"What's my IP?" - extension to 0.6 handshaking
 

Hi

It has been noted several times that one big problem of Gnutella is the large number of nodes that cannot accept direct incoming connects because they're behind some IP-masquerading router.

I do have a network with an IP-masquerading router here, and I must say, the inconvenient thing for me wasn't configuring the router for port-forwarding - that was done quite quickly and just works. The inconvenient thing is that, every time I'm going online, I have to find out my the IP under which I'm reachable from outside and copy'n'paste it into my Gnutella client's config file.
I have spend some thought about how this could be automated:
If my node connects to another node in the internet, then this other node does know my external IP address - so why can't it just tell me it?
With 0.6 handshaking, this should be very easy to implement - just add anthother http-tag like "YourIPAddress: 12.34.56.78"

Guido
Under http://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/ you'll find a link (among others ) to a document describing the 0.6 handshaking protocol

Remote-Ip
 

public.bearshare.net responses with a Remote-Ip: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx tag, which will report back to you what your IP is. Clients will start to use this soon...

Joe