Re: Video chat, voice over IP, video conferencing, and the use of NAT.

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Herman Robak]
> But it means that applications like Gnomemeeting will not
> "just work".  In fact, making them work will be a real pain!

But skype seem to work just fine across NAT.  Is there any free VoIP
systems as easy and convenient as skype?  I suspect we need free VoIP
to be equal to skype in functionallity before it will be able to
compete on equal terms with MSN and Skype. :)

> The same for all kinds of peer-to-peer file transfers.

Wow.  So all users behind NAT addresses are unable to use p2p
networks?  Now strange, as NAT networks are quite common.  Does this
affect all P2P networks?

> Are we really furthering the "filtered web access" view of the
> Internet?  Isn't Debian-edu striving to empowering its users?

The NAT solution is selected to ease out of the box configuration.  If
we can find a way to get squid and a few other services to get their
configuration independent of network address, we can limit IP
configuration to the DHCP and DNS service.  I would love to see this
happen, but am not sure how to get it working out of the box.

> Anyhow, back to Gnomemeeting.  Debian-edu needs some video chat
> applications that "just work" out of the box with the default
> architecture.  Without that, it is way behind the times.  People
> actually use video chat, not just for porn and dating, but for work.

I would love to have a free voice and video chat system that worked
out of the box.  But as far as I know, gnomemeeting does not work that
way.  I've never been able to use gnomemeeting, but it is a while
since I tried the last time.

> Debian-edu should have a solution to this.  Something with
> "many nines" reliability.  Something that doesn't require
> manual fiddling with firewall setups.

I agree.  Any suggestions that also allow all the network services to
work out of the box?