fucked if I care to
>come home and put up with them doing the same shit online.
>
>Pass the Maalox.
I'll take mine shaken, not stirred, with a twist of lime, and a big
phonkin' color clashin' pink umbrella jammed into it.
Ryan Ginstrom
"Michael Cash" <mike...@sunfield.ne.jp> wrote in message
news:4ttmrvo1m4ff6sf3c...@4ax.com...
> People like them, and the ones who create MX chat rooms and tack
> "JAPANESE ONLY!" onto the name of the room, eventually led me to tick
> the little option on MX Moni which lets me auto-ignore people with
> multi-byte characters in their user-names. I cut out a major portion
> of the Japanese who use MX, in other words.
But that explains why the OP had different results -- he's going after that
anime crap, so he has to deal with mostly Japanese traders.
> I hate the way they tend
> to use the network as a file-trading net instead of a file-sharing
> net. I spend my entire day surrounded by Japanese who think they can
> be complete assholes because a car is some sort of cloaking device
> giving them anonymity and freeing them from having even the slightest
> bit of consideration for their fellow man. I'll be fucked if I care to
> come home and put up with them doing the same shit online.
That's one thing I definitely don't miss about the mainland -- people get a
little anonymity, and they're a bunch of selfish assed beyotches.
--
Regards,
Ryan Ginstromu
Drew Hamilton
>allowing transfers to proceed at a seemingly agreeable rate. Winny wants
>port 4444 opened. I have read that doing so is a good way to introduce
>old vulnerabilities into one's lan. (Which prompts one to question the
>choice of port 4444, but I digress.) Would opening this port allow Winny
>to operate in a fashion noticably better than what I'm already
>experiencing?
Port 4444 (and 5810, as mentionned in your next paragraph) were
randomly chosen when you installed WinNY. You can set them both
to whatever port you want, as long as you leave them both open.
If you actually open the ports rather than leave on the Port 0,
you'll have a lot more choice about who to share files with, since
two machines that both have the Port 0 option turned on can't
communicate with each other.
Note that it can take as many as several hours to get a really
good and solid connection to WinNY, so you may be best to fire it
up in the morning, then go to work and when you come back you will
get a lot more hits from your searches.
>4) Right now, it appears I'm set up for two upload and two download slots.
>I can't seem to find where one increases these numbers. I'm perfectly
>okay with increasing them at a 1/1 ratio. With only two of each open,
>a lot of potential bandwidth is going to waste. Anyone know where I
>should be hunting for these variables?
This is not user-settable. You start off with two u/d slots and
you get one extra of each type for each 80 kbps of sustained
upload rate (I think -- I found this info on a Japanese page
somewhere and my translation may have been wrong).
--
- awh
http://www.awh.org/
Michael Cash
>On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:06:04 +0900, Michael Cash
><mike...@sunfield.ne.jp> wrote:
>>People like them, and the ones who create MX chat rooms and tack
>>"JAPANESE ONLY!" onto the name of the room, eventually led me to tick
>>the little option on MX Moni which lets me auto-ignore people with
>>multi-byte characters in their user-names. I cut out a major portion
>>of the Japanese who use MX, in other words. I hate the way they tend
>>to use the network as a file-trading net instead of a file-sharing
>>net.
>
>So THAT explains all of the "Trade?" messages I got in WinMX. I was
>already frigging trading! I always thought that they just wanted me to
>bump them up in my queue. What pisses me off most about this little
>knowledge nugget is that they were gonna sneak me into one of their
>private "JAPANESE ONLY!" chat rooms, and I didn't even know it!
Yep, that explains those messages. It took me quite a while to figure
out that they have their own preferred way of using p2p software. You
can easily spot those guys by doing a whois on them. They're the ones
with thousands of files, dozens or hundreds of requests queued, and
upload availibility of "0 of 1" or "-2 of 1", or some such shit as
that. Quite obviously, the only way you're ever going to get a
transfer started is if the person starts it for you manually. They put
a huge file list out as queue bait, then they go through and browse
the people who request files from them. If you have something they
want, they'll try to contact you for a trade. If something in your
username indicates you do auto-trades, they might go ahead and start
you. But basically you can fucking forget about ever getting anything
off those stingy, one-way motherfuckers. The best you can possibly
hope for is to cruise their shared list, queue up anything that looks
good, and hope that that eventually you stumble across somebody else
who has the same file and actually makes an effort to share with
others.
