And now, where do i connect to?

One question which is always asked after the software is installed is always: "And now, where do i connect to?"

As you know Turtle is a filesharing program, but most of all it's a friend-2-friend system. This means that only connections to directly trusted peers will be established, but also means there is no central structure for direct connection. If you are used to other filesharing programs like Bittorent or Emule, it might be a little strange, but here lies the strenght of Turtle.

By not allowing untrusted parties to connect arbitrarly to you, it makes impossible for people you don't trust to monitor drectly what you is passing through your machine, and protects your privacy. A secret key is necessary to establish a connection to another peer, so before you can connect to the Turtle network, you need to know at least one person already in, that trust you and is willing to establish a connection.

So, if you want to try it out, you need to have a certain number of "friends" with the same program (at least one), negotiate the secret key used for encryption, and then connect to them. Then you'll be able to share files with your friends and the friends of your friends, in a secure way, expoliting the Turtle protocol.

Turtle is mainly meant for small groups of people that need to exchange documents with a particular concern about privacy. This doesn't mean though that it can't be used in large networks of people. As in any other social network, it's only a matter of making some friends, then it will be possible to share files with the whole community, not only to your direct friends. 

The best way of starting using Turtle is to exploit a web of contacts that is already established. For example your friends could be all the contacts you have in your chatting program, or your friends on MySpace, and so on. If you ask them to join in, and they do the same with the other contacts they have, you'll be sharing all the contents you want with a very large community!

So, tell your friends about Turtle, and enter the new way of sharing!

Usage:

Configure your Turtle node by going to 

Settings → Configure Apollon → Advanced → Turtle → Configure.

This will display the main Turtle configuration window. Fill in the fields there as follows:
Setup your Turtle node IP address by filling the appropriate boxes in the Turtle Node Address input field in the Configure Turtle Plugin dialog. If you select 0.0.0.0 Turtle will be visible on all IP addresses on your host.
Setup the Turtle TCP port by filling the Turtle Node Port input field in the Configure Turtle Plugin dialog. By default this is port 1391.
Setup the port where Turtle listens for key agreement requests from your friends, by filling the Key Agreement Listener Port input field in the Configure Turtle Plugin dialog. By default this is port 4242.

You can add new friend nodes by clicking on the Add button in the Configure Turtle Plugin dialog. This opens a new Friend Node Settings dialog, where you can fill in the details about the friend node:
The name of the friend node, which you can fill in the Friend Node Name input field.
The IP address of the friend node, which you can fill in the Friend Node Address input field
The Turtle TCP port for the friend node, which you can fill in the Friend Node Port input field.

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