On Nov 23, 2007, at 12:04 PM, Jim Brown wrote: > We have a wireless ISP at this site, and the ISP > provider decided to take away the public IP address > and assign us a private IP address, which no one can > reach from the internet. We can do everything we need > to do on the internet, but packets that were not asked > for cannot find their way back to the router here . > UDP packets in particular have no way to reach us.
This could be fixed with a VPN tunnel. Are you familiar with that technology? VoIP doesn't "like" riding over TCP as much as UDP, but it works if the bandwidth and latency numbers are right. For low-bandwidth ham radio type applications, I've yet to see it "not work". In a nutshell, you build up an encrypted VPN tunnel between the machine on the odd-ball non-public network and a machine that has a real-public network address, and have the rest of the world "think" you're over at that other address. For IRLP, Dave Cameron was even offering it as a service once, for a small donation. He had access to a large block of public IP's in a data center environment that was very well connected to the Net, and he's used a VPN tunnel for years to hop on to whatever WiFi was around and pop out of that data center with a real public IP address that the world would see for demos and things. Both at the IRLP conventions and at Dayton, for example. He had done all the homework (but none of it is particularly hard to do) to write the scripts to continually set up a tunnel from an IRLP machine to another site, where public addresses were available. Tools like OpenVPN and similar with a little homework can do this for free. You can set it up on a mini network to simulate the odd-ball ISP at home, get it working, and then take it back up to the site, pretty easily too. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [EMAIL PROTECTED]