I set the multi-byte to auto-ignore because I had a large number of
Japanese users like these slipping past my filters. I would specify
that a party requesting a download from me must be making available at
least 2 or 3 upload slots for others, and anytime the first value was
a negative number (-2 of 1 available) they would slip through. Same
thing happens sometimes with non-Japanese users, but it isn't nearly
as prevalent.
Another thing they tend to do quite a lot is to be sharing practically
nothing but their incomplete downloads. It bulks up the number of
shared files they have showing, but basically they actually share not
a fucking thing. The Japanese term for this is 赤共有. They go through
every so often and move their completed downloads out and into an
unshared folder.
Marc Brown
>
> I routinely get several hundred successful downloads per week from [winmx].
> I've only been using it a very few months, and have gotten from it
> enough to at least fill a 120gb drive, with lots of other shit stashed
> off on other various drives on my other machine and some of it burned
> off to DVD-R.
Back in the day, I used WinMX to much the same extent. However, I had to
sit in front of the program for 100% of my free time, to catch lucky trades
when they presented themselves, and when I had to leave the program for
sleep or work, I was lucky to get one accidental file, while simultaneously
giving one jerk my whole collection. The need to physically monitor the
program is a big turnoff. What it really needs is a support app that can
browse the files of people who enter one's queue, look for text and file
sizes pre-specified by the user, and automatically set up trades for
matches. And as I mentioned before, since I can't get on more than about
ten opennap servers these days - nevermind whatever servers the Japanese
are favoring, because I have _never_ been able to get on those - WinMX is
just that much less appealing. The last time I did a search for anything
specific, I found two whole people who had it, both of whom were connected
to almost the same ten servers I was.
Winny sure doesn't give very many hits, but at least I don't have to watch
it as it retrieves whatever it's found.
Well, I'd like to keep things a little on-topic, so I'll reiterate my key
questions in short:
1) Searches in Winny are not yielding even as many hits as today's WinMX.
Is this normal, or is there something I have overlooked?
2) I'm using port 0 behind a firewall. Would opening port 4444 improve any
aspect of Winny's functionality? (Searches, file transfer, etc.)
3) What is the point of port 5810 and the so-called "BBS" aspect of Winny?
4) Probably the easiest question: How does one increase the upload and
download slots in Winny, from the default two of each?
Thanks, whoever can help!
Marc Brown
>
> If you actually open the ports rather than leave on the Port 0,
> you'll have a lot more choice about who to share files with, since
> two machines that both have the Port 0 option turned on can't
> communicate with each other.
First of all, thank you very much for your helpful reply. It's like a
breath of fresh air.
Okay, I sort of figured it would work like that. Though I was holding on
to some hope that my firewall was somehow responsible for the unremarkable
search results.
> Note that it can take as many as several hours to get a really
> good and solid connection to WinNY, so you may be best to fire it
> up in the morning, then go to work and when you come back you will
> get a lot more hits from your searches.
Hmm. Well, it doesn't seem to have worked out this way for me. ;P It
could be that I am using the search functions improperly, or doing
something else wrong. I'm just typing my searches, hitting enter, and
letting it bring the results up. It seems never to take longer than a
split second.
But I have noticed a few things on the node page. I tend to be connected
to three or four nodes, and it seems to be favoring NAT over raw (3 vs. 1
at the moment). It also doesn't stay connected for longer than ten
minutes or so. Being quite ignorant of how this type of networking
operates, I can't even be sure any of this is remotely noteworthy.
