NAT, FireWall, and connections
 

Hey Gang,
I'm working on a P2P chat service, and I'm deferring to y'all for some help.

I've been working away, and I've had some problem getting around firewalls and NAT (Network Address Translation) devices. Do you guys have any hints or ideas on how to accept incoming connections despite these problems? Right now I've basically been writing two clients based on whether or not someone can accept an incoming connection.

Any advice is really welcome!

Dracolytch

Great! Maybe LeeWare can help you--you can find links to him in http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...hreadid=17321. NAT troubles were mentioned there, but probably not the solutions you'd like.

Good luck.

If at least one of the clients can accept incoming connections, then you're fine. But it is in principle not possible for two clients to communicate directly if they cannot connect to each other (in either direction). In this case a connection can only be established indirectly if both clients connect to an intermediate host that is not firewalled and which forwards messages from one client to the other and vice versa.

Of course you can enable port-forwarding or similar stuff on a firewall to let the clients connect directly, but most of the time you are not the administrator of the firewall. :)

Re: NAT, FireWall, and connections
 

When did you start this project? I know of one already being developed that i am a tester for.. just wondering where to find your program.