eDonkey2000

eDonkey was released in September 2000 and was hence tagged with the name eDonkey2000. It started out as a very small community but the subsequent fall of Napster and growing problems on the Kazaa network, suddenly made this software one of the 
most viable clients for the P2P network. 

What took off slowly suddenly became a storm that brought down the P2P planet. If you were one of the hip crowd, you just had to know what eDonkey2000 was!

eDonkey2000 was a third generation P2P software by a small developer group who called themselves MetaMachine. eDonkey was based on the same centralised server concept as Napster, but there was one vital difference. 

Emule, a freeware client for the eDonkey 2000 network Napster had all their servers located at a single location in Silicon Valley, CA. MetaMachine, though, went the opposite direction and released their server software in the community. It was akin to letting salt dissolve in water with the water being the P2P community. 

Now it became the community’s responsibility to take care of the server and update it with the latest information to attract more users to use the software. MetaMachine develops the technology, but it is the responsibility of the community to maintain the network. 

The eDonkey network requires some maintenance for operating at optimum levels. First, every user needs to install the eDonkey2000 client and then download the server.met file from a 
specified website. This file contains the latest information of all the servers available and provides server address to the client software so that it can connect to faster and live servers. 



Once that is done, the client makes a connection with a server and gets connected to the network. Now you can use the integrated search box in the client to search for whatever you want ranging from applications to movies to albums to just about anything. Other applications that are modified eDonkey2000 clients and utilising the same network are eMule, Shareaza, aMule, eMule plus, Morpheus and many more for the Windows platform. For Macs, you can use software such as hydranode, iSwine and of course eMule and aMule versions for Macs. Similar clients are also available for Linux. 







The eDonkey network set the standard for hashing files. What is file hashing? Hashing is the transformation of a string of characters into a usually shorter fixed-length value or key that represents the original string. Hashing is used to index and retrieve items in a database because it is faster to find the item using the shorter hashed key than to find it using the original value.

So, if you have a database of Digit magazines consisting of records of articles from June 2001 to July 2005, trying to access data by typing in “Digit-February 2002-Insight-Quick Start-30 Minutes Expert” you will be better off by giving this a shorter value such as “DigFeb02-IN- QS-30". Not only will the search be faster but also be better indexed which will let retrieve data faster. 



Now imagine the same thing being done with over a billion files on a network. There is bound to be confusion and ultimately chaos. Therefore, what happened was each file that was uploaded to the edonkey network was hashed uniquely and checked and then made available. 



This made downloads simple, quicker and reliable. But the same problems that affected the Kazaa network, which were spyware, viruses and Trojans, also affected the eDonkey network. To overcome this, the community came out with Web sites that listed verified content that was being made available on the eDonkey2000 network. Since all of these downloads were verified 
and checked, there was a large reduction in the number of fake applications and the network survived. 




Once again, though, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) swung into action and started proceedings for legal action against several network communities and the process still goes on. With all of this going on, something was coming and it promised to revolutionise...