Hi all.

Just wanted to get some opinions. I've used WinMX a few times in the past to download perfectly legal, freely distributable files . Recently I've noticed I'm totally unable to download anything. I can search, find the files I want (with plenty of sources) and tag them for download. The files go to the transfer window and show as "Initiating network connection" (or similar). Then instead of going green and downloading, they timeout after a few minutes and turn red. This happens on any file, regardless of server area or sources.

So I did a bit of fiddling and a bit of searching, it seems as though a lot of people are reporting the same issue on newsgroups. Some of the reports are junk, but there are a significant number that do appear to be legitimate issues. Unfortunately the normal responses from other usenet posters are along the lines of "you don't know what you're doing, you suck, get a life, stop complaining" etc. There are also a significant number of people reporting that they have no problems at all, which is backed up by the large number of sharers on the network. The usual advice (check firewall, port settings, are you sharing files etc) all don't apply in my case, and I'm confident everything is set up correctly. I am not aware of any changes to my setup between (say) 3 months ago when I could download, and today when I can't.

So a couple of points. Why does WinMX work for some and not others? Why can I search and tag files for download, but they only timeout at the network connection phase? Is there some larger "conspiracy" at work here, with the central WinMX servers under attack? But if so, everyone would be affected. Questions, questions.

Any thoughts?

Sounds strange. I haven't used WinMX in a long time myself though. :/ Have you tried to sniff your network traffic to see if there are any incoming packets at all to your network interface when you try to download a file? This might help to find out if the problem is located elsewhere than in your computer (i.e. if you don't get any incoming packets at all, the problem is seemingly upstream, but if you get some packets it is still an open question, but you might still get clues from the network traffic).

Another seemingly too obvious question is also: Are you using the latest version of WinMX? If I'm not mistaken, WinMX is known for making updates that you "have to upgrade to" to be able to continue using the program, since they have often been not backwards compatible.

Howdy,

The latest version (3.53) is a bit of a pain to get configured.
If you are behind a firewall, you will need to shut it off or,
you will need to get some ports opened.
I got it to run but it took 20 mins to make it work with my firewall
shut off.

These file sharers are starting to get picky about how they send and
receive packets.

This is like edonkey ???? I have to disconnect my digital phone
modem to use that service. When I connect to it I can search
and pick my downloads but nothing happens.

Woodmann

I sometime use ver. 3.3, without upgrading it and without problems.
Regards, bilbo

dELTA, must confess, I've been too lazy to break out Ethereal. It's the best way to see what's up, you're right. I'm on the latest WinMX version as per their website.

Woodmann, you're right about it being picky but I've had it working before with no issues. As far as I know I've made no changes, but I guess it's possible I altered some "unrelated" firewall rule which has caused the change. I've got everything opened, forwarded and configured as per the docs, one thing I could do is shut the firewall off for a few minutes and see what the results are on an open connection.

What confuses the issue is that I can connect to the network and retrieve filelists from users etc, just not any files. They're not multipoint downloads though, so that may account for the discrepancy.

Cheers for your thoughts.

Suggestions for an experiment:

Use or borrow a laptop (clean, no firewall) , install winMX and connect it through your network connection. See how it performs. If the anomaly is still present, the problem is likely outside your network card. But if the anomaly resolves, then it is something inside your computer. Firewall, network software, etc.

And remember not to patch that computer that you put directly on the internet without any firewall too, to rule out the possibility that any of the latest security patches are causing the problem.

Anyway, "connecting to the network", and sometimes also getting search results (and in some extreme cases even getting file lists from users) is often done through the initial outgoing TCP connection by P2P filesharing programs, while the file downloads themselves practically always make use of direct connections between the users. Hence, all this first stuff can very well work flawlessly while at the same time the file transfers themselves might be blocked by problems with firewall blocking or port forwarding at some level.

Also, some of these programs are quite unclear in their documentation about the possible fact that they actually use both the TCP and the UDP version of some given port number, and hence it is in these cases quite easy to miss configuring the port forwarding of any hypothetical firewall/router correctly (i.e. missing out on the communication from one of the protocols). Not that any of my first guesses would be that you misconfigured your firewall, but then again we're all only human.

A related but different question:

If I have, let's say, a Windows XP running on a VMware virtual machine and the VM Network Interphase Card is running in bridged mode, Does the software firewall of the host system filter, monitor or in any way influence the traffic between the network and the virtual machine??

It is usually not protected by personal firewalls, no. Mostly due to the fact that it uses its own protocol driver, i.e. bypasses the normal TCP/IP protocol driver.

In that case, having a Virtual machine, an keeping a snapshot of a fresh windows install could be handy in pinpoint and debugging network problems like these.

Yep, not to mention most other computer related problems too.

There are some other reasons that there might be some virus /trojans which slows down your connection or blocked by other p2p clients coz they detect you "have" the variants...