[snowman]

Your idea is a good one but it won't work. Sorry.

The basic reason is that the mechanism that 1.5 used to upgrade and then force upgrade the 1.3.3 clients to 1.5 will eventually pollute your new network. I will explain in some detail so get a cup of coffee and read this slowly the first time though. You may need to think about for a few minutes to grasp the math and its logic.

If you managed to say create a network of 1.3.3 or even 1.4 of say 20 active supernodes and 2500 clients the resulting structure would be a multiply linked list of computers. In simple terms each client is connected to 1 or more, or N1, N2 … Nn links where n <= 12 .

I got the 12 number from some post in the Morpheus user form a long time ago. It is not important nor critical if that is the right number as long as it is at least greater then 3 for reasons I won’t explain here.

Since Supernodes process FastTrack searches, the 1 to N relationship, and since each supernodes knows about S supernodes, where S > then about 12 relationship guarantees that:

a) If X-1 where X> 2 supernodes go offline then the single client will still be able to search on the N1 supernode,
b) If N supernodes go offline, the client is orphaned and thus has to re-login or reconnect to the network to continue searching,
c) If S supernodes go offline, the supernode is orphaned and now has to log again as a client and get promoted or have a connected client tell it about another supernode so S is again greater then 1 and reconnects to the original network eventually growing back to S ~= 12.

This causes each client to link like a node in a web of N connections. As long as at least one link is connected the node is still part of the web. Cut all links and the node is orphaned.

So why won’t your idea work?

Clients and supernodes constant talk to each other and exchange supernodes IP’s somehow. That I don’t know so don’t ask. This is the glue that binds the network together and makes it self healing. This is required because people turn off the their computers for dumb reasons. If the turned off computer is a supernode then this causes many connected client to lose an N link. If enough supernodes disconnect the network dies on that client because the client can’t search.

So back to the network of 20 active nodes and 2500 clients. The network would be stable by itself. However if a 1.5 client or supernode attempts to join it will start to tell the nodes to force upgrade. Again I don’t know how but the effect has been well documented. The 1.3.3 supernodes will alter their registry as discussed in other posts to only use 1.5 after restart and won’t connect. Then the N and S links will start to fail like a wave in a pond when you throw a stone in the middle as computers are turned off and on.

Another real world example is the Cellular telephone network with phones and cell sites. Go out of range of that last cell site and your phone stops working. Why? Same reason - no N links.

If you want to create a 1.3.3 network again you have to make sure that you changed the port from 1214 to say 1215 to basically create an alternate network with no chance of a 1.5 node touching it.

However all the fellows at FastTrack are pretty smart so to kill your new network all they have to do is modify a 1.5 client to port 1215, join your network, plant the upgrade message and shutdown. Within a short period it will shut itself down with no valid upgrade path.

Morpheus was not attacked by anybody. All that noise a couple of months ago was simply basic ignorance of how the N Linked Networks actually work. Morpheus was simply denied the upgrade path by 1.5. It shut itself down as people turned off their computers.

The obvious question that the attentive reader might ask is could FastTrack Va.b be shut down? Theoretically speaking yes if you understood the mechanism of the upgrade from Va.b to Va.c. However to do so would required to send the upgrade message to Y clients and supernodes, where Y > Z*2/3 with Z being the total number of nodes on the network. Unlikely to happen in real life though because Z > 20,000,000 for sure and since at least 18,500,000 are not connected at any one time you simply cannot send the forced upgrade message to Z*2/3 nodes as long a Z > 2.

So why did the forced upgrade work from 1.3.3 to 1.5 and not die off? Because FastTrack V1.5 continued to operate after the upgrade and kept sending the force upgrade message achieving Z nodes messaged.

So forget it, it won’t work.