Re: Video chat, voice over IP, video conferencing, and the use of NAT.
On Sun, 06 Nov 2005 20:43:19 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com> wrote:
[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. :)
They must have "reflectors"; servers with huge bandwidth that
forward the traffic, so that the clients don't have to accept
incoming connections. That means a third party has to provide
the same amount of bandwidth as _all_ the users together. I
doubt that is a viable approach for us.
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?
I should think so. The solution is either
1) Manually configured port forwarding (a hassle, requires access to the NAT)
2) Port forwarding automatically triggered by the clients, using
Universal Plug and Play (uPnP). This is considered a security hole.
I have uPnP support in my router from NextGenTel. Windows clients
use it. Hardly any clients for Linux use uPnP. It is a boneheaded
solution to a problem that shouldn't have been there in the first
place. We should have proper static IPs, one for each PC. There
may be too few IPv4 addresses to go around, but that was what IPv6
was meant to address, years ago!
--
Herman Robak
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