Connection Setup Page

Overview

The Connection Setup page lets you tell the program whether or not you will be using the program over the Internet or Local Area Network, and what method you use to connect. You may also reset your entire configuration to the recommended values based on your connection type.

Appearance

Connection Type

Select the type of connection that you have. It is very important to be accurate with your connection type, as this will be reported to other users when they are searching for your files.

In addition, the BearShare Setup Wizard uses this setting to determine what the proper default values are for most of the networking related settings.

Do not misrepresent your connection type!

Selecting an incorrect value here will serious affect your ability to search for files and share files. Modem users should be particularly careful, as they cannot support more than 1 or 2 host connections at once, and will experience extremely poor search performance.

This poor performance is not a problem with BearShare or with the Gnutella network. It is due to the relative youth of the software available which works with Gnutella. The current version and future versions of BearShare will help to solve these problems.

Firewall

It is very important that you determine whether or not your computer can accept incoming connections. If you are a dial-up modem user, cable modem user, or DSL user, you can probably accept incoming connections. If you are using BearShare at an office or business environment, please check with your network administrator to determine the proper values for this setting, and for the settings in the Network Setup Page.

If you advertise that you can accept incoming connections, but your computer is located behind a firewall or proxy, you will be returning search results to users that cannot be downloaded without requesting a push.

Due to the current poor client implementations of the Gnutella protocol, and due to the bandwidth barriers encountered when low speed users add more hosts than they can handle, push requests have a low success rate.

Recommended Settings

By checking this box and pressing OK, BearShare will adjust your host, upload, download, search, sharing, and network settings to reflect the recommended values based on your connection type.

This happens automatically when you complete the BearShare Setup Wizard, but if you have changed your settings and you are experiencng poor performance, you should check this box and press OK from the Setup dialog.