PLEASE READ: Edonkey review [Archive]

vuthu

05-03-2002, 02:06 PM

I've just found this review from epinion. Hopefully, it'll give you a good overview and some incentives to start using Edonkey:

http://www.epinions.com/content_2061344900

Hot Stuff: The best place for MP3, MPG and AVIs (Music & Moviez)
by ptiemann | Aug 27 '01
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The Bottom Line With eDonkey2000, you can search all the files being shared anywhere on the eDonkey2000 network, independent from central server.

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Disclaimer:

When I use the word 'song' in this article, I refer to self-recorded songs from under the shower. The term 'movie' refers to your personal 100 minute recording from your last vacation or wedding party. I do not endorse ripping of CDs / DVDs or even sharing them with others who may not even be legal owners of the CD / DVD.

So Napster doesn't hold the MP3s that you look for and your Gnutella client just fails to make a connection to the server? Look no further.
Visit www.edonkey2000.com and "harness the power of 2000 electronic donkeys" by downloading a 500 kB small client. The eDonkey client is available for Windows (GUI, command line), Mac and Linux and comes in several languages ("localized").

Supported searchs (= types of Media):

- "Any file": just search for a term to be part of a file's name

- Audio: search by file name in *.WAV, *.MP3, *.AA3 and more files

- Video: search among full 2 hour movies (holiday recordings, of course :-)

- Images

- Programs: see for yourself

- Documents: download ebooks (usually PDF files, sometimes HTML or ASCII text)

- Collections

- Users

Normally, one would search by file name. Furtheron, one can search by (file) format and size, there is a special MP3 search that allows to search by album/ artist/ song title.

Search Results

The search results show:

- file name
- size in megabyte
- type e.g. 'Audio' or 'Program'
- file format e.g. 'mp3' or 'avi'
- relevant other information e.g. artist/ album/ title for songs, length (songs, video), bitrate (mp3), and most important: availability.

Napster used to show "Line quality" as some information that the user volunteered (from "T3" to "56k") and it also showed the "Ping" time which describes how quick one packet can be sent to this other site. This ping information is not really relevant. A T3 line with a long ping time will give you more data than a 56k connected neighbor with a short ping time. Availaibility means how many users on the edonkey network have this file. And with this we come to "how it works".

How files are shared with the donkey

Let's say you start downloading Jill's vacation movie that happens to have the name "The Green Lagoon". It turns out that Jill's 3 friends already have copies of "The Green Lagoon". If you have enough bandwidth and RAM you will download from all 4 sources parallel. How that? The 90 minutes long lagoon movie is 600 MB long and the sharing software uses a multi-source file transfer protocol. The movie is cut into hundreds of small pieces and you download them piece by piece from various places. If you have a fast internet connection (multiple T3 lines :-) then you can download at rates of 400 kB / second. At that rate, it would take 25 minutes to download a 90 minute movie.
More realistic for personal use is a DSL or cable modem setup where you may achieve 40 kB/s thus need a little over 4 hours for a long movie.

Any portion that you have downloaded is automatically shared with the community which eliminates the problem of "freeloaders". In other words: you will be simultaneously uploading and downloading the same file.

If one of your 4 sources for "The Green Lagoon" disconnects, you keep downloading from the other 3 until your file is complete. Even if you turn off your computer in the middle of a download, next time you start the donkey, you'll continue (almost) where you left. It saves blocks of 500 kB, I believe.

File names?

One problem with file names is that people can change them. That's what Napster abusers did (those who tried to trade copyrighted material). They renamed a Metallica song to Matellica. eDonkey uses a hashing technique to generate a unique number for each file. So even if one of Jill's friends has renamed "The_Green_Lagoon.avi" to "Jill's Green Lagoon.avi" - the digital fingerprint is the same and you can download from this source.
This is very useful since people once they burn a file on CD-ROM usually lose the original filename (on CD-ROM, one may not want to have spaces in a file name).

