TheMuteFaq
From Planet Peer Wiki
What is MUTE?
MUTE File Sharing is a new peer-to-peer network that provides easy search-and-download functionality while also protecting your privacy.
Where can I obtain a copy of MUTE?
See the MuteDownloads page.
How can I get help? (after reading this FAQ)
Mute Forum on Planet Peer Community or the Mute Mailing List, info is
I can't get connected. What am I doing wrong? Help!
Open the file called "MUTE.log", it's just a text file. Look for messages like:
"Trying to fetch more hosts from web cache"
"Got 10 from web cache"
This tells you that it is contacting a ~GWebCache and getting IPs to connect to. Then it will try those IPs and should connect to at least one of them. If not, try the following:
In the "settings" directory, open the file called "webHostCaches.ini" (all the settings files are just text only files) and put these links in there if they are not in there already:
http://nodes.gotdns.org/mc/mc.php
http://mcache.firstlight.dk/mcache.php
http://webcache.mymute.info/mcache.php
http://azurenet.cybton.com/mcache//mcache.php
http://mcache.tehmute.my3rdplace.net/mcache.php
Remove all other entries if present, they do not work anymore.
Save the file back as "text only" if you have that choice.
The above links are the latest ~GWebCaches we are using for bootstrapping you on to the MUTE network, these may change in the future so please try to keep them up to date, visit the SeedHosts page once and a while. They are only contacted to get you connected to at least one node on the network, from there that one node (and other "busy nodes") on the MUTE network should supply you with more IPs and so on...
You can also contact the above links with a browser and manually enter some of those listed IPs into the connection box in MUTE. You can also try any new links posted to the SeedHosts wiki page.
Open the settings file called "behindFirewall.ini", it should contain one number, 0 or 1. If you are sure you are firewalled and can't possibly open a port through your firewall or port forward (see the PortForwardFaq), then set this to 1. You could just delete this file and next time you start MUTE it will ask if you are firewalled.
If you are still having problems, open the settings file called "logLevel.ini" and change the setting in there to "TRACE_LEVEL" as a test (don't leave it that way all the time, the default is "INFO_LEVEL"), the MUTE.log file will contain a lot more information that may help you figure out what is wrong.
If it looks like the only outgoing connections you can get are to ports other than 4900, then your ISP may be blocking outgoing connections to port 4900 in a effort to block MUTE (and probably other filesharing ports like 6346 & 6347 Gnutella). This is a good reason to change your port setting to something other than 4900 (and switch to another ISP) to help others on the network connect to you. Note that you can change the port by changing the port.ini file.
Can I get better performance if I open port 4900 on my firewall?
Yes! You will get more connections and will have more routes for packets to pass through.
That means faster downloads! You may need to "port forward" if you have a "NAT" type of firewall/router on a cable modem system. See the PortForwardFaq for this and other firewall issues.
You may want to change the port number to anything above 5000. This will help prevent ISP's from simply blocking outgoing ports for filesharing. MUTE doesn't care what port you use.
Can I throttle MUTEs network speed?
The newer versions of MUTE can throttle packets in and out and there are a lot of other improvements, make sure you have the latest one. See the settings tab on the GUI.
What size chunks of data does mute transfer?
Max 32KB on the network including headers, the actual data chunk is now set to 16KB.
I'm connected to the internet using a telephone modem at 56Kbps or less. Can I use mute-net?
Yes, with the latest version you can get large files. Typically a modem can only upload at about 1.7K Bytes/sec but every bit helps the network so please share 24/7.
Why does mute-net contact a website when it is started?
Mute-net needs to know the ip addresses of some other mute-net users so it can contact them. A list is kept on sourceforge and other static web sites called a ~GWebCache.
Should I try to start 20+ downloads from the same site at once?
- No.* Currently, MUTE has no upload or download queues, so if you start 20 downloads, all 20 of them try to start at the same time, right now. This can easily generate several megabits per second of traffic, which will almost certainly swamp most or all of the links between you and the source, causing huge numbers of lost packets and timeouts. You'll be lucky if even one or two of your 20 downloads ever completes; most of them will fail before they receive 10 packets. Even starting a bunch of downloads from different sites may fail, if all or most of them end up being routed through the same nodes. Just do 2 or 3 files at a time and wait for them to finish before starting some more. If the source site is busy, you may have to download one at a time.
Remember that modem users will saturate their upload stream easily and then start dropping packets which then causes retries and so on.
How do I share from a CD ROM?
