Connecting to the FastTrack P2P Network?

February 28, 2008 by sharky

Anyone who’s old enough to buy their own cigarettes is probably familiar with old skool P2P file sharing with KaZaA. And likely this same group probably even remembers when it just stopped working one day - dead in it’s tracks many moons ago. Do you remember where you were when KaZaA died? I do - I was at work and my girlfriend called me to tell me something was wrong with my computer; that KaZaA wasn’t working anymore. To soothe her, I said I’d check it out as soon as I got home, but I could hear the panic in her voice. Right as rain, KaZaA was in the grave - no warning, no notice - just a quick & painless death. “Whew…what a relief!”, I thought inwardly, “Now I can reclaim my hijacked computer and use IRC once again!”. No more blank movie files, no more MP3s with scritchy-scratchy bits and white noise, and best of all - no more bullshit from this RIAA scam & spam-flooded network. It truly was a day of rejoice. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

Anyways, KaZaA got sued and went legit. The only ‘known’ way to connect to the FastTrack network was to whip out a credit card, since it went entirely private and pay-to-use.

Flash ahead - four years later. We’ve tested over a hundred P2P programs, and not one has ever connected to the old KaZaA network known as FastTrack. We’ve tried KaZaA Lite, KaZaA Resurrection, KaZaA K Lite, K++, KLT K++ and every other KaZaA mutant. Many claimed and offered, but none delivered. That is, until today. Huzzah.

The Lucky Candidate

Surprisingly, (with some dumb luck) we’ve found a program that actually connects to the FastTrack network. Nope, it wasn’t some tricked-out version of KaZaA from the KLT Forums. Oddly enough, the program is called…wait for it…Torrent Searcher 9.0. In fact, Torrent Searcher does everything except search for torrents - heck, it can’t even load torrents, nevermind search for them. Despite the misnomer, it’s a decent P2P program in its own right. TS claims to be able to connect to four, count ‘em four, P2P networks, and it delivers! This multi-network application connects to Ares, Gnutella, OpenFT and FastTrack.

At first we thought it might just be a glitch in the program. Fortunately, Torrent Searcher comes with a feature that allows users to de-select certain P2P networks from the search results. So we removed all networks except for FastTrack, and lo-and-behold we developed search results solely from FT - decent ones at that. The screenshot to the right shows only files from the FastTrack network in the search results.

FastTrack Sucks?

We’d assume that just about everyone knows better than to try and use the FastTrack network for file sharing. We’re unsure if Torrent Searcher connects to the old (hideously spammed) FastTrack network, or if it connects to a new FastTrack offered by those abominable KaZaA pay sites (if such a ‘new’ network exists). In our tests, download speeds were very zippy for popular files. MP3 files played as they should, without any unexpected (or should we say, “expected”) malformed audio playback.

Torrent Searcher 9.0 - Features

Even if you can’t stand FastTrack, this is no reason to avoid Torrent Searcher. You can always just de-select the FastTrack network from the connect list and use the other offered networks, instead. Besides the ability to connect to some rather rare P2P networks such as FastTrack, OpenFT and Ares, TS offers a multitude of other features that make it a winner. Here’s a few of Torrent Searcher’s features:

— Completely free of adware & spyware.

— In-program media player (and a good one at that! - uses VideoLAN VLC).

— In-program IRC Chat client and Internet browser (handy for Bitzi lookups).

— Has a great feature to update ban-lists (to filter out the lamers) and add good working node files. Caveat: We had a problem connecting to FastTrack after updating their banlist and node file. This is not undoable (except for a complete uninstall & reinstall of Torrent Searcher).

— You can use Torrent Searcher with an external giFT daemon (remote giFT server).

— Bonafide multi-network connectivity. This is good for two reasons:

1. Since each specific network can be added or removed from connections, this gives users a good opportunity to browse other P2P networks (OpenFT and Ares) that are harder to connect to - and browse files that are native only to them.

2. When all networks are selected, the search results incorporate all of the networks for the sources in each file. This improves the odds of downloading a good file, plus it means the download speed will be extremely fast for high-source files. It is not uncommon to generate 200 or more sources for the same file - spanning across all four networks. What an excellent feature - no wonder our downloads were blazing-fast!

Search results are continuously updated until the search is stopped or cleared by the user.

NOTE: Have patience. Connecting to all 4 networks takes some time (especially with Gnutella - which took over 10 minutes).

NOTE: One feature we didn’t like is that Torrent Searcher attempts to modify the TCPIP.SYS “max half-open connections” to 150. This can be turned off in the settings, but not until after you run TS. We found that even after this unprovoked (and unavoidable) modification, our ‘patched’ version of TCPIP.SYS was not altered by TS. We verified our TCPIP (version 2892) with the EvID4226 patch, and it remained unchanged. In all likelihood, Torrent Searcher won’t be able to modify any subsequently newer TCPIP version (currently 3244).

Bitzi Support

— And another good feature - you can verify the hashes of files in the search results with Bitzi.com. Files that show up on Bitzi’s BitPedia (lookup) should be treated as “good” results (this doesn’t necessarily make files not reported on Bitzi as bad files). Here’s how it works:

Do a search (”metallica” is our example) and highlight a file in the result. Right click it and select “Look up File at Bitzi…”.

This will launch the in-program Internet browser to the Bitzi lookup page. If the file is listed as “official”, you’ll see this message:

While this service works for MP3s (some of the time), it’s not particularly important that a music file is listed or not on Bitzi. Try it with other types of media. We conducted a search for “Alvin and the Chipmunks” but none of the top listed files were found on Bitzi. This is even more proof that these types of P2P programs shouldn’t be used to search for movies. Instead, use IRC (such as Avarice), DDL sites, Usenet NZB, BitTorrent or any other ‘reputable’ method of file sharing.

I think I’ll call up my now ex-girlfriend and invite her over.

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