I do wonder about something, though.. Do my searches only query the nodes
I am connected to at a given moment? Considering how quickly the results
pop up (as well as the finality), in addition to the inexplicable fact
that there are WAY more nodes than the number of hits I get with even an
overly generalized search (like "anime"), I have to suspect that it is
only searching the nodes I am actually connected to. That would explain a
lot. Especially seeing as how the nodes I am connected to tend not to be
all that relevant (in their descriptions) to what I'm searching for. If
I'm right (or, perhaps, regardless of whether or not I'm right), I wonder
if there's supposed to be a way to force an attempt to connect to a
specific, more relevant node...
I have this suspicion that the keyword entry form in the download page may
be meant for something more than filtering searches.
> You start off with two u/d slots and
> you get one extra of each type for each 80 kbps of sustained
> upload rate (I think -- I found this info on a Japanese page
> somewhere and my translation may have been wrong).
Well. Sucks to live in North America, where every single ISP has latched
onto the needlessly wasteful concept of 32k uploads. I think we're the
only ones who have it this bad. Oh well ;P
Drew Hamilton
>that there are WAY more nodes than the number of hits I get with even an
>overly generalized search (like "anime"), I have to suspect that it is
>only searching the nodes I am actually connected to.
Oh, I know what you have to do. Do your search, then wait 30
seconds or so and hit "search" again. Do it a few times. For
some reason it gets a lot more hits after the first minute or so,
but you have to keep pressing the "search" button to make it
refresh the list. I've just got 1128 results for "anime" in
katakana (after hitting refresh for a few minutes), and it's
currently the middle of the day in Japan (ie, when fewer people
are on the network).
The other thing is that if you keep on doing searches it will
reconnect you to nodes that are trading whatever kind of files it
is that you're searching for. Apparently there's a way to make it
do this automatically (ie, you can specify keywords for nodes it
should try to connect to) but I've yet to figure out where the
menu option is for that.
>Well. Sucks to live in North America, where every single ISP has latched
>onto the needlessly wasteful concept of 32k uploads. I think we're the
>only ones who have it this bad. Oh well ;P
Hmm, I've got 80k upload speed on my DSL line.. But I do know
that most of them cap upload speeds at 32k. Lucky I live in
Ontario Canada where the DSL service is deregulated and there are
about 2 dozen DSL providers to choose from.
Michael Cash
the alphabet and kept on going with:
>Back in the day, I used WinMX to much the same extent. However, I had to
>sit in front of the program for 100% of my free time, to catch lucky trades
>when they presented themselves, and when I had to leave the program for
>sleep or work, I was lucky to get one accidental file, while simultaneously
>giving one jerk my whole collection. The need to physically monitor the
>program is a big turnoff. What it really needs is a support app that can
>browse the files of people who enter one's queue, look for text and file
>sizes pre-specified by the user, and automatically set up trades for
>matches. And as I mentioned before, since I can't get on more than about
>ten opennap servers these days - nevermind whatever servers the Japanese
>are favoring, because I have _never_ been able to get on those - WinMX is
>just that much less appealing. The last time I did a search for anything
>specific, I found two whole people who had it, both of whom were connected
>to almost the same ten servers I was.
I think I've spotted a big part of your problem, if you were using the
OpenNap side of WinMX instead of the WinMX Peer network. I did some
googling on the OpenNap thingy and discovered that lots and lots of
OpenNap networks automatically reject people who attempt to join the
network using WinMX as their client software.
Michael Cash
the alphabet and kept on going with:
>Back in the day, I used WinMX to much the same extent. However, I had to
>sit in front of the program for 100% of my free time, to catch lucky trades
>when they presented themselves, and when I had to leave the program for
>sleep or work, I was lucky to get one accidental file, while simultaneously
>giving one jerk my whole collection. The need to physically monitor the
>program is a big turnoff.
You really need to give the MX Peer side of the program a chance
before you give up on it.
I spent a few minutes fiddling with it before going to work this
morning. When I came home and checked it 15 hours later, I discovered
several dozen completed downloads totaling about 1gb sitting there
waiting for me, with 4 downloads humming along nicely and another
couple dozen queued up, many of them with low enough numbers that I
have realistic hopes of getting started on them.