The servers

Napster's weakness was the centralized server. The edonkey2000 network does not have a centralized server. Instead there are ~ 1000 servers (as of today) running all around the world. When you start your client, it knows by installation IP addresses of ~ 100 servers and it tries to connect to one of them. Once it has connected, it can see the files that other users share. When you search for "The Green Lagoon", it will first search all computers that are connected to the same server as you are. Then, over time, it will search on other servers. The list of known servers updates itself automatically (adds new servers, deletes those that it cannot connect to). The file transfer and the chat do not go through the server but directly from user to user. The server only brings groups of users together. You obviously are connected to at least one server but you usually will be connected to many servers. So if one of them goes down, it doesn't matter at all.
edonkey servers usually have names that reflect the spirit (topic) of their community. As I write this, I look and I see three "top servers" each with over 3000 users online sharing 300,000 files (in each of the three). The total of available files among these 3 servers is likely to be a little more than 300,000 since many users are connected to all 3 of them.

In short: There is no central server. Servers can be located anywhere at any IP address. Servers tend to be permanent but do not have to be. It should be very difficult to bring down the edonkey network with technology.

Safety/ Security

With these filesharing systems you never know what you get on your computer. You basically allow the world to see your hard drive or a part of it. Who knows whether there isn't some spy software built in? Well, I have tried sharing systems of obscure origin and don't use them anymore.
The source code of edonkey2000 is available for free download. The software's author appears to live here in the Bay Area (San Francisco). If there was a backdoor (trojan horse) someone would have found out by now. I feel that using eDonkey is a secure thing.

Anonymous?

When you upload/ download files to another user, then you could find out what the IP number of the other user is. The donkey software does not display it to you but if you have a firewall software installed or if you use a sniffer software then you can see the IP number. I would think that law enforcement officials could also take the donkey source code and modify it so that it displays user's IP numbers.
Conclusion: eDonkey is not really anonymous. Do not share hollywood uhmm, holiday movies.

Weaknesses:
-----------------

There are two weaknesses.

1) Incomplete Files

You may start downloading a rare file that only 5 users have and the only of the 5 who had it complete turns off his computer. You may be getting 90% of your file and have to wait a week until you get the remaining 10%. This is mostly a problem with less popular files.

2) Fakes

This is more of a problem. There you sit downloading "The Green Lagoon" and next morning you find out it's a copyrighted horror movie instead! Fingerprinting doesn't solve this problem if someone slightly modifies the movie and then renames it to something popular.

Strengths:
---------------

1) Independant from central server

2) Automatically shares downloads including partial downloads

3) Has a throttle to configure how much bandwidth you want to give

4) Simple UI - little hardware requirements

5) Source code available

6) Very strong community (message boards, yahoo clubs, IRC...)

Conclusion:
---------------

I believe that eDonkey will be around for quite a while. The only way how an organization could shut down the eDonkey would be to partner up with all ISPs and have them forbid the kind of traffic that the donkey creates (blocking ports). As of now, I think that the www.edonkey2000.com web site is worth a visit. It's clearly better than newsgroups or Gnutella.

vuthu

05-14-2002, 10:22 AM

Edonkey File Sharing Program

Edonkey
- Overview
eDonkey2000 doesn't rely on one central server yet searches are quick and your client doesn't get bogged down with endless search requests. You have the ability to search all the files being shared anywhere on the eDonkey2000 network.

It allows you to transfer any type of file. It automatically resumes interrupted transfers from alternate sources. It even introduces ways to share a whole collection of files together so you can be sure to get all the songs in an album or all pieces of a movie. Users will be able to download a file from multiple sources at the same time thus insuring that transfers will be as fast as possible.

Files can be uploaded while being downloaded. This insures that a rare file that is wanted by many people will be distributed as quickly as possible.

The server and client are both distributed for free. There are Linux and Windows versions available with Mac [Macintosh] versions coming soon. Latest features - The chat is now IRC so everyone can chat no matter what server they are connected to. Laguage's include Danish Deutsch Español Estonian Français Italian Nederlands Russian. Mirc compatible & Skinable with all skin / skins

Features:- Share and Download any type of file.
No central server. Servers can be located anywhere at any IP address.
Search all users connected to the service no matter which server they are logged onto.
Download a file from several different users at once.
Downloads are automatically continued from session to session.
User created collections. So you can be sure and get all files that belong together.
Simultaneous uploading and downloading of the same file.
Dynamic ports. The donkey can be configured to run over any port.

Files available for download on network: [.zip .rar .ace .arj .tgz .jpg .gif. .psp
.png .tga .psd .bmp .tif .cmp .cal .fax .eps .img .raw .ica .pct .msp .pcx .ras .wfx
.wmf .ico .cur .wpg .mp3 .ogg .wma .wmv .wav .asf .avi .divx .ram
MPEG;MPG;MPV:Mpeg RMM;RA;RNX;RMX .RV;RM .RMJ .RPM]

How it works
eDonkey2000 is built on top of the Multisource File Transfer Protocol (MFTP).

