Solipsis: Python-powered Metaverse

[Paul McNett]

Ville Vainio wrote:
>>>>>>"Paul" == Paul McNett <p at ulmcnett.com> writes:
> 
> 
>     Paul> Only, I couldn't hear what they said back to me because I
>     Paul> don't have UDP port 6000 open on my firewall and forwarding
>     Paul> to my laptop (and don't want to do that either).
> 
>     Paul> It is a shame: peer to peer has the potential to enable
>     Paul> really cool, imaginative multiuser worlds, but how many
>     Paul> people are connecting directly to the internet these days?
> 
> FWIW, In Finland all home *DSL and Cable internet connections (that I
> know of) are connected "directly" to the internet (in the sense that
> all ports are open). Blocking is reserved for the modem, just the way
> it should be...

Sure, that's how it is here in the US too. You have a modem/router
supplied by the cable or DSL company that provides DHCP and NAT for
outbound traffic. The fact that the internal computers have private
addresses (eg 192.168.1.5) keeps them from being accessed directly from
the outside. The modem still gets access to all ports[1], and most have
ways to set up simple "port forwarding" to, say, listen for UDP traffic
on port 6000 and forward it on to 192.168.1.20.

The problem is, that last step required setup by the user of one of the 
computers in the LAN. Sure, this is a home so there is likely only one 
or two computers in the LAN, but it is still a painful thing to ask 
normal users to configure their firewall, and what if both computers 
wanted to participate on the port 6000 fun?

[1] Although, some ISP's are taking it upon themselves to drop or reject 
port 25 traffic. A wrong but understandable stopgap solution to the 
problem of peoples toy machines getting infected by malware - at least 
those machines won't be able to send mailbombs anywhere else.

-- 
pkm ~ http://paulmcnett.com