Re: [JDEV] Q: oob and direct P2P communications

[Michael Brown]

As for NAT, the problem is even worse since the machines inside don't even have real addresses. The best you could do here is configure the NAT server to map a particular incoming port to a specific machine on the network; not very useful for us. Some NAT aware software encapsulates the clients real IP address into the header somehow, and the NAT server knows how to read this and redirect it to the correct client.  (At least this is how the Microsoft help describes it).  It would be very nice if this could be incorporated into Jabber somehow. I'm not convinced file transfers are going to bring servers to their knees. SMTP servers hold up fairly well. And the rest of Jabber is pretty low-bandwidth. Moreover, ICQ and Yahoo manage to support zillions of users while having protocols that send file transfers through the server when necessary. AFAIK, ICQ *never* sends files though the server.   Michael.