Anyone notice, that for Windows Clients anyway, when you connect a bunch of other clients to it manually (through the -connect option) that if you go over 8, the windows client ends up cutting out the “outside world” connections and stick with the original 8 or more internal machines thinking that it’s the entire network?

I never noticed this since I use a Linux client to funnel all my PCs to the outside world, but I tried it with a Windows client and noticed that at first, it had about 10 connections, then after adding another 50 clients internally that connect directly to it, the number would eventually drop down to just “internal clients” only.

When this happens, the block count doesn’t increment anymore, basically the Windows client has separated itself from “the network” and all the other clients all think that they are the entire network now. If I do a “netstat -a -n” on the windows client, I can see it’s only connected to the Internal clients and the IRC bootstrap channel and basically doesn’t to connect to anyone else on the outside world. You know it’s happening because the block count starts to fall behind of what is really going on outside of your local network (Internet for the rest of the world)

It’s kind of a self-collapsing loop? Doesn’t seem to affect Linux clients though, they will happily connect to and be connected to about as many as it can handle. I could see this is kind of a DoS on windows clients if someone was evil enough.

Good point.  If you’re going to have more than 8 LAN nodes connect to one gateway node, then you’d better have the gateway node set up so it can receive incoming connections.  Otherwise, while the gateway node has 8 or more connections, it will not try to add any more outbound connections.  As the outside nodes you’re connected to come and go, it doesn’t make new outbound connections to replace them.  You’ll be fine if you can accept incoming connections, then there will be plenty of others connecting to you.

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