Shareaza

I've been tearing my hair out recently trying to figure out how to configure Shareaza optimally to get good ed2k search results.

One thing I've discovered is that it seems to be necessary to connect to Emule Security No. 2 from the good emule server list at peerates. None of the others ever seem to give search results.

However, Emule Security No. 2 only seems to do so some of the time, and I have been completely unable to figure out the conditions that trigger it to work/not work.

For example, about a week and a half ago, I suddenly started getting ed2k search results. I hadn't changed anything -- Emule Security No. 2 set as preferred server, Emule Security No. 2 connected with highID, and searches I did previously without any ed2k results, and I got a raft of ed2k results. This remained the case until sometime during the last 48 hours. And then, again without my touching any Shareaza settings, it stopped working again. No results from Emule Security No. 2 from the same searches. Nothing. Nada. Zero, zip, zilch. I have highID, I haven't changed anything, I'm connecting from the same IP range as two days ago, I'm not goddamn doing anything different, and it simply doesn't work today whereas it did two days ago. WHY? Network tab shows very little traffic being exchanged either way with the server post-connection.

I can only assume there's some trick or knack to configuring Shareaza to work properly with ed2k and get good results, and if it's not tweaked exactly right it will drift in and out of working properly over time all by itself somehow.

Someone, please tell me the trick. I'm guessing it's some advanced setting under the ed2k headings somewhere that I ought to adjust, but I haven't the foggiest which one. I'd like an experienced user who has gotten ed2k search to work and to work consistently to tell me the settings they have that are ed2k relevant and not equal to their defaults, so I can try to replicate those settings and see if that makes it work.

*bump*

I have a bit more information, too. When ed2k is working, the ed2k server shows significant activity in both inbound and outbound packets once it's been connected a while. When it's not, I see this:



Only 3 packets have been sent from it, and in fact those 3 are sent right away. It looks like when ed2k isn't working, the server handshakes with Shareaza and after that Shareaza sees no more traffic from that. Shareaza is sending the server traffic, though, so the problem isn't that it fails to even query it.

This means that either the server is simply ignoring all incoming traffic from that client, in which case we need to find out what causes Shareaza to sometimes provoke this cold shoulder, or, more likely, Shareaza is failing to recognize incoming traffic from the ed2k server.

I say more likely, because under any circumstances where the server would want to ignore a client, it would want to disconnect that client and probably ban it from reconnecting at least for a while, and those latter steps are clearly not happening.

If ed2k had simply stopped functioning, with these symptoms, and stayed that way, my suspicion would be that Shareaza had fallen behind some evolution of the ed2k protocol, and servers had switched to sending responses that Shareaza could not interpret correctly. In that case Shareaza would need to be updated to recognize the newer version of the protocol.

However, it comes and goes like a distant radio station. I doubt they're switching the same ed2k server back and forth between an older and a newer protocol version -- why would they not either stick with the newer version, or try it once, then revert to the older and stick with that? -- so I have to suspect a bug instead. If the bug was in the ed2k servers, thus affecting every ed2k user, it would make the servers completely useless and so it would be fixed in a hurry, but it's been occurring on and off for years. Therefore, the bug is at my end.

As for the nature of the bug, I couldn't venture a guess at this point. I can say if it's in Shareaza, it's isolated to the ed2k-specific parts of Shareaza, as nothing else (DC++, torrents, G1, G2) behaves any differently when ed2k is "down" than when it's "up". I can also say that the state of ed2k-working-or-not can toggle in mid-session and not solely when Shareaza is restarted, though it may need the ed2k server disconnected and reconnected. It toggles independently of any updates to, or user-initiated configuration changes to, antivirus software, firewall settings, and things of that nature, as well, and it's not ISP throttling since both states have been observed with the same ISP (and ISP throttling would either slow it down without breaking it completely, or else break it so completely that ed2k would fail to connect or fail to stay connected, not stay connected but not otherwise work).

Now, does anybody here know anything about this? I assume ed2k works for most users most of the time or its inclusion in Shareaza wouldn't have been bothered with. There must therefore be something specific in my configuration that's impairing it, maybe combined with bugs in Shareaza's implementation of the protocol. Whatever configuration settings I have now result in ed2k workingness randomly toggling on and off every few days, though sometimes it stays off for weeks or even months. I'd like to know what configuration settings will result in it staying working.

To that end, I ask that someone who is experiencing consistent ability to connect and search ed2k without the "only 3 packets and no search results" symptoms please post here their Shareaza "Advanced Settings" settings that are not their default values (show a * in the settings list), so that I can duplicate their settings and get ed2k working consistently over here too.

I also ask that Shareaza's developers look into what would cause some choices of settings to result in intermittent rather than steady abnormal behavior of this sort. That the behavior of ed2k can randomly toggle between two states instead of being consistently one or the other for a fixed set of settings seems to me to indicate a bug is present. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should be nondeterministic like that. Threading issues, use of uninitialized memory, and so on are the sorts of bugs you should probably be looking for, given that.

I can confirm this behavior, even though it did not happen to me for a long time. You might want to check your connection test results for any recent changes. Sometimes failing the test can translate into such behavior...