Hello all,

I've been following the development of Freenet for a
few years now but haven't had my own permanent
connection outside work so I haven't got around to
setting up a node until now. I'm in the process of
developing a scalable media distribution system and
I'm considering using Freenet as the distribution
network for a number of reasons, including the fact
that I am wholly supportive of Freenet's philosophy
and the goals of the project.

I downloaded the latest freenet disto, installed it on
Mac OS 10.2 and ran it using JDK 1.4.1_01. The first
time I ran it, the localhost:8888 page can up with no
images and each of the links lead to an error page, so
I restarted the freenet and got slightly better
results. The images on the localhost page came and I
could get some of the pages that were linked there,
although most of the links lead to error pages. I then
ran the update.sh script, ran freenet again, and it
came up with errors in the terminal saying that it
couldn't determine my IP and asking me to specify my
ip in the config file. So I opened the config file,
only to find that it had been overwritten by the
update and there were only two lines in there. I had a
look around and found that I should remove the config
file and run freenet again to go through the setup
questions. Having got my config file back, I tried to
use the system again with similar results.

I understand that Freenet is not going to perform well
until it has had an opportunity to learn about its
environment and gather information about other nodes,
but I was surprised by how poorly it behaved when I
ran it for the first time. I should add that I am not
a novice computer user, and have been doing
network-related programming for about four years now.

I'm still interested in contributing to the Freenet
project in the course of my own development of the
distribution system, but I am yet to be convinced that
Freenet is going to be able to provide a network that
won't scare first-time users away. Consumer software
relies on a positive first impression, and I fear that
I will be unable to offer this using the Freenet
system.

I'm now going to do a lot more research into the
workings of the system to find out what's going wrong
and what I can do to make it better, but I'd really
appreciate any feedback which you guys may have on the
issues that I've come up against.

First impressions really do make a lasting impression.

Thanks,

Simon

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