Hello,
It recently hit me that with all the h.323 work being done with
the netfilter team to pass NetMeeting traffic, there hasn't been a
general discussion on getting Microsoft Windows Messenger to work with
linux firewall/NAT boxes. So I've just spent the better part of a day
looking for answers on how to make this work. It has come to my
understanding that the only way to do this is to either modify the
session initiation protocol (SIP), the real time transport protocol
(RTP), and the remote desktop protocol's(RDP - same as windows terminal
services) internal data structures. Sorry if that's confusing, but what
I mean is the Windows Messenger client looks either via UPNP to discover
a NATing devices external (public) address that the client will be
mapped to and encapsulates this address in the SIP, RTP, and RDP
protocols respectively, or it simply looks at the ip addresses assigned
to the local NIC card. Herein lies the problem of private network
addresses (or any NAT'ed addresses) being sent to the receiver and
therefore the receiver has no way to communicate back with the client.
Now I am very new to this, and just now getting my feet wet so I wanted
to ask everyone's opinion on what the preferable solution for linux
would be. Also I may be wrong, after all my information on Windows
Messenger did come from the Microsoft site ;-) I don't see a UPNP
Server/Application Gateway on the net anwyhwere to use to implement UPNP
on a linux machine. Am I missing something? IS there in fact a
solution out there? If not, is anyone working on one? I would be more
than happy to help, and if not, more than happy to start a project
implementing this.
The questions is, is there a substantial need for UPNP on linux? I can
only think off the top of my head of a few, but I'm sure it would be
very useful. Otherwise the only way I see in solving our immediate
problems, is a netfilter module to modify these protocol packets (if
indeed this is all it requires).
Which leads me to my main question for the netfilter team: Has there
been any work, or is anyone working on trying to implement something to
make Windows Messenger video, audio, etc work? If so, please let me
know their contact info.
Thank you for taking the time to listen, and I would like to offer my
thanks in advance to any suggestions or comments.
Glover George
Systems/Networks Admin
Gulf Sales & Supply, Inc.
(228) 762-0268
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gulfsales.com
