Permanent host

We ran a permanent host during the month of February 2004 in Poschiavo, Switzerland. GPU was running on an Internet Access Point hidden from the user's view. All GPUs around the world automatically connected to this node at startup; using the IP recorded in the logfile of the permanent host we were able to tell from which country the connection came from.

Figure 22: Connections from around the world to a host in Switzerland

We first thought that TCP/IP timeouts might shape Gnutella in geographical clusters. However, TCP/IP proved itself very reliable and we recorded connections from everywhere, including countries like Brasil,
Malaysia, Iran, China and Japan. Gnutella is probably very close to a random graph with no geographical clustering features.