BearShare Tips
Amongst all the P2P file sharing softwares I have came accross so far BearShare is the most efficient one. Unlike some other P2P sharing softwares like Morpheus(hosts of viruses) or LimeWare(terribly slow because of its Java Runtime dependency), BearShare is completely written in C++ and hence very lightweight and efficient. P2P softwares often has a "reputation" of being a trojan horse of various viruses, worms and spywares. This threat is very low for BearShare and if appropriate measure has been taken it could do hardly any harm to your system(for one such measure look at this earlier post of mine regarding BearShare). In this post I will discuss some of the tips and tricks that I've learnt on the way of using BearShare.
Tip - 1
Get the pro version of 5.0.2.3. The serach-space of this version is greater and this also take care of broken downloads. How to get the pro. version. Well you have to pay for it. http://www.bearshare.com/. Another tricky way is to use the BearShare Lite(Free) version itself to search for downloading pro. version. It's analogous to crack SoftIce with SoftIce.
Tip - 2
Be a little selfish. Disable uploading to increase the overall download speed and to secure your system. Do this by going Option > Setup > Upload
Tip - 3
Always make sure a file exactly is what it claims to be. Use Bitzi ticket for that. But before going on using that there exists an easier thumb rule for validation. For example if you are searching for "Half-Life 2: Episode 1" game and got a file of size 202,477 bytes you are definitely dealing with a virus or other misleading files unless it points to a valid .torrent file(which are often pretty small) which could be downloaded by any torrent client like BitTorrent. BearShare falls in a Gnutella category and doesn't support downloading through .torrent files.
Tip - 4
Anytime you suspect about a file, use Bitzi ticket. Bitzi is basically a lookup service which compares a unique SHA1 hashid(that the file presents) with its online database to show details of it. As part of the details you could found the feedback and rating of other users about it. To see the SHA1 hashid of a file unhide the metadata column from "Results" button in the search window(top-left)
In one of the Bitzi lookup I found the following feedback/rating
Clearly One souldn't continue with this download.
Tip - 5
Instead of validating each search result(which could be vary tiresome) with Bitzi lookup, Use Bitzi search and find out the most recommended version of the file. Once you have found "most recommended" or "best version" file, go to the section in details page of the file which reads "APPLICATION IDENTIFIERS".
There you should have two category of URLs - Magnet and E2DK. We are interested with the first one.
Now if you click on the link, ideally BearShare should capture that and start downloading. But world is far from being ideal. Instead it will show you following messagebox.
To fix this remove all attributes from the magnet URL except sha1(first) and dn(usually the last). So the modified magnet URL looks like
magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:ROOFD7DSBLGFZVYMNDMFACGUP7PBGZ74&dn=(PC GAME ITA) The Sims 2 CD1.iso
Put that URL to browser's addressbar and BearShare's URL manager pops up
And you know what to do next. By the way my BrainBrush(BB) series on DataStructure will continue. Just I was busy for office-work for a while. Argentina won. Ole-Ole-Oleeeeeeeeeeeeee