There are two applications that work together to create a Donkey network, the client and the server. The donkey client is what people use to share and download files. The donkey server is what the clients connect to in order to search and find other users to download from. The server is sort of like a phone book. Clients look in it to find other clients with the files they want. No files pass through the server.

Searching: Every client is connected to one server as its main server. It tells this server what files it has shared. Each server maintains a list of all the shared files of all the clients connected to it. When a client searches it sends the search request to its main server. The server then matches all files it knows about to the search and returns this list to the client.

When you press "extend search" your search is sent to the next server on your list. This request and the results are sent via UDP to limit the bandwidth and connection overhead for the servers. So it is possible you will get less search results from a server if you extend a search there then if it was your main server.

Downloading: When a client chooses to download a file, either from search results, a collection, viewing a friend's shared files, or where ever, it first gathers a list of all the clients that have the file it wants. It first asks its main server for all the clients that have the file. Then it will connect to and ask any other servers it knows about to ask if they have clients with the file. Once it finds other clients with the file it then asks each client for a different piece of the file. It keeps doing this until the whole file is assembled.

Inter-Server Connections: The servers do very little communication between them. The only time they connect to each other is periodically to say "I'm here". When they do this the server they are announcing themselves to sends back a list of all the other servers it knows about. In this way the servers maintain a list of other working servers. When clients connect to a server they are given that servers list of know servers. That is how clients learn of new servers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Client
Q: Why can't I connect?

A: There could be a number of reasons why you wouldn't be able to connect to a donkey server. The things you should check are:

Do you have an internet connection?

Is there a server listed under the 'servers' tab? If not enter some from the servers page.

Do you have the latest version of the donkey. Check the downloads page and make sure the version number matches the one of your client. You can tell your version number by clicking the '?' on the toolbar.

Do you use a proxy server to connect to the internet? Then you need to enter the correct settings under the options tab.

If you are using NT, try connecting as Administrator.

It is possible the server you are trying to reach is full. If you get the message "placed on connection queue" and then "Can't connect" it means the server is full. Good news is that you will be able to connect to some server.

It is possible the server you are trying to reach is down. Try other servers listed on the known servers page.

Make sure you are not blocking the port required to reach the donkey server. Usually this is 4661. This could be blocked on your machine, your router or firewall, or by your ISP. One thing to try would be running a donkey server somewhere else on different ports and see if you can connect to it.

Make sure HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ \CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyEnable is set to 0. (I think this can be changed by disabling proxy in IE)

Q: Why is everything Remotely Queued?

A: This means that the people that have the file you want are already uploading to other people. The download will start once those people have a free upload slot. This happens a lot on the donkey since most of the files are large people take up an upload slot for a longer amount of time.

Q: How come bytes transferred is larger then the file size?

A: When you download a file from more then one source the donkey asks each source for a separate piece of the file. If one source doesn't send the piece you asked for then, when that is the last piece left, the donkey will ask another source to send it. This can cause some bytes to be sent twice. Causing 'Transferred' to be larger then 'Size'. The problem is worse on slower connections and with popular files.

Q: What does it mean when a download says "insufficient disk space"?

A: Since downloads don't necessarily come from start to finish there needs to be enough space available for the donkey to write to any part of the file. So the donkey checks each active download to make sure you have enough space to grow the file to its final size. You must have enough space free on both the partion of the temp directory and the partion of the incoming directory. If an active download changes to inactive (Paused, or Insufficient disk space) its ungrown disk space is no longer reserved and other downloads that were previously in the "Insufficient disk space" state can now possibly start.

If you want a particular file to download that is in the "Insufficient disk space" state you can either free up some disk space (It might take the donkey a minute to realize you've done this) or set the file you want to "High" priority and Pause another active download.

Q: What does it mean when a download says "Hashing"?

A: The donkey must insure that the partial file is the same as when you last used the donkey. The download will stay in this state when you first start and eventually switch to "Looking". Hashing is the process of giving a file a unique ID. It looks at every byte of the file so can take a while if the file is large.

Q: What does it mean when it says "Corruption found in filename at part X"?

