However, Gnutella has at least three disadvantages: No court order is going to shut this system down, because there is no one machine that controls everything. As long as you can get to at least one other machine running Gnutella software, you are able to query the network. This approach has one big advantage - Gnutella works all the time. It is an extremely simple and clever way of distributing a query to thousands of machines very quickly. If each machine on the Gnutella network knows of just four others, that means that your request might reach 8,000 or so other machines on the Gnutella network if it propagates seven levels deep. A request might go out six or seven levels deep before it stops propagating. A request has a TTL (time to live) limit placed on it.At the same time, all of these machines send out the same request to the machines they are connected to, and the process repeats.If so, they send back the file name (and machine IP address) to the requester. These machines search to see if the requested file is on the local hard disk.Your machine sends the song name you typed in to the Gnutella machine(s) it knows about.
Gnutella 2 software#
It knows this because you've told it the location of the machine by typing in the IP address, or because the software has an IP address for a Gnutella host pre-programmed in. Your machine knows of at least one other Gnutella machine somewhere on the network.You type in the name of the song or file you want to find.It was only a matter of time before another system came along to fill the gap. With the original Napster gone, what you had at that point was something like 100 million people around the world hungry to share more and more files. When the court ordered Napster to stop the music, the absence of a central database killed the entire original Napster network. The central database for song titles was Napster's Achilles' heel. By spreading the load for file downloading across millions of machines, Napster accomplished what would have been impossible any other way. This approach worked great and made fantastic use of the Internet's architecture. The legal concept behind Napster was, "All of these people are sharing the songs on their hard disks with their friends." The courts did not agree with that logic, but it gave Napster enough time to prove the concept and grow to massive size. Napster was trying to take advantage of a loophole in copyright law that allows friends to share music with friends.There is no way a central server could have had enough disk space to hold all the songs, or enough bandwidth to handle all the requests. Napster eventually grew to have billions of songs available.