-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Dear Jabber Developers,
I am a volunteer for the One Laptop Per Child foundation. OLPC uses XMPP for much of its communications infrastructure. All "Collaborative Activities" use XMPP to share information between laptops. In schools where there is reliable power and more than a few students, we hope to provide a "school server" running a jabber daemon (otherwise the laptops will use link-local XMPP over the wireless mesh). Some of these schools will have some internet access, and we would like to enable global collaboration, so that students in Mongolia may collaborate interactively with students in Uruguay. In the US and Europe most ISPs provide users with dynamically assigned globally routable IPv4 addresses. This is not true in the rest of the world, where a shortage of IPv4 addresses has led to extensive use of NAT by ISPs. The schools are generally given local IPv4 addresses by their ISPs, behind a NAT over which the school has no control. The natural way to enable global collaboration over XMPP is through server federation. Unfortunately, it seems that current s2s protocols will not work with servers behind NAT. Additionally, there is a potential core problem related to XMPP server names. If ISPs provided schools with the ability to request permanent control of certain ports, then it might be possible to make federation work, provided each school server took as its name the global IPv4 address used by the ISP. (Note that ISPs do not actually provide this ability, as far as I am aware.) Unfortunately, it is possible that multiple school servers will be using different ports on the same global IPv4 address. The result would be multiple servers with the same IP address. I imagine that this breaks s2s, since the XMPP standard seems to demand that servers' names be unique, and either IP addresses or DNS names. What would be necessary to make Federation work between servers that are behind NAT? Are there tools for this? Who has attempted this already? How would you solve this problem? Thank you, Ben Schwartz -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH/AqnUJT6e6HFtqQRAmvrAJsH1VSkdmFR9ywUlcBmliJ0THPgXwCdG2wZ 6P09T8jgZcPCAdbxeI2sD9U= =dczU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