A: That 9MB part of the file didn't have the same bytes when you got it as when it was sent. This is ok. That part of the download will be removed and the download will continue. It will redownload that part. Once the download is complete the file should be fine.

Q: Why is my ID number low?

A: You get a low ID number(below 1million) if the server, and therefore other clients, can't connect to your machine. This could be because you are behind a firewall that blocks the port your client listens on, because you are using IP masquerading, or many other things.

It also means that you won't be able to transfer files with someone else with a low ID number. They can't get files from you and you can't get files from them. So if at all possible you want to allow connections on port 4662 to the machine you are running the donkey on.

Q: Why does it take so long to share my files?

A: This should only happen the first time you share the files. The donkey must examine the file to give it a unique ID. After it has done this they should load quite quickly.

Q: What ports does the donkey use?

A: It can run over any port. The defaults it uses are:
TCP port 4661 to connect to the server.
TCP port 4662 to connect to other clients.
UDP port 4665 to send messages to servers other then the one you are connected to.

Q: What is the deal with Collections?

A: See the online help.

Q: Can I open/watch/use the patial files?

A: It isn't a good idea. But if you don't intend to finish the download you can just rename the .part file to the appropriate thing. Keep in mind that some formats require either the end or the beginning of the file which might not have been downloaded yet.

Q: Why doesn't the donkey show the ping times of other users?

A: Ping isn't a measure of how fast the transfer between your two computers will be. It a measure of how long it takes one packet to reach the other machine and come back. This is practically irrelevant for file transfer. What is important is the bandwidth between the two machines. You can connect to a machine on the other side of the world that has T3 and get a horrible ping time but still get your file faster then someone next door on a modem. Though each packet will take maybe one second longer to reach your machine. You will get many times more packets per second.

Q: Ok, so why doesn't the donkey show the bandwidth of other users?

A: The donkey always tries to get the file from all the clients that have the file regardless of their bandwidth. It stops asking new clients for the file when your downstream speed is maxed out. So you never have to try to find the source with the highest bandwidth. It will all happen automatically.

Q: What do the colors on the progress bar mean?

A:
Black: The parts you have already downloaded
Red: Parts that can't be found on the donkey network.
Gray: Parts that you are currently asking for.
Shades of Blue: The more blue the more common that part of the file.

Q: All those little files? (known.met, shared.dat ...)

A:
known.met- this file caches the file IDs that you have hashed so far. It keeps the donkey from having to rehash your shared directories every time.

pref.met- this stores the preferences you have set for the donkey, username, max Upload speed, etc.

shared.dat- This is a list of the directories you have marked for sharing. If you delete this file you will only share the incoming directory.

server.met- List of known servers.

friends.met- List of users you have marked as friends.

layout.dat- The sizes of the windows and the column headers.

Server

Q: How do I set up a public server?

A: First you need a connection to the internet that gives you a static IP address. Modems and most DSL setups give you a dynamic IP address so you can't run a server off of those. You also can't run a public server on a machine that can't be called from the outside world, no servers behind firewalls or IP masquerading unless you map the port.
Then you download the server application from this site. It currently is only compiled for Windows or Linux.
Then you make a donkey.ini according to the documentation. Set the seed server to a working server so others will find you.

Next start dserver and your eDonkey2000 server is now running.

Q: How much bandwidth/processing power does the server use?

A: Servers take very little bandwidth. They mainly need processing power. I think they use about 4-8Kbytes/sec for 800 users. A server on a PII 333 running Linux with 800 users uses about 50% of the CPU. Here are some stats provided by maurice.

Other:

Q: How to increase the max open connections in win98.

A: Change or add the followng key in the windows register (98 & 98se only):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\ \Services\VxD\MSTCP\MaxConnections

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q158/4/74.ASP

Network Error 10055 (No buffer space available)

In order to fix this error, try increasing the number of TCP Ports in Windows 9x. To do this, you must must edit the Windows registry as follows:

If you are not comfortable with editing the registry, please don't try this.
Click on Start and select Run.
Enter Regedit and press the OK button.
Once started, locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and expand it to the following branch:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ \CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP
Be sure to highlight the key MSTCP.
If you are using Windows 95, create a new DWORD-value named MaxConnections (if it doesn't already exist). Modify the value to something higher than 100 (hexidecimal 64). 100 is the default setting.
If you are using Windows 98, create a new String-value named MaxConnections (if it doesn't already exist). Modify the value to something higher than 100 (for example, 256). 100 is the default setting.
After restarting Windows, the problem should be solved. The MaxConnections setting only affects TCP/IP Protocol! In Windows NT, this procedure is not necessary: only adequate available RAM memory--including virtual memory (NT 4.0 minimum 1Gb, Windows 2000 minimum 2Gb). The maximum connections are capped at 12,800 in Windows NT, and at 25,600 in Windows 2000.

