There is a simular feature available in EchoLink Nate.
They call it a 'Proxy server' and it allows you to
use regular TCP/IP packets to travel from the user to
a proxy site and be translated to UDP packets for the
rest of the world. It then appears that your IP
address is the address of the proxy server and not the
ISP who has assigned you a private IP address.
There are quite a few proxy server sites that are
continuously on line and available for
limited/intermittant use and I can use one of them for
short periods of time. But it would take a dedicated
site that only accepts proxy inputs from a particular
remote user to work halfway decent. Another problem
that is interduced is the packet loss incurred when
using the proxy. I have used them quite a bit and
find the connection is never as good as the direct UDP
to UDP route.
One fellow who has a public IP address at his home
converts his EchoLink node to a proxy when he hits the
road and dedicates it to his own callsign with a
password so he can access it through the wifi ports he
finds while away from home.
I did find one interesting thing in a situation where
the user did not have a public IP address, and that
was that he could connect to the EchoLink test server
and packets would flow to and from the test server
just fine, but he could not connect to any other
EchoLink node. I think the EchoLink folks must be
tinkering with some kind of work around and it is
implemented between a recent download of EchoLink and
their test server. (The EchoLink test server is a
parrot that repeats everything you send to it back to
you)
The real solution for us is to obtain a public IP
address, which we had until the ISP changed us over a
couple of months ago. We lost the Winlink FTP mode
also, since no unsolicited packets can reach us from
the internet. (My son runs a Winlink station at this
same site)
Thanks for the input -
73 - Jim W5ZIT
--- Nate Duehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> 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]
>
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