Jonathan,
Jonathan Hogg wrote:
Aren't Microsoft already "standardizing" this with their Universal
Plug and Play (UPnP) architecture?
I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I believe the concept is
that applications that understand this can communicate with the
router (the NAPT box in the case of SoHo networks) and request
ports to be opened externally and forwarded back to the host. I
think Microsoft's NetMeeting conferencing program supports this
already and there are a few ADSL modem/routers that implement it.
That is the little my feeble understanding of it has grasped too.
However, I still don't fully understand how it resolves the problem of
originated-from-the-outside connections: Let's say there are 3 web
servers in the inside, all three talk to the NAPT box and all three have
the NAPT box open a translation port. The part I don't get is where the
NAPT box chooses which one of the three gets the traffic without
something like decapsulating the http header.
Michel.