Question: I Need Help On Getting The Windows Fonts Working!!

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q133/7/25.asp
Need a little help.
---What you need to have from your Microsoft CD---

desktop.in_
fontext.dl_

Place those 2 files in C:
Then expand them by going to Start>Run>Open

----Windows 95, 98, ME Systems----
expand c:\desktop.in_ c:\windows\fonts\desktop.ini
expand c:\fontext.dl_ c:\windows\system\fontext.dll
---------NT Systems-----------
expand c:\desktop.in_ c:\winnt\fonts\desktop.ini
expand c:\fontext.dl_ c:\winnt\system32\fontext.dll

Everything should work if you EXPANDED the files. Make sure the attributes are set to read only and system for the files and font folder.

Here's a users review: Hi all,
I'm astonished that not one of us seems to have tried this prog yet (or at least never thought it was worth it to comment about it).

edonkey2000 http://www.edonkey2000.com) is far and away the best (only?) good source for big files that I know about, except for actually going to a mall and picking them up.

;-)

Of course, we can't all fit into the mall at one time, and of course there's things that aren't there.

I know that there are various alternatives, but all the one's I've tried leave something to be seriously desired somewhere. Generally, they are all very frustrating, one way or another.

Enter edonkey2000. (and please, I know that it's been around for some time, but I don't have a lot of time for these things) These are the new ideas:

It hash-identifies files so that it knows exactly when two files are exactly the same, no matter how they've been renamed or what portion of them you have. It downloads (and uploads) with equal emphasis on every byte of the file. In other words, incomplete files are all different, with each incomplete person tending to have parts that others still don't have. The downside to this is that if you start to download a movie the entire space that it WILL take is taken up immediately on your drive, but the efficiency of bandwidth use is amazing. There is no such thing as a leech on edonkey because if you are sharing nothing and downloading only one file you are still sharing (usually at full capacity) the parts you have of that one file, almost immediately.

This does a number of things. First, with any reasonable file, you are almost guaranteed to get it. Even if only three people have the whole thing on a given server, dozens, perhaps over a hundred people, will have parts of it and so the file pool is HUGE. Second, even if a file is harder to get, you can simply request it and gradually find people who have it. It's astonishing how many files out there are actually identical. The donkey is a persistent bastard--it's really remarkable.

In many ways, the donkey is similar to direct connect but without any (repeat ANY) of the drawbacks, at least as I see it. The reliability of downloads is 100% unless the file is very rare, and even then it's only a waiting game. There are a hundred or 200 servers (like hubs) except that they are automated. The server owner can create a custom greeting--that is it. No ops, no children, no banning, no status whatsoever. Anyone can run a server fairly easily, and people all over the world do. The donkey autoconnects (if you want it to) beautifully, though, and more server ips are given to you by the server you are on (sort of gnutella style). There is an ad banner on top (you can register to get rid of that, but it is less annoying than dc's version--I'll never bother. It doesn't waste space to speak of.). Also, where dc forces you to
share with childish rules and threats (like cutthroats sitting at a table together--a very nasty, unpalletable situation) the donkey has you share just because you always have something it wants if you are downloading even one file. This is customizeable too--you can throttle bandwidth in 3 ways and limit connections (generic connections, up and down together), but the prog claims that your downloading will suffer if you do this. I have limited upload bandwidth somewhat (the bandwidth is so efficiently soaked up otherwise that I can barely surf at all) and noticed no change whatsoever.

The chat feature is basically an irc add-on now, so it is server independent and op free. It is sketchy right now, but it is already the best I've seen because it is not crawling with power-freaks using op features.

