[zeromq-dev] Routers and Nats Question

[Brian Duffy]

Thanks for the stats. I think that for my particular application it makes
sense to avoid Nat traversal techniques. The plan is to provide a single
purpose device that would be useful for a wide range of users (most of whom
would not be comfortable making changes to settings in their router). I was
hoping I could have networking without maintaining an intermediate server
that I had to worry about scaling and securing. No such thing as a free
lunch I guess.

Sure had fun playing with zeromq though. I was pretty excited about the
upnp option (the Gupnp lib even has Vala bindings) until I realized that
not all routers support it or enable it by default.

Nats are a bummer, if only the pioneers of the internet could have foreseen
the need for 128 bit addressing ;-). The powers that be would probably
still have figured out a way to prevent us from talking to each other
without a middle man.


On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:53 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> According to this diagram
> https://developers.google.com/talk/libjingle/important_concepts#candidates
> 8% of their connections would have to transfer data through a relay
> server (but many applications will say 'no' at this point because it
> is expensive). This study from 2005
> (http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/pub/imc05-tcpnat.pdf) estimates
> an 11% failure rate, but when the connection succeeds your STUN server
> handles only the much smaller amount of traffic needed to establish a
> direct connection through the NAT devices.
>
> Seems like you might need to know about individual TCP connections at
> a lower level than you get from ZeroMQ.
>
> On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Brian Duffy <brduffy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Okay, I read up on Nat traversal (interesting). One more question; is it
> > worth it? Assuming I am developing an application that would need to
> handle
> > port forwarding automatically for users that are not expected to interact
> > with their routers settings, I am concerned about the drawbacks of Nat
> > traversal. Specifically, I don't know how many routers might support
> upnp or
> > nat-pmp by default, and I don't know if enough routers will be
> configured in
> > such a way that STUN will be effective. Also, I really don't want an
> > external server in my implementation if I can help it. I may just decide
> to
> > implement some local blue tooth networking and write a mobile app so that
> > users can atleast share some data in a personal area network and then
> sync
> > back to the clients when in range, but I would be interested in peoples
> > opinions on implementing automatic port forwarding in their applications
> and
> > what luck they may or may not have had.
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>



-- 
Duff
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