At 10:25 p.m. 12/05/2004, you wrote:
>how about overnet, another edonkey clone...i tried blocking the ports
>(4661-4672) on my router (RTA220). only problem being games like
>Counterstrike are blocked too (do i have to specify the CS ports too?),
>which my young flatmate plays 24/7 and of course, overnet never seems to
>download, just uploads!

I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to do... You want to stop people from using Overnet on your network by blocking ports? If, so, the most effective way, as mentioned a number of times before, would be just to instruct them not to use it and if they do, ban them totally. Barring that, you could try blocking but bear in mind, any decent P2P program (such as Bittorent, Emule etc) lets you specify what ports it'll use for externally initiated connections. Locally/client initiated connections of course depend on what the client (server) it's connecting to wants it to use, which will generally be the default but could easily be something else. This is one reason why blocking P2P traffic is not as easy as it seems if someone wants to get around it (and why the best policy for home situations is probably user controlled usage whenever possible).

I'm not sure why blocking the those ports would harm CS since CS whether the old HL or Steam as to my knowledge neither generally use those ports. Perhaps it would suggest there is a problem with your router/firewall set up? Are you sure the problem only arises after you block those ports and you are just blocking those ports, nothing else?

With Emule, the download speed depends a lot on the file in question, how many sources there are and such. Uploading more does help in some cases, but from my experience, it isn't really that great (although have only had limited experience since they added Kad) especially compared to say Bittorent. The number of connections etc is important though. Also, you should always limit your upload (I would recommend with the internal limiting whenever possible) by at least, 2-3k from your max, to avoid it saturating your download.

Forwarding ports if you're using a NAT router is important (for most P2P programs of course). It will greatly improve your download in most cases.

BTW, as Matt mentioned, Overnet is not an Edonkey clone, it is a newer client made by the person who made the original Edonkey (whether this is good or bad depends on your opinion of course). Emule Kad feature is a similar although incompatible (but IMHO better) version of Overnet's horde function. It's no use arguing over which one is better though, just find the one which has the best feature set and works fastest for you. For me, that has always been Emule...

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