You have a very valid point. However these issues are not unique to P2P
chat. This begs the question, how do current chat clients (jabber or
otherwise) manage P2P audio/video transmission? If it can be done for
audio/video, it can be done for text.
- Ravi
P.S.: Note that this is now just for sake of discussion. As I mentioned
in another post, I do agree that benefits of P2P chat are questionable.
I will consider starting with proven technology and reconsider the
architecture in next version.
Hal Rottenberg wrote:
This only works when you have simple ACL-based stateless firewalls.
An application-layer firewall will look at your packets, see that they
are not HTTP, and silently drop them. A stateful firewall will of
course not let you poke a hole inward until a connection has first
been made outward. Since this could easily be the problem on the
other side as well... Not even a $30 home router would let in port 80
"unsolicited" unless the user was running a web server or something,
and if every user were savvy enough to poke the holes in their own
firewalls we wouldn't be having this discussion!
