Gtk-gnutella - Features

Features

gtk-gnutella is programmed in C with an emphasis on efficiency and portability without being minimalistic but rather head-on with most of the modern features of the gnutella network. Therefore, it requires fewer resources (such as CPU and/or RAM) than the major gnutella clients. It can also be used as headless gnutella client not requiring Gtk+ at all.

gtk-gnutella has a filtering engine that can reduce the amount of spam and other irrelevant results. gtk-gnutella supports a large range of the features of modern gnutella clients. gtk-gnutella was the first gnutella client to support IPv6 and encryption using TLS. It can handle and export magnet links. It has strong internationalization features, supporting English, German, Greek, French, Hungarian, Spanish, Japanese, Norwegian, Dutch and Chinese. gtk-gnutella also has support to prevent spamming and other hostile peer activity.

Several software distributions provide pre-compiled packages, but they are usually outdated as many distributions version freeze old stable releases. The gnutella network benefits from running the latest version obtainable as peer and hostile IP address lists change rapidly, making building the latest SVN snapshot the best option. There are also pre-compiled packages for many Linux distributions available online. Persons concerned about security might wish to compile their own. The gtk-gnutella sources use dist as build and configuration system instead of Autoconf. Most users are only familiar with the configure scripts generated by the latter. Another hazard for novices is configuring NAT devices to enable full network connectivity for gtk-gnutella. gtk-gnutella, like any gnutella client, is still usable behind a firewall or a router, but with some reduced functionality, if it cannot receive incoming TCP connections or UDP packets. In an attempt to mitigate the issue for newcomers, gtk-gnutalla implements the UPnP and NAT-PMP client protocols.

gtk-gnutella supports features for downloading larger files (videos, programs, and disk images). Version 0.96.4 supports Tiger tree hash serving and versions after 0.96.5 support tiger tree hashes for uploads and downloads. Tiger tree hashing and other gtk-gnutella features make file transfers as efficient as BitTorrent. Specifically, gtk-gnutella supports partial file sharing, remote queueing and files larger than 4 GiB. Overlap checking was the only mechanism to guard against bad data prior to versions 0.96.4. Overlap checking does not guard against malicious corruption like Tiger tree hashing does.

Version 0.96.6 introduced preliminary support for a Kademlia DHT, which was completed in version 0.96.7. The DHT is replacing search by SHA-1, when locating alternate sources for a known file or looking for push-proxies. In version 0.96.7, the DHT is enabled by default. LimeWire first developed the DHT and named it Mojito DHT.

Version 0.96.9 introduced full native support for UPnP and NAT-PMP, making the usage behind a compatible router much easier since there is no longer any need to manually forward ports on the firewall. In this version the code was also ported to Microsoft Windows however the Windows port is still considered beta due to lack of wide testing so far.

Version 0.96.9 also introduced important DHT protection against Sybil attacks, using algorithms based on statistical properties.

Version 0.97 was a major release, introducing client-side support for HTTP pipelining, "What's New?" queries, MIME type query filtering, GUESS support (Gnutella UDP Extension for Scalable Searches) and partial file querying. Although many Gnutella vendors already supported server-side GUESS, gtk-gnutella introduced the client-side as well, also enhancing the original specifications of the protocol to make it truly usable.

Version 0.98.2 employs a minor patch to correct malloc memory allocations and multiple threads issues, mainly on Ubuntu 11.10 operating systems. This 2011 gtk-gnutella version was also dedicated to the memory of Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011.

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