MLDonkey is an open-source, multi-protocol,

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include r ...

application that runs as a back-end server application on many platforms. It can be controlled through a

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

provided by one of many separate front-ends, including a

Web interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fr ...

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet contr ...

interface and over a dozen native client programs. Originally a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

client for the eDonkey protocol, it now runs on many flavors of

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

, OS X, Microsoft Windows and

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale dev ...

and supports numerous peer-to-peer protocols. It is written in OCaml, with some C and some assembly.

History

Development of the software began in late 2001. The original developer of MLDonkey is Fabrice Le Fessant from

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

. It was originally conceived as an effort to spread the use of OCaml in the open source community. In January 2003, Slyck.com reported brief friction between MLDonkey developers and the official Overnet MetaMachine developers, which denounced MLDonkey as a "rogue client", allegedly for incorrect behavior on the network. Versions before 3.0 have a known security vulnerability that allows an attacker with access to the web interface to read any file on the file system.

Features

Features of MLdonkey core: * Peer to peer (p2p) program that supports the following network protocols, either partially or completely: **

FastTrack FastTrack is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that was used by the Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh and Morpheus file sharing programs. FastTrack was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, and used mainly for the exchange of music mp3 files. The ne ...

( Kazaa) ** eDonkey network (with Overnet and

Kad network The Kad network is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which implements the Kademlia P2P overlay protocol. The majority of users on the Kad Network are also connected to servers on the eDonkey network, and Kad Network clients typically query known node ...

) ** BitTorrent (with

Mainline DHT Mainline DHT is the name given to the Kademlia-based distributed hash table (DHT) used by BitTorrent clients to find peers via the BitTorrent protocol. The idea of using a DHT for distributed tracking in BitTorrent was first implemented in Azure ...

) ** Direct Connect **

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

* Multiple control interfaces: telnet, web interface, third party GUIs. Written in the OCaml programming language and licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license, the application separates the user interface (which can be a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

, or a third-party GUI application) and the code that interacts with the peer-to-peer networks. MLDonkey is able to connect simultaneously to different peers using different network protocols. In addition it can download and merge parts of one file from different network protocols although this feature is currently documented as experimental. MLDonkey runs in a terminal session and does not require a GUI environment, saving memory and processing resources. Behavior is controlled by editable

configuration file In computing, configuration files (commonly known simply as config files) are files used to configure the parameters and initial settings for some computer programs. They are used for user applications, server processes and operating system ...

s, or—in a more user friendly fashion—from a separate user interface. From release 2.9.0 (2007) on, support for

gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million compute ...

and G2 are no longer compiled in by default as both plugins are buggy and currently unmaintained; however, it is still possible to compile them in by making the appropriate setting in the configuration file.

References

General references *

Frontends

P2P-GUI (web interface)

Onager
(Palm OS)
Sancho

MuleDroid - Interface Android

External links

* * New development at GitHu

Bug tracker
{{File sharing 2001 software BitTorrent clients for Linux Cross-platform software DC clients for Linux EDonkey Clients for Linux File sharing software Free BitTorrent clients Free file sharing software Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in OCaml

History

Features

See also

References

Frontends

External links