Linux OS: Installing And Running An eDonkey P2P Server
Introduction
The eDonkey network, which is sometimes known as eDonkey2000, is a peer-to-peer network which does not have a centralized hub and instead mainly uses servers and clients. This means that the files are directly shared between clients and allows the files to be around in the long term.
The eDonkey network was originally supported and maintained by a company known as MetaMachine who are now out of business, but the network lives on by itself and still has many active users today. If you are thinking of setting up an eDonkey server you will need a package known as the aMule daemon and aMuleWeb. If your Linux distribution does not have a binary file (amule-daemon) available, you may have to compile from the source which is beyond the scope of this article, but you may find more information here and by using Google. The source code is located on the main amule website.
aMule
Once you have installed amule you can run it by using the following command:
amuled
However the first time you run it, the program will notice that it is the first time, create you a nice set of configuration files, and then fail. It is now your job to make sure they work; the life of a Linux user is always fun. Luckily for you, they do not require too much editing. There are 3 main variables that need to be edited to get your server up and running - Port, AcceptExternalConnections and finally ECPassword. The port is quite simply the port you want to use, and by default on eDonkey it will be 4661. You then want to set AcceptExternalConnections to 1 and finally set a hash for the ECPassword.
The ECPassword uses MD5 encryption, in order to gain your hash use the following:
echo -n
Thats it!
That is literally all you need to do in order to get an eDonkey server up and running. You may now share your files with the world who can connect to you and download them. Remember that a home connection speed probably is not enough to start up a massive server, but it will do the job for those of you who want to share a few files with friends. But it may be slow at times and may just be easier to hand it to them on a disk.
If you would like to use the web envrionment to configure your server further, you must run:
amuleweb and it should start a local web server on port 4711, so you should be able to open your web browser and type in: https://127.0.0.1:4711 to access it.
Conclusion
This article has hopefully shown you how you can run a simple eDonkey server from home and send out a couple of files to friends. If you enjoyed reading it and you have it set up, please feel free to leave a comment. Also leave one if you have not quite got it set up due to some error or something going wrong and I will try to help you to the best of my ability. For the client side of things, there is a program in Linux known as Imule which goes hand-in-hand with eMule.