Help needed: Autonomous NAT traversal test [Was: enabling bridges on NATed clients]

[Christian Grothoff <christian@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

In order to more thoroughly answer sird's question (for GNUnet, possibly for 
Tor and generally for anyone interested in P2P), a group of people (including 
Andreas Mueller, Samy Kamkar, Nate Evans and myself) would like your help.  

We've written a piece of software that will test your NAT implementation to 
determine how well various NAT hole punching techniques work.  The tester (at 
least the version with the tests we're interested in right now) currently only 
runs on W32 and requires that you first install http://www.winpcap.org/.  
Then, please download, unzip and run the NAT tester from 
http://nattest.net.in.tum.de/.

At the end, the tester will launch a browser to report the results back to the 
nat tester website for evaluation.  The collected data is made public, and our 
evaluation report will also be public; finally, whatever method we end up 
implementing for GNUnet based on this will be reasonably modular so that Tor 
can choose to build on our code (if the evaluation makes it look promising 
enough). 

Thanks for your help in advance!

Best regards,

Christian

On Monday 22 February 2010 12:56:39 am sird@xxxxxxx wrote:
> What do you guys think about using http://samy.pl/pwnat/ idea to allow
> people that want to run a bridge behind a NAT? Maybe enhance the
> discovery protocol to this kind of stuff.
> 
> I say this because I think that people in china need bridges, and this
> kind of solutions may dramatically help in that, specially because now
> they can't just send reset packets in the discovery part of the
> protocol.
> 
> Anyway, it's just an idea, what do you think? is it usable?
> 
> Greetings!!
>