The prog is very very hard to monitor by the thought police because you only see who you get files from when you need to (even better than gnutella). Unlike the gnut or any of it descendants, search results do NOT include information on the sources. You have to instigate downloads to find that out, and the process is very gradual and slow. I may not have this exact or I might be missing a detail, but this is the best prog for somewhat anonymous file sharing. DC, though also fairly good for this, still tells more quickly what people are sharing, by showing you in search results what users have what file, and by hotlisting. The donkey also hotlists, but only AFTER the long process of starting a download from a user and THEN hotlisting them. A list of users never shows. Direct messages are also included, but I haven't had one work yet.

Interestingly, searches can be forwarded to other servers, over and over, so you can search very very broadly. I don't understand this part yet, though. It clearly shames DC's lame efforts at doing this, though.

There are serious downsides, though, that have stopped the donkey from just taking over (although as time goes by I think this one might take over). First, searches are very slow, slower than gnut or dc, sometimes by far. Every server is different, though, and some are slow because they have lots of users. So, you need to pick what you want--faster server or more users. Also, the file info is limited to filename. I personally don't want anything else for big files anyway, so I don't care and prefer this. (Morpheus simply overkills with too much info) Music files could really use more info though, but the donkey isn't optimized for mp3s.

Also, downloads can be very slow and drawn out, (sometimes crawling along at only 3 -6 KB/s), but again this is the trade-off that you make for reliability (ie. getting the whole file, for certain or almost for certain). I am giddily happy to make this trade. Although I have received
complete big files on dc the stress and waste of time hoping to get the whole thing is not worth it. Ditto for the gnut. Mirc, hotline, napsterish progs, etc. all suffer from the same annoying flaw, and I'm done with them for good for big files. The donkey slowly gathers up all the fragments of big files, (my average download speed over a shortish trial has been maybe a little over 10K, with specific files as slow as 1K and as fast as 50K. That said, you don't spend any time at all looking (compared to dc, and especially mirc/hotline) and once you request it you are GOING to get it, so you just relax and forget about it for a day or two. Beautiful.

Another flaw--people, no doubt often the thought police or worse the sympathizers of thought police, have uploaded fake files. A particular (ie. edonkey only) problem is that it is harder to tell if a file is fake because you can't check it at all until it is done. There is already a tool to check partial downloads, however, so soon this will be less of a problem for movies. Zips will possibly always have this flaw. No doubt, though, creative solutions will arise.

The prog is cpu intensive when it hashes files before sharing them, but I don't care. Also, it has to hash your file shares once (and only once, ever) before sharing, which takes some time, but not much and again I don't care. I find that the resource use is steady and not very high, especially compared to dc. In fact, the cpu usage is remarkably low for what it is actually doing.

It works on all platforms (I think--at least the big three).

Also, it is stable (but even dc is almost stable on win2k).

Downloads auto resume, by definition, and in a way that is so reliable it shames other progs.

ONE WARNING: in order to help you (???) the programmers have the prog use your proxy
setting for ie automatically, which usually screws it up because you're probably not using a proxy that edonkey is hoping for. Simply deselect proxy in the options.

ANOTHER WARNING: I have only tested this prog by attempting to download files that had at least 2 people sharing them, and usually several more. That said, files as odd as the godfather, battlestar gallactica, 2001 a space odyssey, and 2010 each had 2, 10, 35-50 and 15-25 hits respectively. Planet of the apes is into the hundreds, as are several games. Any given server will get you a hundred double digit user-count search results for the term "divx".

Going to your favorite mall will always be best (and long live the acid) but the donkey is superb.

Oh, and though kazaa/morpheus supposedly have so many users and also support multiple-source downloads, you will not see even a tiny fraction of the big file hits, and you will not download nearly as effectively, (since kazaa "multiple" means "same old way but from more people at once".) Morpheus and winmx will still be mp3 kings of the moment, but the donkey is taking over everything else.

And, incidentally, I have been collecting rare Leonard Cohen mp3s for at least 4 months straight now, and have spent DAYS, altogether, doing so. In the last 24 hours I have doubled that collection. Probably some luck there, but I'm not sure how much.

Last, edonkey is the only prog that had so many mature, knowledgeable people defending it on the web with such earnest. The donkey is not the most user friendly (though it is just a shade harder than napster--the proxy thing is its one tripwire), it is a slow downloader, and the community, of course, was probably small in its early months, so people criticized it. The defenders of it were always intriguingly sincere, dedicated, and apparantly informed. Often, they would go out of there way (like I am now) to tell people the reasons why it is good. A prog that can inspire people to do that is really refreshing.

Finally, a big file sharer has stepped up.