Beginner's Guide to P2P

[imcool]

This article is intended for beginners to indroduce them to p2p. It was first featured on my blog [edited]

P2P, Peer to Peer, is one of the most popular methods of sharing files over the internet. Because this is a website about applying technolgy rather than describing the technical stuff, which is already all over the net. Simply, P2P copies a file from one computer on a p2p network to another through a server. This article aims to show the reader different p2p software options and how to use them.

Software

Kaaza

Once the king of p2p, now riddled with trash, viruses, and often terrible speeds, many users jumped ship to torrents, gnutella, and edonkey.

Shareaza

One of the most popular file sharing programs today, it's free, open source, and and uses not one, but three networks, edonkey, gnutella 1 and 2, and therefore has one of the best libraries. Also supports bittorrent

Limewire

Has an ad-supported free version and and non-ad version for $18, has a good collection of music and videos and is quite fast. Uses the Gnutella Network

DC++

Well ranked, open source

Bittorrent

The newest, most innovative technology, it has several, clients, i'd reccomend the built in bittorrent support in shareaza. The innvovation is that if you are downloading a file, you have to simeltaneously upload it, which helps give better speeds. It's more of a content distributing system than a file sharing network, the clients generally don't have a search feature. You have to find a tracker file from the net.

Here's the official documentation. It will tell you more.

iMesh

Adware turned freeware, have'nt tried it in along time but had a bad experience when i did, kaazaa's still worst though. Maybe this comes second (from the back).

eMule

Nice, clean interface and right up there with shareaza, very functional, very good. Uses the reliable edonkey2000 network

EDonkey

Edonkey's own client for their network, but the free version has ads and there is a paid version as well. I'd suggest shareaza.


And the winner is...

Shareaza and emule were a close fight, but shareaza comes up trumps, firstly because is supports a massive number of networks, and it has a slick and clean skinnable interface, and it's good for begiiners and for those who want to take the next step up as well.

P.S. - Please Don't Use Kaazaa, despite what your friends may say. It's Polluted, and Loaded with Worms, Trojans, etc...

I know this does not describe p2p, and is not of an advanced level, but as i said, it's intended for beginners.

[edited] please do not link your personal website in your posts

[android]

plz tell me a site frm whr i can download shareaza . i am usin kazza litee nowadys . is it also loaded wid trash ?

[imcool]

u can get shareaza from www.shareaza.com , kaaza lite uses the kazaa network. i used kazaa lite once, don't remember, had a dial-up back then, but the kazaa network is pretty much trash, shareaza uses gnutella1 and 2 and also edonkey2000, even more, and it's open source freeware (no ads)