Good evening,
Have been using the different betas of civilnetizen with great success...until recently. I have been trying to transfer files between myself and a friend on a mac. I have tried using both my pc and mac to do this. We are both using airport base stations as routers. The download will start on his end and will consistently fail half way through. I have tried sending smaller files..under a gig in size..we have both deleted previous attempts and started again. In the past we have been successful in transfers but the past 3-4 weeks have been frustrating. I am running windows xp sp2 and he was running os x 10.4.10 Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I have been having same problem. Worked great at first but has not worked for about a week.

Hi,

I apologize for the frustration that Netizen is causing you. I checked our network service backend and nothing seems to be amiss. There can be a number of reasons why you are experiencing spotty network performance from Netizen. Since you are serving files directly to your friends, network congestion with either of your ISPs will cause Netizen to timeout or lose the connection. If you are part of a congested Cable or DSL network, then time of day may matter when you attempt a transfer. I've seen this in a very small, but growing minority of users. This may explain the rather odd timing that it has not been working in the last few weeks, since there have been no real changes in the system since the beginning of the summer. The reality of these networking situations sucks, I know, but I've been working hard to take these real world conditions into account and the next release (Beta 9) of Netizen will be much more resilient to these sort network conditions.

Finally, with Mac OS X, you have to be sure that your built in firewall is allowing TCP and UDP connections on Netizen's dynamic port range of 4895-5395.

I hope this helps.

Paolo

Paolo,
Thanks for taking the time to respond..unfortunately we have tried transfering files at all different hours...especially over night and this still happens. As far as firewalls neither of us have them running. I thought that no port forwarding was necessary in the routers? Any idea when the next beta will be released? Have really loved using netizen for almost the past year and have tried to get friends to use it but its become unreliable in the past few weeks. If you would like a beta tester for the next beta or have any other suggestions I would be grateful.

Thanks

Tom

Hi Tom,

Port forwarding is generally not necessary, but I recommended it just in case your situation warranted it. I apologize for the drop in quality with our service in the last few weeks with you. I'm looking into it. It might be a localized problem as it only happens to a very small subset of our users (around 2%). This should improve with our next release, which I'm hoping will be out by December. I just put up a new blog post detailing our Beta 9 ordeal. Check it out for the details.

As soon as I have a usable, pre-Beta 9 release available, I'll see if I can get you to try it.

Thank you for your support. It means a lot.

Paolo