Confused oO

[ultifinitus]

How in the world does a P2P networking program work???? Is there a server that connects clients? How in the world does it bypass firewalls?? I was under the distinct impression that you had to set up port forwarding in order to act as a server of any sort... Can the server hand the clients to eachother?

*Buildings fall, children cry.

[Disch]

Is there a server that connects clients?

In the case of torrents.. I don't know exactly how it works, but I know there's a "tracker" which I think tells peers how to find other peers.

So in a sense, you can think of the tracker as a server. Although the actual file transfer does not go through the server, only information about peers does.

Additionally I think individual peers send information about other peers they are connected to. So it's like.. connect to one person and then you can connect to all the people they're connected to.

How in the world does it bypass firewalls??

It doesn't. Programs can't just bypass firewalls. If they could, firewalls would be even more worthless.

You have to configure your firewall to allow P2P traffic somehow.

[ultifinitus]

but I know there's a "tracker" which I think tells peers how to find other peers.

That makes sense to me. I was thinking about how I would program something like this, and that's exactly what I'd do.

Although the actual file transfer does not go through the server, only information about peers does.

That I did know =) And that's why I was confused!

It doesn't. Programs can't just bypass firewalls. If they could, firewalls would be even more worthless.

I was under the impression that they were, my bad.

You have to configure your firewall to allow P2P traffic somehow.

That is what I was looking for. However the little experience I have with file sharing P2P (SC2) I didn't need to do any configuration...

I'm talking on a socket level. What protocol do they use? What kind of sockets do they use (TCP)? How do the clients connect to each other??

[chrisname]

ultifinitus wrote:

I'm talking on a socket level. What protocol do they use? What kind of sockets do they use (TCP)? How do the clients connect to each other??

BitTorrent uses both TCP and UDP I believe.