Salocin

23rd October 2002

After wrestling for 2 hours with Freenet, I give up.

I went to play squash this morning. I got up at 7:30, pottered around as my body grew used to the fact that it wasn't getting a lie-in this morning (a break with recent tradition), and when I felt reasonably awake, I cycled to the squash courts, met my opponent, and promptly lost the match.

This was Ok, because I got all the benefit of feeling that I had gained several hours of wakefulness over my usual day. I was going to put these to good use, and I had many plans.

All of these plans were executed smoothly until I hit the item on my list that said, "Install Freenet on PC". Freenet is an anonymous peer-to-peer network of interesting design that requires that individuals set up nodes in order to function. I was ready to do my bit.

Downloading and installing works well, the system is much more slick that it was last time I saw it (which is not saying much at all, it's still crude and unfriendly, but before it used to be crude, unfriendly, resource-hogging, in-the-background, crash-prone and cryptic). But as soon as I try to download anything at all...

Network Error

Couldn't retrieve key: CHK@hdXaxkwZ9rA8-SidT0AN-bniQlgPAwI,XdCDmBuGsd-ulqbLnZ8v~w 

Hops To Live: 15

Error: Route not Found 




Attempts were made to contact 0 nodes.

0 were totally unreachable. 

0 restarted. 

0 cleanly rejected. 

The request couldn't even make it off of your node. Try

again, perhaps with the GPL to help your node learn about 

others. The publicly available seed nodes have been very 

busy lately. If possible try to get a friend to give you a 

reference to their node instead. 

Change Hops To Live   

And this message will not go away for love nor money - I tried everything I could think of, new seed nodes, restarting a hundred or so times, relaunching my connection to the internet, removing every interaction between Microsoft Windows and the internet connection - nothing.

So all the time I saved getting up so early was completely wasted trying to install innovative but frankly buggy software on my computer. So much for doing my part.

Posted by nlvp at October 24, 2002 12:06 AM