It's probably better to just copy the files to your hard drive, a CD is only 700MB. That would prevent a lot of wear and tear on your CD ROM Drive starting and stopping and not create delays in transferring data.
The other way would be to create a symbolic link (or "shortcut" as they are called on windows) to your files on CD and place that link inside your "files" directory. This way the program can still write recently downloaded files to the "files" directory and share them back to the network for others to enjoy.
How do I fetch MUTE from CVS and build my own version?
See the MuteDevFaq page for Programmers / Developers.
How do I recompile MUTE on Windows systems?
See the WindowsFaq
Is MUTE available in other languages than english?
Yes, a german version is available. Check out http://www.planetpeer.de for further details.
How can I translate MUTE into other languages?
You can use "Babelfish", a MUTE translation utility program. Check the below links or search the forum for "babelfish":
http://board.planetpeer.de/index.php?topic=5.0
http://babel.altavista.com/translate.dyn (for small stuff)
Is it anonymous? How can it be anonymous?
MUTE isn't completely anonymous, there will always be possible attacks.
The home page talks about how "MUTE protects your privacy", but not about how "MUTE guarantees your privacy". Also, the website describes several attacks and how MUTE makes these attacks difficult.
MUTE Website and the MuteAttackFaq describe several attacks and how MUTE makes these attacks difficult.
Why Anonymity?
You may want to look for text on many of the anonymity sites out there, there's lots of very good reasons to always protect your privacy.
Good Reading Link to start with.
Why doesn't MUTE have "End to End Encryption"?
MUTE encrypts using military grade encryption called "AES" to each connected node, so your ISP can't tell what you are doing and it's hard to block the traffic since they don't know what it is.
End to End in this situation only protects a little more since each connected MUTE node can see every packet going through it. E2E would allow nodes to say "I didn't know that was going through my node, it was encrypted so I just passed it on". But no one knows if this is really necessary since all data is sent using a "virtual IP" and you should be covered just like a ISP is when passing packets.
The lead developer states that End to End is technically impossible and will not be implemented.
HOWTO Text-mode MUTE File Sharing on Linux?
See the MuteDevFaq page, you have to compile the text-mode client yourself.
Can I help by putting up my own ~GWebCache?
Yes, that would help a great deal. We need more ~GWebCaches for a healthy network.
Does MUTE support downloading a file from multiple sources, like Kazaa, Bittorrent, or eDonkey?
interview that _"Multi-source transfers (swarming)"_ may be added in a later release. And in CVS there is some code written.
What should I do when I've already tried port forwarding and changing and even dropping my firewall settings, I get lots of messages in the log about not receiving the public key.
When at first you don't succeed, try, try again? It does take a little while to get a good connection.
What good do the virtual addresses do, if the RIAA can just start downloading a song and see the IP address they are getting it from? Doesn't this just force them to perform an extra step before they can sue you?
By nature of the MUTE protocol, there is no definitive way to resolve a virtual address into an actual IP address (which, in turn, can be resolved into a street address). There are ways that the actual IP address can be guessed, but proof is difficult to obtain without physically intruding a user's network.
How do I use the text-mode client?
See [MuteTextClient].
How does it get the IPs to connect to?
It uses a web page on a web server called a "webcache" when it starts for the first time. After that it tries to use a list of stored IP addresses it has seen on the network.
Each node internally caches any IP that it connects to. The connection has to establish an AES encrypted session and send a little info that let's us know it's a MUTE node before we store that IP in the cache. Then we exchange a list of randomly picked IPs from our internal cache at every connection, even if we are busy.
So the only way a IP gets into the internal caches of the network is by first finding them through a webcache and then at least one node needs to establish a connection to it. After that they can drop off the webcache and still have their IP passed around the network. The IP will die if no nodes can connect to it for a while as each node updates it's list.
If the firewalled bit isn't set, then a node posts it's IP to the web caches every hour (default setting).
If you see this in your log file: "Posting our address to web caches." Then your firewalled bit is off and you posted your IP to all the webcaches at that point, if your port is forwarded through your firewall then you should see incoming connections.
So if you wanted to check manually you would need to watch your log file and then go look at the webcaches to see if your IP is there.
How can I see the latest changes and what's being worked on?
Please watch the Mailing list for info on what is being worked on for the next release or....
Jason keeps good notes, you may want to also check CVS for his notes file and the change log:
http://mute-net.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/mute-net/MUTE/doc/notes/notes.txt
http://mute-net.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/mute-net/MUTE/doc/changeLog.txt
(if those links don't work, look for the correct link by going to the Project page "Browse CVS" link)
