How to get around your college firewall

Many colleges block Napster from their networks because of the large amount of bandwidth MP3 transfers consume. This bandwidth absorption is crippling when the transfers occur between college students and people outside the college; it stresses the link between the college and the rest of the Internet, which may be fairly limited in throughput.

There are two potential solutions to this problem, from the student's point of view. One can either break through the college's block or rules, or one can engineer a solution which satisfies both the student and the administration. We present two solutions, one of each type.

NetBrilliant will, at least for a while, break through your college's ban on Napster clients, because it uses different servers than Napster, which won't initially be blocked by your network administrators. But it's only a matter of time before they detect these connections and break them; all software solutions of this nature are eventually doomed to meet such a fate, because all must connect to a well-known bootstrap server outside the college to start up (even Gnutella). For this reason, we recommend the second solution, which will also be satisfactory for your network administrators.

Since the load of MP3 transfers occurs when a file moves either in or out of the college, one can simply run a server inside the college. This cannot be blocked by administrators, and it will not put an unreasonable load on their network. You can download the OpenNap Napster server program, both for Windows and Linux, from this page. It's small, light and easy to install. Once you're running your own OpenNap server, you can easily configure NetBrilliant to use your own in addition to the standard Napster and OpenNap servers on the Internet. Your friends can connect to your server too. Before long, you'll be back in business.

Use your own Napster server

An initiative has begun to create an open-source, Napster-compatible server, and has progressed to the point where stable and effective versions have been built on many architectures. This server is called OpenNap; NetBrilliant is compatible with the OpenNap protocol.

We encourage you to download OpenNap directly from its home site. That way, you'll be assured of getting the latest version. You can also download it from a local copy.

As time permits, we will post information here to help guide you in setting up your own OpenNap server.

 Why we don't support Gnutella

Engineers within Tenebril Incorporated have successfully decoded and reviewed the Gnutella protocol for sharing files. While Gnutella offer some advantages over the Napster and OpenNap central-server model, it brings with it some very striking penalties. Our engineers have discovered sever exploits and security holes in the Gnutella protocol; for this reason, we believe including Gnutella compatibility in NetBrilliant could potentially be very harmful to NetBrilliant's users. For this reason, we have chosen to leave the Gnutella client out of NetBrilliant at this time.

We will be watching the Gnutella protocol as it evolves, and will fully support it when we believe it safe for our users. For the mean time, we believe supporting Napster and OpenNap is even better than Gnutella, as one can still get around college blocks, can get more files, and can get them much faster and with greater reliability.